This is a topic that a lot of people ask about, and the main question that needs answering is: “Why move to cloud accounting?”
There are a couple of very clear reasons why, such as the fact that you can do it from anywhere and access the information you require from wherever you are, in other words, work can be done, whether you are in the office or not. This means you don’t lose valuable time when people are not in the office.
There is also the advantage of continuity, which means that you don’t necessarily have to back up data and you don’t lose data when something happens at the office, such as a break-in or a fire.
For example, when Covid-lockdown was implemented, a lot of companies were unable to gain access to valuable information, to get things done, such as getting Covid relief. All while we didn’t know this was an actual problem, as all of our data was already on the cloud and accessible to everyone who needed it.
What we try to do, is change from the old ways of doing accounting. This entailed youdoing your thing as the business owner and then at the end of the month you provide
the accountant with a file or a box, or a USB drive, or even a dropbox folder, for them to do their part.
There are a couple of problems with this. The whole process only starts at the end of the month, then the accountant takes about two weeks to do it, and afterward comes to you with a whole lot of questions on what happened to some of the transactions. You probably won’t be able to tell the accountant exactly what happened, because the transaction happened a couple of weeks ago.
The outcome is you putting your business and job aside to investigate these transactions. You then either give them a wrong answer or you don’t give them an answer at all and they start taking guesses. This results in you getting the management report and having unnecessary discussions with them on why you don’t agree with some of the numbers or transactions.
The problem here is that when you eventually get your final report, weeks after the end of the month, you won’t be able to use the information, because it’s too late. And if you identify a problem, you probably continued to make the same mistakes and have to sit
with the loss for another couple of weeks.
The solution here is cloud accounting. Where instead of the business and the accounting being 2 separate things, we try and make them one. This means that you’re able to work on the system at the same time as us. It means that instead of us telling the system what you did, it rather tells you what to do.
The outcome is you doing your part on the system and us following suit while doing accounting. This means that if a problem needs to be identified, it can be identified quickly and rectified so that the problem does become a bigger problem.