Is technology ethical? How the business world must deal with the intrusiveness of tech.

Like any business sector, accounting is growing ever more high-tech. But there’s been some interesting discussion about tech in accounting in recent months as the result of some comments made by Freddie Faure of Cooper Faure. It’s raised the important issue of ethics now that outside technology is so heavily involved – how can you be sure of security?

In “the old days”, everything was kept in one big book, and information was only ever copied out of it when reported to HMRC. Nowadays, electronic records are complex and sometimes difficult to manage. Of course, this comes with benefits – it’s much harder to lose all your records without a trace thanks to backups and cloud software. But the question is, does the number of different software providers involved in modern accounting make for a compromising ethical issue?

With so many different pieces of software recording client data, are accountants knowingly exposing their clients to a risk in the form of hackers? Or are they making sure that client data is truly secure and not at risk by any physical means whilst it’s behind the latest in online security? It’s a thorny question, and perhaps one that doesn’t have a true “right answer”.

For our part, we’re on the side of technology. The rise of computing changed accounting forever – what used to take days can now be done in minutes, and a single handheld smartphone can store more records than a room full of filing cabinets. Here at AIMS, we pride ourselves on the use of the latest technology in the accounting world to help our clients. There may always be a place in the accounting world for physical records, but for AIMS clients, tech is the way forward.

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