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| Yes | 61% | 218 votes | Total: 359 votes | |
| No | 39% | 141 votes |
Yes
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Add to FavoritesThe reasons we should switch from paper to electronic bank statements can be broken down into five catagories; reduced fraud, convenience, reliability, cost savings and its environmentally friendly. The internet has become part of just about everybody's life now a days and it only makes sense to move our financial system online. Online banking has a multitude of advanntages and the disadvantages can be easily remedied for a smooth transition.
Online banking can reduce fraud in many ways. There's no paper statement sitting in your mailbox where somebody can steal it. Also not all postal workers are as honest as you would think. I've heard plenty of stories of somebodies mail getting opened and used for identity theft.
It is in fact harder to forge an electronic statement than a paper copy. Try to Photo Shop a bank statement and you'll find its much easier said than done.
All bank sites use the https protocol which is a secure way of sending information over the internet. Your browser encrypts the information it sends via Secure Socket Layering. Even if a suspected identity theft were to intercept your information it would be encypted. The most powerful computer in the world would take 40 years to crack the encryption.
You can view charges almost instantaniously. You can look online at your days charges to see if there is anything suspicious. I personally look at my accounts every single night before I go to bed to make sure everything is in order. You can stop fraud within hours of it happening. You don't have to wait till the 5th of the next month for your paper statement.
Online banking is extremely convenient. As mentioned above you can see your charges instantly. You know exactly where you stand at any given point in time. Disputes are just a click away. Also details on transactions are just a click away. You can view check images usually the next day they clear. If your at a friend's house and you need to see if you have enough cash for that Xbox game you've been wanting you can hop online and view your account. You don't have to either hope your check register is up to date or go home to look at a paper statement.
You have to also keep in mind that you can still print your online statements. You just have them electronicly delivered. Then you can have a hard copy if there's every an issue.
People always say but what if you can't access the internet then what? You have automated phone services that can tell you just about anything you need. If the power is out once again if your phone line is working you can call or better yet use your cell phone. I'll admit that these forms are slightly less secure but so is letting the mail man have your bank statement every month. If you are one of the few individuals that doesn't have the internet you can always go to your public library. There computers are just as secure as the one you have at home.
When you switch to electronic statements you are helping the environment. Less trees are being but down just so you can look at what you spent last month.
Electronic statements are much more efficient and save companies money. If every customer switched to electronic statements companies would save billions of dollars. Now you might ask so what? They don't need anymore money. The thing is the savings are large enough that they will pass at least most of it down to you in the form of lower interest rates on loans and higher rates on interest bearing accounts. This can be seen with online only sites where they offer rates on savings accounts of roughly 7 times more than your traditional bank.
Going electronic just makes sense in the natural progression of things. The transition needs to happen gradually and I can see in the future that banks will start to offer more and more incentives to go electronic. I don't see companies switching entirely over to electronic statments for many years mainly because there are still a few people who don't see the sense in electronic statements. Companies will just start charging for paper copies.
Learn more about this author, Robert Caldwell.
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No
Call it old fashioned but the switch from the traditional banking statements on paper as well as bills is hardly appealing. While the world is fighting to go "green" and reduce paper usage and computers are now considered a safe and competent alternative it is hard to make that leap of faith to changing over again. Why is it that this is the case?
The decision to remain stuck in the past as many put it is far from being based solely on simply being what the kids call old school. My partner and I are small business owners. Each of us come from families that have been in the financial fields or small business owners going back at least three generations each and with that comes experience and knowledge. Most significantly however is the first hand experience of trying to go paperless and the increase of headaches it caused.
We tried being environmentally sound and friendly moving into the the modern times. We switched everything we could to electronic statements. It didn't however take long to realize some important things that made this a terrible move for us personally, which were that we needed to have hard copies of our transactions, and the hard copies we made by printing our on line receipts were worthless when it came to adjudicating errors.
While the concept of going paperless was nice, as pointed out above it wasn't really paperless, it was just different paper. When a bill came in we had to print a copy of it to place in our files should it be necessary for an audit or to dispute an error. The piece of printer paper was usually larger than the paper the bill would have come on to start with which defeated the purpose of switching from a conservation standpoint. We then realized that most businesses charged a fee to get an original copy of a bill over three months old which meant more paper- the folding kind of paper money going out of our pocket, to acquire a bill that would have otherwise been in our possession free of charge each month. In fact almost all businesses only offer a three month billing history on line free of charge. With that limited availability what happens if per se the IRS decides to conduct an audit of four years prior and you don't have those bills to refer to?
From personal experience I can tell you the answer. You will spend a lot of money and time tracking all this information down. Your bank will require a charge of anywhere from one to three dollars per month plus postage to give you a paper copy of old statements. Businesses will do a similar thing. They view getting such records to you a nuisance and as it costs them to get you those records you will pay for them. The IRS will tell you copies of statements printed from your computer are a nice reference point but prove nothing as they are not official and can be doctored by anyone with a desire to do so. This is just one disadvantage to handling your finances on line. Furthermore should you have a dispute with a billing agent itself who is to say that without that original mailed out paper copy of a bill, what you see online is what was actually there originally? Let's face it, not every business is ethical.
A second is that there are times when the computer is down and you need information regarding billing right away to conduct daily business. You have two choices, either wait for the server to come back on line or put your business on hold. Perhaps you can try to handle matters by phone, but that can be cumbersome and aggravating especially if you do not have a hard copy of a bill or invoice to refer to. If you are lucky you can refer back to printed out copies of the documents you needed from on line transactions if you have them, which again isn't really going paperless.
The third bone of contention is how much personal and business information do you want out in the electronic world? Granted not everyone is hacked or has to deal with identity theft but when transactions are made on line they are floating around out there for anyone with the proper knowledge of how to do so to gain access to that information. Every credit card number, bank account, purchase made, etc... holds an increased potential for being compromised. The more you have the more you are at risk.
After our experience of going paperless we decided that for us it just wasn't realistic or viable. We had to have official hard copies available at all times and on record to insure the ability to conduct business efficiently and accurately and insure that should a problem arise more than three months old we didn't have to jump through hoops wasting time and money to prove our side of the billing story. It is true we do pay some bills electronically, but we always without fail demand we be mailed our paper copy of monthly statements for everything. This seems to be the only mix that works for us.
In summary the move to electronic transactions may be fine for those whom are paying a household bill or two per month, and far easier than writing checks and mailing them in, but in business the old paper way is still the best way. It provides a legally acceptable record of bills and payments as well as a good on hand backup reference immediately available whenever necessary. Plus as we found out actually going paperless in business is a myth. You may cut out the paper bill coming to you in the mail, but you will still be printing the on line payment receipt to accompany the on line statement for your records. Unless you have full faith in others when it comes to your money and believe you will never have a dispute going paperless is not just a bad idea, but a potentially dangerous and expensive mistake.
Learn more about this author, Amanda Fox.
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