5 Super Obvious Reasons to Embrace the Cloud

May 27, 2015 Hubdoc

The airwaves are abuzz with one revolutionary idea: The Cloud.

Accounting firms can now eliminate manual work, focus on clients, and save on wages; all thanks to modern technology. Yet, many accountants are still hesitant to make the move.

The shift from convention and onto the Cloud can seem scary, but the denial to embrace this transition is overshadowed by clients and their need for a modern accountant. Experiencing the benefits of the Cloud in services they use every day, like Netflix and Spotify, clients will soon be (and already are) demanding universal accessibility to their data and real-time updates of financial information. Firms stranded in the past will be caught off guard, as the Cloud soon becomes convention.

Progressive firms ready for this shift are the ones most likely to profit and thrive in the long term. There’s no denying that the Cloud offers a multitude of features/benefits that will streamline and enhance your firm.

Let’s dig in…


1) Eradicating the Avoidable

For the traditional accountant, a significant part of their work is spent performing avoidable tasks. They spend time (and money!) traveling to and from client offices, not just to meet, but also to manually update financial information and collect documents, like receipts and invoices. These administrative tasks are avoidable & expensive, and take accountants away from higher value work, like advising clients.

Leveraging the cloud to reduce administrative interactions helps you focus on what really matters, the clients.

With solutions like Xero or QuickBooks Online, you and your clients will have direct access to their account, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Additionally, their data and documents will be updated in real-time. You will no longer have to move papers around from person to person, but rather click a few buttons to retrieve, update, or upload transactions and documents.

As the industry evolves onto the Cloud, eradicating the avoidable will allow for increased widespread productivity and scalable growth for your practice.


2) Automation & Beneficial Backups

Data. Accountants and Bookkeepers run on data.

A decade ago, you had filing cabinets, from wall to wall, filled with receipts and invoices, and come tax season your office looked eerily similar to the insides of one of those filing cabinets. Then commenced an influx of long overdue computer software with an aim to eradicate this mecca of chaos, yet the need for physical backups and problematic paperwork remained.

As technology progressed, organizations like Hubdoc automated the process of getting receipts, bills and statements from clients and entering them in your accounting softwares. Imagine never asking a client for a document again, having hundreds of bills and statements only a keyword search away, and having source documents attached to each transaction within Xero or QuickBooks Online.  Technology like this will allow the accounting industry to abandon its cabinets and rely solely on online software that will keep multiple backups for you.

The Cloud has successfully done what accounting software aimed to do a decade ago; provide a means for accounting firms to go truly paperless.


3) Real time Accessibility

A few of the considerable setbacks resulting from traditional accounting practices are that the data is hardly up to date and local to one computer. The Internet is vast, and any device connected to it has access to the Cloud, thereby allowing any/all accountants in your firm to easily access records, and update fields.

The real-time benefits of the Cloud allow clients to access their accounts from anywhere and with any device, along with being able to make better business decisions via the up-to-date information.


4) Lower Costs

Accountants are geniuses when it comes to efficiently utilizing and managing finances, and when a profitable opportunity, like the Cloud, presents itself, they shouldn’t hesitate to jump on the bandwagon.

Data entry is a routine but necessary task for accounting firms, where data entry clerks typically receive on average $13/hour. To handle your client base, your finances are directed towards a few clerks who handle a few hundred clients each. Automating data entry would allow you to significantly reduce costs and support a much larger customer base.


5) Supplementary Services

Along with Cloud software comes a plethora of add-ons you never knew you needed. A feature, offered by Hubdoc, is regularly uploading receipts or invoices to Xero that then have the ability to automatically get matched to corresponding transactions.

Rather than utilizing generalized software, you can pick and choose supplementary add-ons to tailor the product and your service offering to a specific industry, like e-commerce. The inevitable spark of efficiency resulting from integrating a collection of useful tools will strengthen your practice and solidify its future.


Summary

Jettisoning out of the traditional way of doing things is not the easiest of tasks.

This change would be a reinvention of your firm as a whole.

But, once fully integrated with the cloud, you will have access to an endless array of features that will optimize your practice. In this era of progressive reform within virtually every industry, accountants need to evolve onto the Cloud.

Progress is a direct result of travelling to the edge of convention, then taking a leap.

This transition will allow Accountants and Bookkeepers to better serve clients and will lead towards future scalable growth.

We hope the vast amount of features of Cloud Accounting will benefit you and your firm. Subscribe to our blog to get notified of new content!

Until then,

Team Hubdoc!

 

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