Business growth

Firstly business growth stories tell you:

  • Your profitability
  • What things cost
  • Information on Controlling & managing cash
  • Planning
  • Returns and Information for the Tax authorities, sending in VAT and Tax returns


Telling your business story mainly comes from your financial and business transactions.  This includes what you’re spending, where money’s coming from, money coming in and out of the bank.

Cloud Accounting has revolutionised the way that businesses record their financial transactions.  It efficiently and effectively captures, store and records our business words.

What is Cloud accounting?

Most of you already use and connect with the online world. This can be through things like online shopping, social media and e-mail.  Online accounting gives you the best of the human and technology world.  The technology captures and records the numbers more efficiently. The human and technology allow you to more easily extract the useful numbers.  The human tells you what those numbers mean and what to do.

Cloud accounting benefits

Cloud systems make record-keeping more efficient as processes can be automated and streamlined. They represent a big step towards paperless working. Other benefits include the ability to track the costs and income of individual projects. As a result it will be easier when reporting against budgets and more effective credit control, cashflow forecasting, and increased collaboration and access to information across the business.

Costs

Certainly there will typically be one-off investments when moving to a cloud accounting platform. These include preparing the data for transfer, setting up the new systems and staff training. However maintenance, version upgrades, system administration costs and any server failures are managed by the service provider.  Hence there’s no need for any major up-front investment in hardware and software.

Security

Xero provides high-level encrypted data security and you don’t pay extra for online back-ups because that’ part of the subscription cost.  Consequently you get practically unlimited file storage, therefore all your business documents comprehensive documents can be uploaded and stored online.

They can also be attached to the specific transaction, which significantly reduces the time looking for and querying transactions.

Data capture

You can make productivity and efficiency gains by automating processes for recording financial transactions. You can set up automated bank feeds that send bank data into the cloud accounting system. As a result you can establish bank rules to suggest coding for these transactions. Most noteworthy cloud software can remember how you previously coded a transaction and automatically suggests where it should go. Certainly reconciling transactions is so much faster, with the combination of bank feeds, bank rules and system prompts.

Mobile phones can be used to scan in receipts. Hence the data from the receipt is extracted and pushed into the accounting platform. This includes making a copy of the receipt. As a result this significantly reduces data entry and removes the need to keep the original receipt.

Cloud accounting can integrate with other business systems such as ticketing and box office. Open application programming interfaces (APIs) exist that are easy for developers to connect with. Consequently this means other solutions can be adapted to talk to the accounting systems, enabling data to flow between the two solutions.

Access can be given to multiple users and you can tailor permissions so that people with specific job roles only see what they need to see.

Smartphone and tablet apps give you information on the move wherever you are. So software housed in the cloud can be accessed wherever there is a connection, anytime and from pretty much any device.

Benefits of using Cloud

We have seen the benefits of Cloud accounting in practice. Above all for organisations who may not have the resources and budget of a team of dedicated accounting staff. Also robust financial management and reporting becomes easier. Hence more efficient and powerful.

Who Cloud accounting is for

We have set up Cloud Accounting for many clients. These range from business services, property, arts & manufacturing; sole traders. The power and capability of Cloud Accounting can be harnessed for any business.  Certainly our business can be at the acorn stage, or on its way to be an oak tree business.

Make the move

To make the move, you will need to define your expected requirements from the system. These could be; tracking categories, reports needed, business systems and  it will integrate with the available apps. You will need to be involved in evaluating the software solutions available and also making the final choice. Subject to organisational size, an implementation team can then steer the project.

Thanks for reading this blog and we hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Please read our Free Guide Release The Power of You: Take Charge Of The Cloud.  We explore Cloud Accounting in more detail.

We look at Xero, the leading market product and even take you through the steps of migration and onboarding.

Contact us to see if we can help you develop, implement & use Cloud accounting for your business. For more business and finance , news, advice and tips, don’t forget to watch our weekly broadcasts, listen to our weekly podcast I Hate Numbers.