4 Age-Old Business Problems Solved By Cloud Accounting

Driving business efficiencies is the key to increasing your company’s profitability - helping you to engineer a well-oiled machine that makes light work of essential business processes.

Accounting is undoubtedly an essential business process but, without a lean system in place, this can become an intensive and time-consuming endeavour that feels less like a streamlined system and more like a dreaded chore.

With the advent of cloud accounting, business owners can carve out precious time for the all-important running of their company and wage war on wasted resources.

In this post, we’re putting cloud accounting under the microscope and uncovering its many benefits for the modern business owner.

What is cloud accounting and how does it work?

Cloud accounting is the process of storing and managing your business’s books online. These financial records include everything from your top-level income and expenses to your liabilities, assets and more.

With a personal login you can use to access your digital books, you can view your business’s financial data at any time as well as accessing tools that help you to invoice customers, quote on new work, manage your bills and much more.

By investing in a cloud accounting software solution, such as Xero, you can migrate your business’s financial records to the cloud and even connect the software to your business bank account for seamless data transfer between the two. From here, you can log into your cloud accounting software from your work device, at home or on the go.

Business problems solved by cloud accounting

Embracing change in business can be a tough pill to swallow as the prospect of overhauling a central business process initially feels fraught with risk. There’s no denying there’s an upfront time investment involved with making the move to cloud accounting, but the problem-solving cloud accounting software is capable of more than justifies any initial expense - time or otherwise.

Here are just some of the many business challenges solved by embracing cloud accounting:

• Time-consuming legacy processes: it’s no secret - automation drives efficiencies. Whether your business is currently making use of traditional offline accounting software or the dreaded physical bookkeeping systems, making the move to cloud accounting will eliminate much of the manual effort required to keep your books in order. Forget painstakingly transcribing financial records - let your cloud accounting software pull data directly from your bank account to your online books
• Paper overload: old-school pen-and-paper bookkeeping systems create piles and piles of paper. This paper of course serves as a vital record of your business’s incomings and outgoings and is nonetheless all too easy to misplace or inadvertently dispose of - such is the nature of physical record keeping. In scenarios where your paper records are lost, unless you have some form of digital backup, this can make accurate financial reporting impossible
• Accessibility issues: naturally, physical accounting can only be done in one place - wherever your records are kept. Equally, traditional accounting software can only be accessed through the relevant device, meaning you have no way of reviewing or updating your books via other devices or in other locations. Cloud accounting software can be accessed through any of your devices using your dedicated login - creating new opportunities for high-level data review and real-time updates on the go

• Collaboration barriers: as part of the lack of accessibility that comes with non-cloud accounting, you’re also limited when it comes to enabling collaborative updates by other relevant parties. Whether you’re looking to grant temporary online access to an external advisor or give key team members the access they need to view important financial data, cloud accounting facilitates this collaboration

Make the move to cloud accounting software today

The UK government’s Making Tax Digital initiative means small businesses across Britain are now joining the cloud accounting revolution and digitising their books.

Now’s the time to embrace the change so you can get ahead of the curve and enjoy peace of mind that your business is fully compliant with MTD before this initiative becomes law.

Contact the team at Harlands Accountants now to find out more about the advantages of relying on the cloud for your company accounts and take your first step towards best-practice 21st-century bookkeeping.