Improve Your Business with Cloud Based Accounting Tools

What do a pastry chef, a construction project manager and a creative design director have in common? They are all small business which was established by entrepreneurs who are passionate about rendering those services rather than spending hours sorting out accounting or bookkeeping.
Fortunately, the small-business owners today can take advantage of a rapidly developing suite of organizational tools and technologies to avoid issues related to managing invoices, bills, and receipts while increasing the time spent building their businesses. These tools are readily available as cloud-based offerings, and many small businesses should consider migrating their current accounting workflows to the cloud.

But what exactly is the cloud? Cloud-based software, or Software as a Service), offers users access to technology on a subscription. The software provider securely hosts the relevant databases and servers, and the small business owners can access their data at any time, from any location via the internet.

One issue small business owners worry about is their ability to use the same functions from the cloud-based accounting programs that they have been using with the traditional desktop versions. While the cloud-based versions of these tools have features similar to the QuickBooks, they have slightly different functionalities compared to the desktop version, the features absent in the current versions of the cloud tools are sufficed by versatility and long-term viability.

It is likely that software providers will continue phasing out desktop solutions and limiting or discontinuing support. This means customers that migrate their accounting workflows to the cloud will not encounter issues with products that are no longer supported. In addition, small businesses that upgrade accounting workflows to the cloud can also benefit from other features attainable with the SaaS models. Some of these benefits include:

1. Enabling smart organizations for a distributed workforce.

Storing the accounting information in the cloud makes it easy for team members to access their data from any location. For example, is a sale rep needs to add expense receipts, or a project manager needs to check an invoice for a supplier, the use of cloud-based tools can make the process of organizing and accessing important information as easy as photographing a document or searching by vendor, amount or date.

2. Relationship management and efficient resolution of discrepancies.

The success of small businesses also relies on the ability of the owner to develop good relationships with the vendors and distributors. When issues regarding payments arise, the business owner can depend on the cloud-based tools to quickly search for the invoices. The use of advanced tools enables team members to perform virtual searches for bills and to identify the payment was omitted, in which case, the bill will be quickly paid to maintain the good relationship with the vendor.

3. The use of a more advanced suite of secure apps.

Cloud applications such as QuickBooks Online and Neat can be used to gain access to information and documents from any device; they can also be integrated with other cloud-based tools. When a small business adopts a cloud-based accounting technology, it becomes easy to extract and leverage data across many other platforms thus preventing time wasted during manual entry.

Small business owners are mostly entrepreneurs who have established their businesses because they are passionate about their products or services. They rarely consider or have the time to manage paperwork. Changing the traditional accounting workflow to the cloud-based solutions will help small business owners to reduce the time spent in maintaining information, giving them more time to focus on improving operational efficiency.