As businesses all over the world continue to see benefits from remote work arrangements, many are still scrambling to add the necessary technology their teams need to keep the business running. Cloud accounting offers ways to boost your bottom line and pave the way for future growth—and now it’s critical to ensure you can pay bills, receive payments, and track cash flow, regardless of whether you and your team are in office or working remotely. More and more small businesses are opting to move to cloud accounting in order to support their business needs and allow for a more flexible work environment.
Why move to cloud accounting?
Below are five reasons why you should make it your New Years’ goal to move to cloud accounting.
#1: You’ll boost your bottom line.
First and foremost, cloud applications are scalable, meaning that you only pay for the resources that you need. If you’re a small business with only a handful of employees, why would you pay the same amount as a large enterprise with significant resource needs?
Moreover, think about the difference in how you pay for software: there’s typically a significant upfront installation cost, along with a list of constant updates and hidden maintenance costs. With cloud-based accounting software, there aren’t any upfront installation costs. Instead, you pay monthly via a subscription model. The more resources you need, the more you pay for the monthly subscription. You also don’t have to purchase and install updates, as updates occur automatically and incrementally, which keeps your data safe and secure. Not to mention that support for many desktop apps is actually being discontinued!
When considering the cost of small business cloud accounting software, add an analysis of what the app can do for your business’s bottom line. Utilizing a cloud accounting app, you have insights into your business finances at any time with a click of a button. As a business owner, when you have real-time insights into your business’s finances, it is simple to make business decisions in real time, too—like those that can help you to circumvent potential downturns, or that can propel your business forward by identifying opportunities.
You may also be interested in comparing the pricing of QuickBooks and Xero.
#2: You’ll have accessible, real-time insights into your business.
Think about the traditional desktop accounting software that you install on computers within your offices. You only have access to that software when you are on location, using that computer. That’s because all of your financial and accounting information is stored internally. Or, if your business accounting is stuck in Excel, or on paper, you only have access to your business’s finances when in the office. Inconveniences aside, this becomes a serious concern with natural disasters such as hurricanes and their potential to destroy physical copies of documents and hard drives.
Contrast that outdated technology with a cloud-based accounting app. Here, you have the ability to access your financial and accounting information from any digital device, regardless of your physical location. You now have the ability to access all the relevant financial information about your company from anywhere, at any time, because it resides in the cloud.
#3: You’ll be able to run a more efficient business.
The days of companies being divided into silos are coming to an end. In today’s digital economy, data is paramount to your company’s success, and that means that every division or unit of your business needs to be able to share and collaborate on projects. Effective collaboration is much more difficult when your accounting team is a separate silo of your business that’s only visible at the end of the quarter or during tax time.
Cloud-based accounting software offers a completely different way of doing business. Your financial and accounting software resides in the cloud, where you can give team members customized levels of access. Your accounting platform can also receive data from other platforms, such as your e-commerce site or sales CRM. Even small, inconvenient tasks become easier—for example, you can create workflows that enable secure and efficient approvals of invoices and bills while also creating an audit trail to track every dollar and every click.
#4: You’ll run a safer, more secure business.
If you’re installing your own software, it also means that you’re committing to hiring an IT team to make sure it runs properly 24/7. That can be expensive if you’re a small business with a limited staffing budget. By moving everything to the cloud, you’re able to run a leaner, more streamlined business. All of the maintenance, upkeep, and security is handled off-site by experienced staff members who stay on top of threats and bugs. Cloud accounting apps provide top-level security technologies and updates to ensure your data stays safe and secure. That means you can focus on running your business without any extra security hassles.
#5 Integration and automation are seamless.
While spreadsheets and simple accounting software solutions are great at sorting data and running formulas, they don’t allow for automation or integration. When you keep your books in Excel, you’re responsible for manually entering every data point. Aside from the sheer time involved in data entry, you’re also opening your books up to a lot of errors. It’s a well-known truism that as manual data entry processes increase, typos and mistakes creep in.
You likely have a variety of apps and platforms that enable business as usual. Few things are more frustrating than a disconnected tech stack that makes more work for your team than it helps them accomplish. Hence, most app developers create integrations that connect their various tools. While bookkeeping includes a lot of sensitive data that doesn’t need to be accessible to everyone in the company, there are certain pieces of information that need to come together—everything from payroll to inventory management to point-of-sale transactions.
Review our top cloud-based accounting apps.
When your books are in Excel, you’re missing out on the benefits of an integrated tech stack. Transitioning to a cloud platform allows you to integrate and automate while also protecting sensitive data. Cloud accounting platforms can automatically pull data from outside sources, such as your bank account and credit card statement, reducing the need for manual or double entry.
We challenge you to examine your small business accounting solutions and identify where your pain points are. If you feel that your accounting could benefit from an upgrade, send our team a message. Let’s make it your New Year goal to make the move to cloud accounting.