Cloud Vs. Traditional Accounting
You’re the businesses owner but you are also the marketer, the sales person, the admin person and the rest! You are looking to save time, money, and hassle, one area you can do this is accounting! Xero – a cloud based accounting system that will change the way you feel about your accountants forever!
How? It’s simple. The benefits of cloud accounting beat out the traditional form of business accounting in many ways. See below;
Problems with traditional accounting software
- Updates can take time and money!
The data in the system isn’t up to date and neither is the software. It’s expensive, difficult and time consuming to upgrade the software.
- It’s not user friendly
It only works on one computer and data bounces from place to place. For example, on a USB drive. This is not secure or reliable.
- User access is limited
Only one person has user access. Key people can’t access financial and customer details. With traditional accounting software, access to your business’s detailed financial information is limited to when your accounting professional is available, or when you can get to the office to review the paper-based records or even the desktop computer holding the information.
- Back up of data not included
It’s costly and complicated to keep backups (if done at all).
- Customer support is expensive and slow
Benefits of Cloud Accounting
- Cloud Accounting Costs Less
You avoid lump sum purchases of programmes for your accounts and as accounting rules and tax regulations change, you won’t have to purchase and install updates. Instead, your monthly subscription cost includes the updating cost, and these are completed by your provider as needed.
- Real-Time Information Updating
One of the common problems with traditional accounting systems involves updating accounting information. When one figure needed to be changed, it meant manually recording the change in each location where the figure appeared, including forms, ledgers, and other documents. With cloud accounting, when new data is entered, it populates each location where it’s required. This saves time, money, and potential headaches that could arise if any locations are missed.
- 24/7 Accessibility to All Accounting Info
One of the big benefits of cloud computing is accessibility. As long as you have internet access, your accounting records are as close as your mobile device. It’s at your fingertips in a matter of minutes.
- Team-Wide Availability
Cloud accounting benefits the entire business team as the data is available to all authorized users at all times. There’s no more need to gather in one office and take turns to reviewing important documents.
- Immediate Fixes
Remember when computer accounting packages first hit the market? While they may have been an improvement over the previous paper-based systems, if there were any problems with the program, users were required to wait patiently for the next version for the bugs to be fixed. Among the benefits of cloud accounting, fixing software issues immediately is among the most important.
- Automatic Data Back Up and Restoration
Cloud accounting allows automatic data backup, removing the possibility of forgetting to do it, and reducing the opportunity to make human errors. It is backed up automatically and saved to an offsite location, this helps secure your information in the event of a break-in, fire, or other incident that could put sensitive and important information at risk. If anything should happen your cloud-based service provider can help you restore your data, getting your business back up and running quickly to minimize the impact and inconvenience to your customers.
Did we mention automation? Cloud accounting systems like Xero can massively reduce the time you spend on your business bookkeeping and finances by automating tasks such as your bank reconciliation, debt collection, credit control, issuing repeat invoices automatically to customers, filing returns with HMRC…………..
Automation is further improved by using linked cloud systems and add-ons. For example, by working with Xero in conjunction with Directli and GoCardless, you can automate the issuing of an invoice to your customer, the payment of the invoice from your customer to your bank account and the matching of the payment in Xero against the customer invoice – once you’ve done the initial setup, that’s it! Invoices issued automatically, money collected automatically, payment and invoice reconciled automatically!
If you’re serious about simplifying the financial aspects of your business, and saving time and money in the process, consider the benefits of cloud accounting.
Find Out More About Cloud Accounting Here