A journal in accounting is the book where business transaction entries are first made as they occur. With latest developments in e-commerce, online journal diary has emerged to tap the new businesses based on the internet. There are several advantages of online journals which are discussed below.

All activities happening on the web-based business are tracked in the journals be it a transaction or just an account update. The journal is updated each time a client login to their account. Online entries are updated automatically after creation of new transaction, modification of a transaction or a delete is made either by the client or third party. Errors which are common in the manual journals do not happen in the web-based entries because they are updated by machine as they happen in real time

Another advantage is that the online journals come with an automatic billing capability when charges from customers are due. They will create invoices and send to them. This reduces your workload of going through all the records of customers and debtors and manually creating and sending billings which is very cumbersome work

Group emailing can be enabled for automatic emails. All you need is to create emailing groups of clients and you memorize the reports to be send, they will be send on the schedule you have set. In offline journals, you have to create these schedules and send them manually which is prone to delays caused by human errors or emergencies which are unavoidable.

The location of the customers may be important to some businesses. With web-based journals, it is possible to locate your customers as when they log in, the system records where they are logging in from. This may come in handy for such things as marketing campaigns as you know where most of your clients are located. With manual journals, this may be hard to keep up with.

With most offline journals you are only able to record one accounts receivable entry and accounts payable entry. This is not the case with journals based online because they will allow for multiple accounts payable and receivable lines. When consolidating accounts payable at the end of a reporting period it is very easy to do that on multiple lines. This is the same for accounts receivable.

The bank transactions are updated immediately as they occur in web-based journals. Unless on very rare occasions when there is technical error on your site, all the bank transactions are entered corrected without any error. With this happening in real time, possibility of hackers getting in your site and destroying all your data is not high because even if they deface your site, all the transactions up to the time they hacked were recorded and back up created

The list of advantages of online journal entries does not end there. Due to automation of these entry recordings, operational costs of running the business will be lowered. You only need one administrator to be managing the journal.