8. Future of accounting

The question of the future of bookkeeping arises because Accounting 1.0 was applied unchanged from 1494 to about 1985 for nearly 500 years, and sometimes placed in a series with Latin letters or Arabic numbers that may no longer be modernized. Accounting 2.0 has transferred this technology to EDP and initially only copied it. That would speak for immutability. But there have also emerged new applications that were unknown in 1494 and even 480 years later. With the strong networking of company information by means of the ERP system, Accounting 3.0 has been created in the last 10 years, at least in large companies, which has almost completely eliminated the data collection by the people. The bookkeeping will theoretically continue in this segment, but the accountants will disappear there. However, the previous accounting will disappear from the consciousness of the people.

Digitalisation involves a dividing line between top and bottom, big and small, north and south. Information has become a power factor. With better data, companies can be run more successfully. It is currently unclear whether these success factors will only be available to large companies in the north or whether small companies in the south, small companies in the north and large companies in the south will benefit from technical progress. There are technical possibilities to use the "big technology" even for small companies. At the moment, however, there is a lack of funding and, very often, the problem awareness of small businesses. Then it would be up to them to keep accounting data manually. It creates a two-class bookkeeping. Large companies have extensive information and small businesses must incur significant costs to meet the minimum statutory requirements through external service providers, in particular tax consultants. In addition, in the light of the technical possibilities of large companies, these are constantly being increased (for example electronic submission of tax returns, online audit). However, the state does not offer small businesses any help with technical implementation, e.g. by a sample organization for small businesses, as described in this book.

"Modern bourgeois society, born of the downfall of feudal society, has not abolished class antagonisms. It has only replaced new classes, new conditions of oppression ... with the old ones. "(Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, London 1848, in: Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED (ed.), Marx-Engels-Werke Volume 4, Berlin / GDR 1977, p. 463) The same applies to the transition from industrial society to the information society. If politics wants to learn from history and promote an evolutionary development of society instead of provoking revolutionary upheavals and associated upheavals, digitization must be shaped politically. Knowledge is power, and small business owners are not powerful! A peaceful disempowerment of the powerful with the leveling out of knowledge advantage avoids the necessity of revolutions. The future viability of small businesses would be strengthened and excessive concentration of the economy dominated by large companies that could afford their own ERP systems would be prevented.

A political control of digitization is also necessary for other reasons. Today, people are only supposed to provide companies with machine-readable data, and the data sent by companies is sometimes unreadable for people, or at least not understandable. In the context of digitization, man is made an appendage of machines. Politicians have to take action here instead of leaving digitization to large-scale companies and delivering their citizens without protection.

The Cuban government must also rethink! The small business owners are no threat to the state-controlled large-scale enterprises. Strengthening it is not a counter-revolution. Instead, they close gaps in the supply left by the state economy. It is in the interests of the people that this is done as effectively and efficiently as possible.

The current regulations for small entrepreneurs have the character of an overwhelming bureaucracy. Evasive reactions are the mandatory consequence. The politically desired effects can therefore not be achieved.

Large companies can also work more effectively and efficiently. Improvements in this area are also not counterrevolutionary. The adoption of suggestions from this book threatens at most lethargic functionaries who themselves have not developed any ideas for improving performance. The blockade of improvements is likely to have a greater impact on the Cuban economy than the US blockade. But the inner blockade is easier to overcome. You just have to want it!