Why Your Accounting Firm Should Care About Cloud This Tax Season?

Most tax professionals avoid using cloud technology as they are not tech-savvy or are concerned about security in the cloud. However, with a number of security measures taken by third-party providers, there is no reason to worry for tax professionals or accountants.

In addition to this, cloud offers the accounting process with the mobility, flexibility, and scalability that the CPAs can utilize during the tax season and attain high efficiency.

According to a survey by The National Small Business Association, one in three SMBs have reported spending more than 80 hours (which is approx. two complete working weeks) each year on federal taxes.

This time, which was spent on planning, organizing, and preparing taxes, could be spent growing business and working closely with existing clients.

How can cloud be of help during tax season?

1. Cloud saves your valuable time

With cloud computing, all your tax data is stored in one place, the cloud. This makes it easier for tax professionals, CPAs, accountants, or employees to view or access files. This means that you need to spend less time to find and deliver all the data or information required to prepare taxes.

You don’t need to send files back and forth as email attachments. The end result is convenience, increased efficiency, and productivity.

Whether you want to send reports or are trying to figure out the most tax-beneficial method to sell an asset, everyone involved will have real-time access to the data. It becomes easier to get important information and see if you can take out the benefit of legitimate tax deductions.

During the tax season, when the CPAs have to work long hours, the optimization of time due to cloud helps in performing their tasks stress-free and on time.

2. Enhanced Security

Tax professionals may consider their business to be too small to be a target for scammers or thieves. However, that is not the case. As accounting firms have critical data and have comparatively less robust security systems, small accounting businesses are increasingly becoming targets for scammers.

It is just a misconception that having your financial data on a computer is safer than in the cloud. When you’re sharing the data with an accountant, bookkeeper, or employee through email, it is more vulnerable to get into the wrong hands.

Data stored on hard drive or laptop can be stolen or lost, and you may put the critical information of clients at risk. Cloud service providers offer the best security standards with industry certifications. Moreover, they also deploy advanced security methods such as multi-factor authentication, Intrusion Prevention, and Detection Systems, and data encryption to keep your data secure.

As your data is stored in the cloud, you can easily access it even if something happens to your system. You also have the option to remotely wipe out all the data from lost machines to avoid getting in the wrong hands.

3. Automated Backup

For tax professionals, data is always important. If stored on a local system, it always remains prone to theft or loss in various forms, such as system damage, natural calamity, or accidental deletion. Losing data, especially during tax season, could be the worst thing that could happen for tax preparers.

Maybe it has been a while since you last took a backup, or maybe you never had a backup at all, in which case, you need to start everything from scratch.

Cloud providers offer you automated backups regulary at remote data centers. This means that you can always recover your latest data. As these backups happen automatically, you don’t need to remember when to take the next backup.

Various cloud hosting providers offer choices to select the storage space or time range for backups. So, you can make a choice depending on your requirements.

4. Remote Access

During the tax season, the accountants and tax professionals are not limited to work only from office. There is a need for all-time access to business data. Cloud enables you to access data from anywhere and at any time from any internet-connected device.

It helps businesses in implementing policies like work-from-home for the employees which further improves the employee satisfaction rate.

Moreover, with the help of cloud, you can collaborate with your team of CPAs, accountants, tax professionals, and other stakeholders on a common platform from anywhere around the globe.

5. Dedicated Support

Efficient technical support is a must for any tax-related process at any time of the year. However, its significance increases immensely during the tax season. Although the accounting firms deploy an IT team for the resolution of issues, it involves a lot of revenue and effort.

The competent cloud hosting providers such as Ace Cloud Hosting offers the customers with always-on support with a team of highly skilled professionals tending to all your issues.

Conclusion

Most issues occurring during tax season come from being ill-prepared or not being aware of developments. Making appropriate use of cloud accounting during tax season can help you save your valuable time.

If you are looking for cloud hosting providers for your accounting firm, call our experts at 855-910-6927 and get a free 10-days trial.