7 Ways To Streamline And Improve Tax Workflow With Cloud Hosting

The tax business is one of the busiest in the global market. Especially during the tax season, when the tax preparers have a lot on their plate, it is imperative to optimize the tax process with the help of best practices, technology, tools, and services.

Cloud hosting is one such service that provides you with the latest technology, tools, and platform to streamline the workflow. There are various competent cloud service providers that offer tax software hosting.

Here’s a video discussing the 7 ways in which cloud hosting can help you streamline the tax workflow.

Let’s discuss in detail.

1. Virtual Workspace

One of the most common challenges that tax preparers face is the organization of their work. All the tax documents need to be assembled and kept in one place to avoid any misplacement. Moreover, the paper-based manual tax process leads to a discrepancy in data, causing mistakes to happen.

Cloud technology creates a virtual workspace for you where all the documents can be organized in a centralized location. The forms can be filled out online, reducing the usage of paper. Moreover, the cloud hosting providers offer the integration of useful third-party applications with the tax software on the same cloud environment. This results in a streamlined tax workflow, reducing the efforts of tax professionals.

2. Multi-user Collaboration

The tax process requires constant documents and information from clients. Moreover, other accountants and team members must also be consulted at times to get the tax filing right. The general mode of doing the same is through emails, which means continuous back and forth email communication.

Cloud technology prevents the long email threads by offering your tax team as well as clients a unified platform. Any number of stakeholders can be given authorized access to the cloud, enabling them to upload or download files. Moreover, multiple users can access and edit the same tax forms simultaneously. Hence, cloud hosting minimizes the chances of committing errors by eliminating the multi-versioning of files.

3. Remote Accessibility

The tax preparers always look for ways to introduce mobility in their tax process. You, as a tax preparer, want to file taxes at your convenience and not be bound to a desk all day. However, this is not possible in the case of an on-premise IT infrastructure.

By utilizing the capabilities of cloud technology, tax preparers get the ability to access the tax software from anywhere at any time. You can work on tax software and access data on internet-enabled devices like smartphones, laptops, and tablets. This helps you attend the unavoidable events, even during the busy tax season, as you can file taxes from any location.

4. Scalability

The local systems are rigid as they come with a defined configuration, be it RAM, storage, or processing power. In times of heavy workload during the tax season, you need to serve various clients, which calls for the requirement of more system resources. Hence, you need to upgrade the hardware by manual replacement.

However, with cloud technology, the hardware can be scaled without replacement. The cloud service providers can scale up your tax process as per the business requirements. You get charged only for the resources you use. Moreover, if you want to downgrade the system resources after the tax season, you can do that too, saving costs.

5. Tax data Security

The security of tax data is paramount to the tax industry. The tax professionals deal with some of the most confidential client data, be it their personal details or financial records. Any vulnerability to the security of the data can lead to breaches and ransomware attacks.

The cloud hosting providers deploy a highly secure cloud environment in state-of-the-art data centers. With safeguards like multi-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption, access control policy, Intrusion Detection and Prevention, and DDoS protection, the cloud providers ensure data security at all levels- physical, admin, and network.

6. Backup and Recovery

Any loss of tax data can cause professionals to lose business. Since the tax data is highly critical for the functioning of any tax professional, every effort should be made to keep it protected. Taking the backup of data is an essential process to ensure the same. However, deploying a backup server at the local premises leads to incurring additional expenses. Moreover, being on the same location, it is not safe from external accidents like fire or cyberattacks.

The cloud hosting providers offer the tax preparers with automatic backup solutions where the data is stored in backup servers daily at a specific time, without any human intervention. Moreover, the data backup is stored in redundant data centers to ensure its recovery, even if an entire data center is inaccessible.

7. Reduced Maintenance

As a tax professional, you must have realized the time wasted due to the issues caused by the local systems. It causes the loss of valuable hours, especially during the tax season. Moreover, the dedicated IT team deployed to take care of these issues costs a big chunk of your operational budget.

By opting for tax software cloud hosting, you can transfer the tasks of hardware maintenance to the service provider. As the provider has the ownership of the hardware on which your tax process is hosted, they are responsible for its maintenance, upgrade, and setup. Hence, you can spend the time and revenue saved on improving your tax workflow.

Wrapping Up

Cloud hosting not only helps in organizing the tax documents better but also save capital and operational expenses. Moreover, tax preparers can stop being concerned about the security of their data while sharing files with their clients. Cloud hosting will help you give more time to clients this tax season by reducing your efforts and time spent on menial hardware-related tasks.

Have more questions about tax software cloud hosting? Call our Solutions Consultant at 855-223-4887.