There are a number of reasons why I decline paperless statements.
1) I want a physical record of each statement for tax purposes and would rather have them print it than me. (why don't I just use PDF's? - for many things I do and I backup as well, but I've seen many hard drives crash abruptly and unexpectedly and I've seen backups fail - I've rarely seen paper just fail without the presence of a flame.)
2) exactly what you're pointing out - what if I cancel my account there - will I still be able to access older statements. I think we keep anything that could impact taxes for 5 years.
3) I recently heard of a bank that is fairly prominent that had an interesting quirk in their ONLINE statements. A client of this bank had paper statements and there was an error (I believe everything had been recorded correctly, there was a MATH error of 5 cents from one PAPER statement to the next.) So, comparing the PAPER statement to last months PAPER statement revealed the error. The problem was that the online statement used the CURRENT balance and activity over the last month to GENERATE LAST MONTHS view. So online (which they're support representives look at) LAST months ONLINE statement now shows a different balance than their paper statement in fact, going back in time through all the prior statements they are now ALL off by 5 cents. This is on an account that they have to be filing tax reports on to account for every penny and they've spent a disproportionate amount of time working their way up to the "food chain" to get the problem solved.
So, I ask this question - bookkeeping practices can be audited - what about online statement calculation algorithms? Or are people sufficiently naive to think that they don't need to know HOW the software algorithm deals with previous activity as long as it "looks right to me". It sounds to me that in this case they haven't been willing to spring for extra storage to close and record the end of statement period information each month. Instead they thought their algorithm was "good enough" to be able to extrapolate the past without keeping a benchmark to compare it to.
Online statements make it too easy to rewrite history.
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There are a number of reasons why I decline paperless statements.
1) I want a physical record of each statement for tax purposes and would rather have them print it than me. (why don't I just use PDF's? - for many things I do and I backup as well, but I've seen many hard drives crash abruptly and unexpectedly and I've seen backups fail - I've rarely seen paper just fail without the presence of a flame.)
2) exactly what you're pointing out - what if I cancel my account there - will I still be able to access older statements. I think we keep anything that could impact taxes for 5 years.
3) I recently heard of a bank that is fairly prominent that had an interesting quirk in their ONLINE statements. A client of this bank had paper statements and there was an error (I believe everything had been recorded correctly, there was a MATH error of 5 cents from one PAPER statement to the next.) So, comparing the PAPER statement to last months PAPER statement revealed the error. The problem was that the online statement used the CURRENT balance and activity over the last month to GENERATE LAST MONTHS view. So online (which they're support representives look at) LAST months ONLINE statement now shows a different balance than their paper statement in fact, going back in time through all the prior statements they are now ALL off by 5 cents. This is on an account that they have to be filing tax reports on to account for every penny and they've spent a disproportionate amount of time working their way up to the "food chain" to get the problem solved.
So, I ask this question - bookkeeping practices can be audited - what about online statement calculation algorithms? Or are people sufficiently naive to think that they don't need to know HOW the software algorithm deals with previous activity as long as it "looks right to me". It sounds to me that in this case they haven't been willing to spring for extra storage to close and record the end of statement period information each month. Instead they thought their algorithm was "good enough" to be able to extrapolate the past without keeping a benchmark to compare it to.
Online statements make it too easy to rewrite history.
No point NOT to use it in the right CONTEXT. Wireless devices - yes, factories? I don't think so...