If anything changes, it changes on the server. When next you connect to your application, which lives on the server, you get the latest and greatest.

All changes made to your software end up on the server. All responsibility for the running your application rests with the server and the owners of the server. The Internet is always on and it’s very unusual not to be able to connect to any particular website.

Choosing a reliable hosting company, like Amazon Web Services, ensures a level of reliability not found in the vast majority of businesses running their own software.

It goes further than just many employees working together at the same time from all over Earth. They also work with and share the same data. As soon as Susie in Sydney enters new data, that data is available to Larry in London.

There is no synchronisation between devices. Everybody works with the same database at the same time. All the data is always fresh and up to date, as long as it has been entered into the database. The database sees to it that there are no collisions with updating data. It is impossible for two or more people to update the same data at the same time. The relational database is a mature technology used billions of times every day all over the world. Air travel and hotel reservations are only two instances seeing heavy use every minute. The list goes on and on.

If you have different people relying on having the latest information, no matter where they are, a hosted database application cannot be beaten. This is one aspect of life that cannot be improved upon - perfection is already here.

Starting with the database, there’s more a web application can allow you to do than entering, updating, deleting and looking at data.

You can also search the data in many ways, finding in seconds what would have taken you days in a paper world. Searches can work on many fields, like names, surnames, telephone numbers, addresses, postcodes and many more. Your input can be treated case insensitively and used as a part to match a whole. That is to say that if you enter 345 you will be matched to any postcode, telephone number or other search field with 345 in it.

Then you can run reports. You will most likely want to run the same set of reports with different variables which you supply, many times. Like the sales report between different dates. Or looking for sales including different articles between any two dates. The possibilities are endless. You just have to specify the reports you want so they can be created by the developer.

Still staying with the database, the reports mentioned can be turned into pdf documents which you can download and print or email to someone who does not have access to your application. In fact, there can be a function saying email this into which you just fill in a list of comma separated names and email addresses and the report will be emailed as an attachment to the names and addresses on your list.

You can have consoles for users in different roles with notifications in the consoles of certain conditions in the database, like new sales or users signing up or late payments. The list is endless.

Having mentioned email, you can have emails sent to anybody in response to certain events, like payment not arriving say a week after the due date. Or a thank-you note for payment. Or the level of a certain item in your inventory runnng low. This can happen automatically without any input from you. Emails are generated from templates and can, or can not, have attachments.

Jobs can be scheduled to run at any interval going through your database and responding to certain conditions. In most cases it will be a notification email. Again, these jobs run with no input from you and they do what they do with no input from you.

Once your database is set up and your information has been entered you don’t enter the same information again. A client told me he now issues occupation certificates in less than three minutes where it took him twenty minutes in the local council where he worked. Of course, he doesn’t have to enter the client details into the certificate again, like he had to on paper. Then he doesn’t have to write a covering letter and put the certificate in an envelope to be mailed. The client details are filled into the certificate from the database and a covering letter is generated using the details in the database and the certificate is emailed to the client as a pdf attachment to the email. All this with the push of one button.

And then there are online payments and online shops. PayPal allows you to take secure payments in a variety of ways. It is highly trusted and not likely to scare users away. But PayPal is not the only way to take care of online payments. Stripe is in many cases cheaper and integrates seamlessly with any online shop. Why not have both? You can also have fancy shopping carts with which users can interact in all conceivable ways.

The possibilities for making your working life easier are endless. But, unfortunately, you will still have to work.