Are You Creating Backups of Your Financial Documents?
If not, you should be. There’s an old saying that goes, “if something can go wrong, it will probably will.” Following this mantra with your financial documents and accounting records is usually a good idea. You should hope for the best but prepare for the worst. If your financial records were ever stolen or destroyed, would your business stay afloat?
Unfortunately, many businesses have been forced to close their doors due to poor financial records. In some cases, the records are lost. In other cases, they are stolen or destroyed. Regardless, you should take the necessary steps to protect your financial records, and business, from disaster by creating regular backups. Having backups of your records will give you peace of mind knowing that your business will continue to operate in the event of a disaster.
So, how do you create backups of your financial documents? For paper receipts, it’s best to create digital copies by scanning them and saving them to an external device or the cloud. For digital documents, you can simply create digital copies, also saving them to an external device or the cloud.
The key thing to remember is that you want to save your backups to a location other than the primary source of your financial documents. If your financial documents are currently stored on your computer hard drive, for instance, you shouldn’t create and store a backup copy on your hard drive. In the event that your hard drive is damaged, lost, stolen, etc., it could result in complete data loss of both your main documents and the backup copy. This is why it’s a good idea to store backup copies on an external device or the the cloud. USB flash drives may suffice, assuming you store them in a safe, secure location that’s away from your main computer.
But there’s actually an even easier way to create backup copies of your financial documents: use Quickbooks. Developed by Intuit, Quickbooks supports automatic backups, meaning you can schedule the software to create backups of your financial documents at specific dates and times. This takes the burden of having to manually create backups off your shoulders, freeing up valuable time that can be used for other aspects of growing your business.