Distinguish Your Accounting Firm from the Competition through Cloud-Based Technology

Author: Joe Martin, Date: 2017-07-18

Pitching your accounting firm to clients doesn’t have to be boring. You can radically adjust your accounting firm’s image through new cloud-based technologies.

Let’s face it: it’s difficult to make an accounting firm exciting. At best you can usually hope for “stable and trustworthy.” But when differentiating yourself from the competition, you really want a “wow” factor. You just need to figure out how to introduce that into spreadsheets and depreciation schedules. And that’s where technology comes in. Few things get people as hyped today as “the cloud.” By using the cloud, you can position your accounting firm as modern, technologically advanced, and cost-effective.

The Future of Accounting Is On the Cloud

Actually, the future of everything is on the cloud — and it’s useless to fight it. Just a few years ago, cloud-based technology was regarded as a sort of quirky trend. Microsoft was running inscrutable advertising about moving your photos and documents “to the cloud,” and there was wave after wave of security-related concerns. But that’s not today. Today cloud-based technology is the de facto standard for enterprise-level work. The lowest estimates of companies using a cloud-based infrastructure hover around 55%. So why should the accounting industry lag behind?

An Industry Based on Legacy Solutions

There are very few industries that are as fixated on legacy solutions as the accounting industry. Similar industries include the legal profession and the medical profession. It’s simple math: anything that has to deal with numbers is usually best left to old and proven solutions. But it’s also something else: the accounting field (and the medical field, and the legal field) tends to deal with highly educated, intelligent professionals, who are not necessarily tech savvy.

And there’s nothing more stubborn than a very intelligent and very busy partner. Partners in accounting firms tend to be very resistant to changing their technology. Not only is it an investment of time and money, but it can disrupt their own work flow — and why fix it if it isn’t broken?

The Advantages of Cloud-Based Technology

But because accounting firms are historically hesitant to adopt new technologies, it opens the door for accounting firms to become competitive. Cloud-based technologies have some tremendous advantages, both for businesses in general and for accounting firms specifically:

• Employees can work from anywhere. Partners can easily work from home without disruption; employees can be outsourced from different states or different countries. As a work force is consistently going mobile, this becomes very important. Accounting firms will even be able to recruit better talent by offering work-from-home hours or flex-time.
• The cloud is intuitive and easy to use. Though partners may be hesitant to adopt new technology, the cloud is different — the cloud is an intuitive platform built primarily on web interfaces. Many of the software solutions being ported to the cloud are things that the employees and partners are already familiar with using, such as Office 365.
• Services can be automated and improved. Through the cloud, organizations are able to tap into tremendous amounts of resources and advanced technology. Firms will be able to automate much of their services, delivering better services at lower costs. They will also be able to offer more to their clients, in terms of advanced solutions such as web portals.
• Cloud solutions are far less costly. Rather than having to invest in on-premise servers and equipment, a company can pay for only the resources that they strictly need through their cloud solutions. This means that they can spend more money on other areas of their business, such as expansion or customer care.
• A cloud service provides better uptime. Because a cloud solution is generally managed through third-party services along with a 24/7 help desk, accounting firms don’t need to fear potentially going down or experiencing business disruption. Companies also don’t need to invest in in-house IT services when they have a cloud-based solution.
• Cloud solutions are better secured. Accounting firms deal with tremendous amounts of personally identifiable information and finance-related information. Though there were security concerns initially, the cloud is now very well secured — and that’s important in an era where ransomware and phishing attempts are running rampant. Many cloud solutions can automatically detect and mitigate these threats.

It isn’t just that cloud-based solutions are the future of accounting — it’s that it’s likely that your competition isn’t leveraging the cloud in an effective way… or potentially at all. A cloud-based solution is going to give your organization a huge number of benefits, both in terms of costs and services available. It’s also going to show that your organization is committed to advancement; that it isn’t afraid to change and to evolve.

It’s hard to transition to any new solution, but cloud-based solutions are much easier to transition to compared to other types of upgrade or radical infrastructure change. Today an accounting firm can get absolutely everything they need setup for them in a single, all-in-one infrastructure — improving upon productivity and reducing IT-related expenses. The only question is when you’re going to take your first step into the clouds.

Is your Vancouver accounting firm thinking about moving to the cloud? Contact Compunet InfoTech today to find out more about leveraging the cloud for your firm, either through info@compunet.ca or (604) 986-8170 !