It was one of those days. The sun was shining, God was in his heaven, I was on top of my workload for once, and the phone goes. Hello, it's the VAT inspector here. We'd like to come and see you. Fine, I have all my VAT records up to date on the computer - should be easy. Only there's one thing, they tell me - they aren't allowed to look at computers, so would I mind printing everything off for them.

Time to sit back and start to panic. VAT lady is coming in less than a week. VAT lady would like to see all of records ("please"). VAT lady wants to see every invoice and purchase order since 1997. VAT lady is not allowed to look at computer. Oh God.

This is one of those interesting areas in which computing for smaller businesses and indeed for consumers promises a whole lot and then at the last minute, turns around, pokes its tongue out at you and fails completely to deliver. This isn't anything to do with the technology itself, it's the fact that it has to exist in the real world. And whatever the government and other agencies' claims and efforts are relating to the online world for business, there are more issues to overcome than they appear to have anticipated.

Take, for example, the issue of accreditation for VAT. A handful of accounting software suppliers have actually registered with the Business Application Software Developers Association (Basda) and passed the tests required to confirm that their systems are VAT compliant; for what it's worth these companies are Deltek, Squaresum, TAS (owned by Sage), Anagram Systems and Solomon. The others are likely to work, but basically you have to take them on trust. So why have so few companies bothered registering so far?

The answers are many. First, it's a lengthy and no doubt costly process, at least in terms of the time taken, and whereas there will be others awaiting their accreditation, if their products are already selling then the impetus to get a formal certification is fairly small. Second, one of the Basda committee tells me that Customs and Excise weren't all that enthusiastic about the accreditation in the first place. C&E's view, quite reasonably, was that the VAT-registered business has the responsibility to get its figures right; it's not really C&E's place to mollycoddle companies or endorse individual software systems. Basda's energy saw the accreditation through but the legal position remains as C&E states it: if your records aren't up to date or if you've put the information into your computer badly then frankly that's down to you.

All of which leads to the conclusion that if I failed to keep a paper copy of everything to do with my VAT records then that's my problem, which has to be fair comment. Except nowhere in much of the documentation that you get with the software does it say "incidentally the VAT inspector won't touch your computer with a plastic bargepole because then you can blame them for anything that might go wrong later and you can't expect them to learn every software system on the market so print everything out as you go". I mean, it wouldn't, there'd be no point in buying the bloody thing then. Unless of course there were some new function like a "VAT inspector" button built in as standard in all of these systems - something like a software wizard you could hit when they announce they're on the way, which would then ask which periods they're looking at and print out everything you need, clearly labelled so that you can leave it running while you get on with your work. It can't be that difficult.

And nor should extracting receipts from websites from which you've bought items be any great strain; one of these, from which I'd sourced my last-but-one computer, had just such a function. Click here and view your invoices, it said, so I clicked and found they'd changed their system in 1999 and were unable to produce any invoices issued prior to that date. (Of course they can if you beg; they're legally obliged to keep trading info for six years and they know it as well as you do). Again, my fault for not printing out and preserving the thing at the time.

Or is it actually my fault for trusting that computer systems will do what they purport to do and communicate with the real world when someone has forgotten to tell the real world it's supposed to have changed to fit in with the technology? Whichever, when buying software and hardware for your business it's always worth being a bit sceptical when it tells you it's doing something and is foolproof. Software programs? Lying sods, the lot of them.