Update: This article was last updated on 4th March 2020 to reflect the accuracy and up-to-date information on the page.
Over the past few years, many industries have been moving to newer and better technologies to make their work easier and more efficient. The accounting industry is not far behind when it comes to technological advancement.
Accountants are required to perform multiple tasks at the same time, such as auditing, data analysis, financial modeling, and a lot more. However, working on an on-premise system causes a lot of problems such as multiple entries of data, loss of data while sharing, heavy expenditure on hardware, and many others.
An efficient way to solve all these problems is by adopting cloud technology for your accounting process. Moreover, opting for cloud hosting to host accounting applications like QuickBooks and Sage means that all your files and data are stored in the cloud and not on your local system.
Here are some of the benefits that cloud technology brings to the table.
1. Remote Access
Being an accountant, you can work only when you are in your office because all your accounting applications and data can be accessed from the local system only. It gets challenging to work when you are not in the office. This hampers your work productivity, and you end up losing clients.
Cloud solves this problem by providing you access to all your accounting documents from anywhere around the world at any time, given that you have internet access. This adds more flexibility to your work life, and you can work efficiently, even when you are not in your office.
2. Multi-user Collaboration
Working in a team means sharing documents with your colleagues and working on it together. As an accountant, you might have to share documents with your clients or other teammates. Sending documents back and forth via email might lead to the loss of data or multiple copies of the same files.
Cloud makes communication and collaboration easy for accountants. You get a common virtual platform for all your work, and you can easily share documents with your colleagues and work on them at the same time.
3. Scalability and Flexibility
Accountants have to constantly scale their business up and down depending on the business requirements. For example, during the tax season, you might want to hire more CPAs for your firm. Doing so gets very difficult when working on a local system as you have a fixed hardware system.
The cloud platform is extremely flexible in terms of the number of users, devices, or storage. You can easily alter these specifications as per your requirements and scale your business up or down.
4. Data Security
With the increasing number of cyberattacks these days, security has become one of the biggest concerns for an accountant. Moreover, data loss can also occur due to hardware failures, human negligence, or accidents like fire.
By adopting cloud hosting, your entire accounting process is hosted in remote cloud servers, which means that any damage to the local system does not cause data loss.
In addition, the reliable cloud hosting providers offer advanced security features at all levels- physical, network, and administrative, such as access control, multi-factor authentication, data encryption, DDoS Protection, and a lot more to keep your accounting data safe from any internal or external threats.
5. Cost Savings
Deploying a local IT infrastructure involves a lot of heavy capital and operational expenses such as purchasing of hardware, its maintenance, hiring of IT staff, etc.
Cloud eliminates all such extra expenditure as cloud service providers take care of it all. So, you only have to pay for your chosen hosting plan. Thus, you save a lot of money that can be spent on other, more useful investments.
Wrapping Up
Cloud technology can be extremely beneficial for accountants and can help make their work easier and more efficient while saving substantial operational costs. It leads to better collaboration between colleagues working from different locations and thus enhances teamwork. Apart from benefiting work-life, cloud hosting also makes personal life better by improving work-life balance.
Have more questions about cloud? Connect with our cloud experts at 855-223-4887.
Comments (1)
Cloud technology is slowly becoming important for all aspects of business but its is even more important for accountants. With a proper utilization cloud can help accountants clients connect to clients all over the globe. This increases their reach as well as their usefulness.
Cloud is bringing the world even closer that it was before. The advantages of using cloud technology for accountancy are twofold. Firstly, accountants can reach out to clients from all over the globe effortlessly. Secondly customers can avail the services of accountants from other parts of the globe at a much affordable fee than what they had to pay the ones in their countries.
Accountancy becomes much faster with using cloud. Transactions can be recorded and analyzed in real time without and in-between waiting time. The better communication that cloud provides makes accountants more resourceful and able to cope up with discrepancies and problems instantaneously.
An accountant becomes a lot more flexible if he uses cloud technology. He is able to work from home, on-the go and even from remote places. This lets him deal with the needs of his clients anytime anywhere. It is pretty obvious that such an accountant is bound to grow in terms of reputation and business.