Business owners have enough challenges to face without working against inadequate business software solutions. Their accounting platform needs to be as agile and versatile as possible so as to meet the dynamic needs of modern business. As such, many businesses are moving away from the inherent limitations of locally hosted accounting software toward cloud accounting solutions, which provide considerably more flexibility and allows accounting processes to be performed and addressed from anywhere as soon as the need arises.
What is the cloud, anyway?
The “cloud” is essentially a catchall term for the Internet. Cloud-based software is software that is hosted somewhere offsite on the software provider’s server and is accessed by through your internet connection. The cloud differs from locally hosted software by affording users ready access from anywhere, making it considerably more versatile for people who perform business processes from outside the office.
What are the benefits of moving to cloud-based accounting?
There are many problems associated with traditional off-the-shelf-and-onto-your-hard-drive software. The following are some of the challenges inherent to locally hosted accounting software:
- one must be onsite to access software and data hosted on a closed local area network.
- typically, most locally hosted accounting software is only accessible to one or a very select few users. This results in an increased workload for the primary users of the software, as others do not have the access to input data they otherwise could handle themselves.
- because one has to be onsite and go through the primary user, the flow of accounting processes slow considerably due to unnecessary gatekeeping side effects of limited data and personnel access, ultimately created needless cost on lost working hours.
- users often do not keep software up to date on their own, and the closed-system nature of locally hosted accounting software creates opportunity for financial data to fall out of date if it isn’t manually updated by the few people with access.
Alternatively, cloud-based accounting processes inherently address many of these problems, opening up and making more transparent the financial processes your business needs to maintain:
- one can access cloud-based software from anyplace with Internet access, meaning accounting processes can be addressed anytime.
- as many people as you need are able to access the shared accounting database, which removes roadblocks of certain personnel having to go through others to input data. This ultimately spreads the workload around and streamlines everybody’s job functions.
- because anybody can access the data from anywhere and you don’t have to restrict the number of users to maintain data integrity, there are no unnecessary bottlenecks slowing down your accounting process, lowering your overhead as related to your accounting processes.
- your software will never be out-of-date because the company responsible for hosting and maintaining it will handle updates as they occur. Additionally, because all data is accessible in real-time, all users will always work from the most up-to-date information available.
Contact us at e2b to learn more about Sage Intacct. There’s a Reason Sage Intacct is the AICPA’s Preferred Provider of Financial Applications.
