One of the benefits of online
The main reason to save your data is to ensure it remains safe. When you store your data locally (e.g., at your office or home), there are all sorts of disasters that could threaten it – fire, theft, hardware failure, or accidental deletion.
An unsettling concept about online accounting software is that you don’t have a physical copy of your data. The data doesn’t live on your hard drive or a USB stick. It’s in the cloud! But what about those among us who want to hold their data tight? Unfortunately, there’s no true option to do so with online accounting software. The best you can do is export a comma-separated value (CSV) file of most of your data, but you’re not able to save a single file that contains all your company data – a file you can restore to your online accounting software if you ever need to.
With online accounting software, your data is replicated in multiple data centers, where the top priority is to protect your data against potential disasters. If somehow your data were destroyed at one data center, it would be safe in another. Data centers are staffed by professionals, whose full-time job is to make sure your data will always remain safe. And let’s face it, if data centers were to lose their customers’ data, they would go out of business.
Is there a chance of a horrible screwup and your data being wiped out from a data center? Yes, of course. However, it’s a lot more likely that your locally stored data could be destroyed than it is a professional data storage company would lose all your data, just as it’s more likely for you to crash your car then it is for an airplane to crash.
Your Data Is Safe, So Why Do You Need Online Accounting Backups?
There are other reasons to save your data, beyond ensuring its continued existence. The top three are:
- Restore points
- Testing
- Closing the books
Restore points: Having restore points is having the ability to revert your data back to a previous state. With desktop software, this means saving versions of your company file at regular intervals so that you can always go back to a previous version if need be. For example, say you spent a few hours entering transactions, but all of the sudden, you realized you were working in the wrong company file. Having a restore point would allow you to clear away all the incorrectly entered data by reloading a backup of a file before you had entered all the data. Online accounting software doesn’t have restore points, so if you want to fix all those incorrectly entered transactions, you’d need to manually delete them and start over.
Testing: When your online accounting software connects with other software via add-ons or an application programming interface (API), there’s a huge need to protect your data. When you use an add-on, it will start to manipulate your data. It can modify, add, or delete records that you don’t want it to. This can also happen when you import files.
To make sure your data isn’t affected in a negative way, it’s a best practice to test out new add-ons or the imported data. But with online accounting software, there’s no way to safely conduct tests on your existing data, since it’s not possible to revert back to a previously saved file (because there are no saved files).
Closing the books: Another use for a saved file is to keep a point-in-time copy of company records, like the version of your books that was used for a year-end filing. Some online accounting software products have a “lock dates” or a “close books” feature that lets you prevent changes to data before a certain point in time. However, this isn’t as clean and fail-safe a measure as having a saved copy of your records.
Work-Arounds for No File Saves
Since saving company files isn’t possible with online accounting software, here are some tools, ideas, and work-arounds to help if you find yourself needing to correct misentered or modified data or to restore deleted data.
Trial accounts for testing
Before I try to manipulate my data via an add-on, import, or using an API, I usually try it out using a trial account first. Most online accounting software allows you to create a free trial account, which you can then use for testing. If it’s an add-on I want to start using, I’ll use a free trial account with the add-on provider as well.
The good thing about this is that I don’t have to worry about screwing anything up since they’re test accounts. Also, most online apps provide free trials, so cost usually isn’t an issue.
The bad thing is I usually have to re-create any of the steps I’ve taken with my real software accounts. It’s a duplication of effort in order to protect my data.
What if you don’t want to create a ton of email addresses just for testing purposes? Some mail systems allow you to modify your existing email address to make it seem like a new one. For example, let’s say my address is [email protected]. If I want a new email address for testing purposes, I can use an address like [email protected].
What I did was add a “+” and then some text to my email address to make it appear like a new address. However, with some email systems, text beyond the “+” is ignored. In my case, even though I write an email to [email protected], it still goes to [email protected]. So, I can make as many test accounts as I like by using such email addresses as:
I know this trick will work for both my Gmail and my self-hosted domain name email addresses, but I’m not entirely sure how many other mail systems this works with. I’ve read the same type of trick can be used with a “.” or “-“, which would modify my email address to [email protected] or [email protected].
If that trick doesn’t work for you, another solution is to use a disposable email address using the free Mailinator service. Mailinator allows you to create any email address you like @mailinator.com, so I could create email addresses like:
The good and bad thing about it is that all the emails are publicly accessible, so anyone who knows your email address can go in and access the email. But you can make up any email address you like, so the chances of anyone really stumbling on your temporary email address is slim. You can also permanently delete any emails going to the address, and you can quickly read and delete the emails. I wouldn’t use this for any sensitive data, but if you need a quick and easy email address that doesn’t require signing up for a service, it can be a useful tool.
Bulk recategorization
Depending on the software you use, some have a bulk recategorization feature that lets you modify many transactions at once. This won’t help you with deleted data or data that was added that shouldn’t have been, but it can be helpful if you only need to modify transactions.
Audit trails
Some online accounting software products provide an “audit trail” feature that allows you to revert changed transactions, delete added transactions, or restore deleted transactions. Even if the software doesn’t let you modify transactions, you’re still able to get a record of all the changes. You can use those records to help revert your data.
Transaction Pro Deleter
If you’re using
Conclusion
While there are work-arounds to not being able to save company files, I think the real solution is for online accounting software companies to provide file saves. Whether it’s automated or the user presses a “save” button and does it manually, it’s an important ability that has been left out of online accounting software.
Online software services I use that have a file save (restore point) feature are WordPress and Google Docs. With both, I get automatic restore points, and I can go back to any point in time and revert my document to a previous version.
What I don’t think online accounting software will provide is a downloadable company file. This is purely speculation on my part, but it would seem to me that providing a file that can be uploaded is technically harder than providing a restore point. Online accounting software is changing at a rapid pace, so a file created a year ago may not able to be read properly. Keeping saved files within online accounting software is an acceptable trade-off to me, especially since I need to use the software to open the company file anyway.
A capability I’ve seen and like is the ability to do a one-click CSV (or
While not being able to save a company file is not a deal breaker for me, I think there are people out there who would feel a lot more comfortable with online accounting software if it had that ability.
How about you? Is the inability to save company files stopping you from using online accounting software?