While productivity and business operations had been temporarily halted by the pandemic, innovation waited for no one, and pretty soon innovative practices were utilized to once again jumpstart business and production operations. Before the pandemic, there had been a variety of corporate accounting practices existing in the backdrop of the accounting world that only a few smart and well-to-do firms had taken advantage of.
These were cloud accounting softwares and accounting services and businesses with knowledge of these practices had utilized them to gain a competitive edge. Now, with the pandemic, the popularity of these practices of utilizing cloud accounting softwares and accounting services has exploded into the mainstream business world due to the myriad of advantages they have over the traditional in-house accounting departments, particularly the advantage of limiting face to face interactions. These advantages of cloud accounting software and accounting services will be briefly explained today to better explain the reason for the switch and their prevalence during the pandemic.
The Advantages of Cloud Accounting Software
· Allows remote access: the most important advantage of cloud accounting software is likely its ability to provide remote access from anywhere around the world. These remote access capabilities are absolutely vital in our pandemic ravaged world as it allows easy compliance to health regulations and minimizes the risks faced by employees- as accountants no longer need to be cooped up in one small office. Aside from that, remote access also allows convenient access from anywhere around the world, meaning improving efficiency of work, error checking capabilities and gaining the ability to potentially work from from anywhere, even while travelling.
· Security: The cloud is an extremely secure place. Security in the cloud has been developed by Google and Microsoft to extreme levels for its use in financial, military, and public sectors. This means that, as the cloud stores data of multiple huge corporations and the military, the cloud has access to the most cutting edge encryption keeping your accounting data extremely secure. Furthermore, there are multiple backups and remote storage, so there is no risk of having physical storage that can break down or be tampered with.
· Real time operation: cloud accounting software allows real time accounting operation. This makes collaboration between multiple people- potentially from anywhere around the world- significantly easier. Furthermore the more convenient access translates to a greater ability to proofread data which will increase the rate of error detection or make it easier to detect potential fraud.
· Scalability: with traditional in-house accounting departments, it’s a bit complicated to scale your business as you require more hardware, employees and you need to manually remodel or integrate the extra business features. With cloud accounting software, scaling your business is significantly easier as you can easily integrate the new features by simply remodelling the software making your accounting capabilities extremely scalable.
· Cost effective: utilizing cloud accounting software grants many reduced costs. Firstly, the need to keep or maintain extra hardware or a personal IT staff is removed creating savings in that front. Secondly, all the extra efficiency reduces the need for extra personnel and creates savings in terms of reduced administrative costs as excess resources of your accounting department can then be diverted elsewhere.
Advantages of Utilizing Accounting Services
· Cost and time savings: for traditional in-house accounting departments, there are a variety of hardware costs, maintenance costs, then costs of keeping accountants on your payroll and finally administrative costs of training and maintaining an accounting department. By using accounting services you can basically replace all these expenses with only a small payment to the accounting firm. You will save massively on operational costs and will no longer have to utilize your time or resources in the administrative costs of training employees or maintaining an accounting department freeing up those resources for use in different ventures.
· Greater efficiency: accounting services cater to a variety of businesses and have to work in an extremely competitive environment. Therefore, they have to keep their business as efficient as possible, remaining informed of the newest accounting trends, employing the most expert specialist accountants they can and utilizing the best accounting software. These accounting services are therefore extremely competent and can efficiently deal with any and all of your accounting needs.
· Security and fraud protection: accounting services utilize the best accounting software and the best security they possibly can. They cater to a variety of businesses so they have to make sure that the data of their clients is never compromised or lost. Furthermore, due to their position of holding sensitive data of multiple companies, accounting services have a reduced risk of fraud as they better self regulate themselves and are led by consummate professionals.
· Extra convenience: with using accounting services you can rest easy that your accounting data is being processed by the most professional accountants of the field. Furthermore, any scalability requirements can be easily met as you simply need to send the required instructions to the accounting service. All this allows you peace of mind so that you can focus your attention onto different parts of your business.
