Accounting before the cloud
Before cloud computing was a thing, accounting tasks were way more laborious and time-consuming for businesses. Professionals used to store records on traditional desktops where all the invoices, bills, and transactions were kept; so all of these routine bookkeeping tasks would require them to travel in order to complete the work on-site. What also often happens is that many companies focus more of their time on providing excellent customer service and general bookkeeping duties tend to fall behind… This makes errors like miscategorized and missed expenses slip easily, leading up to the financial end of tax-year disasters. Creating tax returns from inaccurate accounting records was then a real burden before cloud computing was a thing!
How has cloud computing revolutionized the accounting sector?
Whether it is accounting firms, tax specialists, or businesses looking after their own bookkeeping, everyone has already benefitted from cloud computing. In the next few sections, we will discuss the processes that were successfully streamlined thanks to the cloud and virtual desktop services.
1. The cloud helps you keep a better record of your expenses
As you may know, getting crammed with hundreds of receipts and trying to make sense of them at the end of the tax year is a real hurdle. Nowadays, accounting software that is deployed from the cloud helps you keep a close track of all of your business expenses in real-time, and so preparing your business’ tax return will surely be based on accurate estimates. What cloud-hosted software for accountants also does is to provide snapshots of receipts and bank statement files for audit purposes- all done in seconds by intelligent computing technology! This gives companies better trust in their accounting systems, higher productivity of the staff, and no financial loss from inaccurate deductions.
2. Accounting can be done on the go
Accounting software on the cloud allows you to be a lot more flexible if you move about a lot and you have a lot of outstanding work that can’t be postponed. With cloud-hosted software, you can easily access your financial reports and generate invoices from anywhere. You also needn’t have to travel to the office to meet your tax year deadlines and let your business suffer the unpleasant repercussions if due dates are missed.
3. Maintaining accounting software is not your job
There’s nothing better for a business than finding new ways to optimize workloads and streamline operations. Back in the day, accounting software required hefty installations as well as recurring updates and patches, which slowed down the departments and made room for more mistakes. Thanks to desktop virtualization services and cloud-hosted services, none of these worries exist. New versions are updated all by the Managed Services Provider (MSP) at no additional cost. Also, if your accounting business needs to onboard new staff, you won’t need to pay for additional licensing, configuration, and IT maintenance, since everything is taken care of by your provider. In addition, cloud computing gives companies better security of their data, stored all on cloud servers where it gets backed up and protected from intrusions or disasters.
4. You rely on better collaboration with your clients and teams
One of the greatest features of the cloud is the high agility and flexibility of the technology. This means that you can rely on an uninterrupted cloud desktop service that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time. In a scenario where your accountant needs quick access to your financials so they can help you make an important investment decision, they can easily be given access to your remote workstation, without time-wasting and unnecessary backward and forwards of information. This way, the whole process of running numbers and making estimates can be done on the spots within minutes. Cloud computing encourages collaboration by providing your employees with an agile environment that is secure and easily accessible for all parties involved.
Maintaining and running accounting software used to be a much bigger job in the past with a traditional desktop environment. Thanks to advancements of cloud technology, in the present day, work can be completed in lesser time and with much higher accuracy due to the high availability and performance of the service provided.
If you need more information about the steps to moving your accounting software on the cloud, you can send an inquiry to the we-IT team and we will get back to you shortly!