The Cloud is Coming
Source: CPA Trendlines
The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article in CPA Trendlines.
Say goodbye to your servers and file cabinets.
Kimberly Hogan, business development manager for ScanSnap sales at Fujitsu, and Taylor MacDonald, vice president of channels at Intacct Corp., make a compelling – and maybe a little controversial – case for cloud computing at accountingtoday.com.
- Increased Collaboration and Sharing. Clients communicate and collaborate more often and more closely with their own business partners because all work is done online.
- IT Infrastructure Goes Away. A cloud-based document management system reduces energy costs, avoids technology obsolescence and reduces the support burden on the IT staff.
- Accessibility of Documents. It can be the middle of the night in the northernmost region of Canada, and you could still access any document as long as you have an Internet connection.
- Scan, Capture and Populate. SaaS takes the scanning process to an all new level. Information loads into fields within accounting and tax systems to enable smoother workflow processes.
- Improved Compliance. SaaS means fewer people will handle specific information because it lives in the cloud, not on a desktop. Information is more readily available, for example, to accounting regulators and the IRS because it can be shared online.
- Happier Clients. Because fewer errors will be made in managing the data, the risk to clients decreases while the quality of work increases. This leads to more satisfied clients.
- KISS: Keep it Simple (and) Simple. We feel CPAs and accountants may not “get” document management in the cloud until they experience it for themselves.
Trade shows, demos and webinars may be good ways to see SaaS at work. But Hogan and MacDonald argue it needs to begin with “a commitment to want to change.”
For the complete article, read “Cloud Computing: 8 Reasons Why Resistance is Futile.”
From CPA Trendlines, http://cpatrendlines.com, February 1, 2011.