UK accountants are turning to cloud technology in their droves. According to a recent Censuswide poll, the biggest motivating factors include the opportunity to cut internal overheads such as travel and data input costs, improve service and increase client satisfaction.
Rather than waiting for year end, cloud software empowers even the smallest microbusiness to exercise greater financial control and stay up-to-date with their accounts.
Firms need to download their data to a file and then send that to the accountant. This is not a responsive way to work. But with the cloud, the accountant can look at the financial information at any time of day and always get the very latest picture. Hence , adopting a single ledger model, accountants and their clients no longer have to transfer client data into desktop software systems, but will benefit from shared access to up-to-date finance data in the cloud.
Gartner says cloud computing will become the bulk of new IT Spend by 2016 and IDC predicts that over the 2013–2017 forecast period, public IT cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5%, five times that of the IT industry as a whole.
Clearly, the cloud is destined to have a profound impact on all business functions and although cloud adoption in the finance function initially lagged behind other functions, such as humans resources, sales and marketing, it is now clearly catching up.
Cloud Computing is a trend that is clearly seen in accounting professionals amongst others. The cost-efficiency and the avoidance of at-home servicing of IT facilities is the driving factor. Cloud computing has many benefits for accounting firms, such as the ability to link offices around the world, making it easier to access and transfer information securely among them and their clients. Instead of rolling out updates on hundreds of desktops, they can be uploaded just once onto the system hosted in a cloud and be available to users across all member firms.
About the Author
Sachin Lohade is a Chartered Accountant and works with Accounting Firms to improve practice and reduce costs. He can be reached out at sachin@corientbs.com or you can visit www.corientbs.co.uk for further information.
