Doug Sleeter’s Advice on Choosing Desktop, Online, Or Hosted Solution For Your Accounting

The accounting industry has moved on to the digital space from traditional paper-based accounting. However, with so many options around, accounting firms find it challenging to choose the best solution for their business.

Ace Cloud Hosting met up with its leadership board member, Doug Sleeter, to get his views on the best accounting solution for firms right now.

Douglas (Doug) Sleeter is the founder and former CEO of The Sleeter Group. He has been featured on Accounting Today’s list of ‘Top 100 Most Popular Influential People in Accounting’ for eight years straight from 2008 to 2015. He was awarded ‘Small Business Influencer Champion’ by Small Business Trends in 2013 and inducted in The CPA Practice Advisor Hall of Fame in the accounting profession. Doug is also the author of The QuickBooks Consultant’s Reference Guide and QuickBooks Complete.

Let’s watch the video by Doug to know more –

Video Transcription:

So, people ask me – whether I want to use desktop solutions, online solutions, or maybe a combination, like hosted desktop solutions. So, let me go through all that for you.

First of all, we have grown up in a world of desktop software. Windows software, MAC software- all lives on the computer in the hard drive, and the data is – all right there. And the thing about that is – it’s just been so responsive for all these 13 years or whatever that I have been using that. Good software, very mature, very good feature set, solves a lot of problems for lot of different business types, so we really like that.

But in the last ten years or so, we have really seen a move towards online accounting software. So, Intuit’s QBO, Xero, Sage products, and these online areas, and these are really, really compelling new solutions because it provides us with really the future of where it’s all going.

So, my question then always comes back to – each client has a different set of needs, what do they really need? What is their business process? What are their specific features in their software that they go to have in order to get the reporting and management solutions out of the software? So, for this, I always do an analysis on each client and make my decision.

But let’s say my decision is – okay! Well, I can’t find an online solution yet, that is the feature set I want- I need to use the desktop. For those folks, I say okay. But as soon as you start thinking deeply about the way your business works, at least what I want to do is get the software and data hosted in the cloud, which is the Windows hosted environment that I really want you to move to.

I moved to this ten years ago myself and what it allows me to do is I get the best of both worlds. I don’t have to retrain my staff on how to use the software because it’s the same software, but it’s in the cloud, where it’s safe. And if we have to have a discussion about whether it’s safer on the desktop or in the cloud just mind that my opinion has been, and developed over along period of time, it is way safer in the cloud because there are professional data centers protecting your data in the cloud than it is on your desktop.

So, the other benefit that we get all of a sudden-it’s in the cloud, so that means I can be at home, I can be at the office, or multiple people in my firm, or my client firm. So think about whether you want the desktop software, the online software, or if you are in the desktop world, of course, where I want you to go is to hosting.

What if you said -but I am online? Well, you know what – I still want you to get it hosted. The reason is- because it’s more than just the accounting software you use, it is your whole office- you data, all your documents, I want them secure as well. I want them to be able to be accessed from anytime, anywhere. So, the hosting solution is there for you whether you stick with your desktop or whether you are going to move to an online pure cloud solution.

Key Takeaways

Doug Sleeter gave his key insights on the best accounting solutions present today. According to him, we are all habitual of using the desktop accounting software. However, with the developments in technology, the leading companies are introducing online accounting solutions. However, it depends on clients and their requirements on what solution you choose.

If an accounting firm wants an online solution with the feature set of the desktop software, the best solution is to host the desktop software on the cloud. With this, you get all the features you need in a secure and flexible cloud environment.

He also thinks that the cloud-hosted accounting solution is better than the online solution because, in cloud hosting, the entire data, documents, and all other applications are stored on the cloud securely.

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