Should You Take Your Practice To The Cloud? You’re Still Asking?

Anytime, Anywhere

I’ve seen a lot of articles lately (and written a few myself) directed towards accounting professionals “taking your practice online” or “taking your practice to the cloud”.  At this point, when a professional asks me the question “should I take my practice to the cloud”, my response generally comes in the form of two return questions:

The first is “what leads you to believe you have a choice?”  The second is “what makes you think you haven’t already?”

You may question the glib response, but there are a few realities about doing business today that can’t (or shouldn’t) be ignored.  Professionals can recognize these realities and work with them, or fight the changing tide and lose out to more relevant providers.

To address the question of choice, let’s consider the fact that many of today’s entrepreneurs and small business owners have been exposed to Internet services and online technologies for quite a long time, and use of these services has become an ingrained element in daily life.  Not using online technologies seems “old school” to these folks, and is often perceived to be due to some deficiency in the ability to understand or use new tools.  If professional service providers aren’t able to leverage these tools to provide the access, collaboration, and higher level of service which business owners demand, they won’t work with those business owners for very long.

In addressing the “what makes you think you aren’t already?” question, let’s consider the fact that almost all of the accounting software offered today has incorporated cloud-service or Internet-based functionality in some manner.  Even the tried and true desktop editions of QuickBooks financial software  have quite a lot of web service functionality designed in to the product.  Where credit card processing was once an offline (or telephonic) process, it’s now an instantaneous service delivered via the net.  Payroll?  Tax tables aren’t just downloaded to the software where you perform the processing and calculations.  Payroll is a service, delivered via Internet connectivity to Intuit’s payroll service bureaus (or ADP, Paychex, etc.).  Even banking is less traveling to the establishment and more Internet access and data exchange.   We don’t think twice about downloading transactions from the bank computers instead of working from the paper bank statement. Internet/web/cloud service and functionality has become a pervasive element to almost every aspect of software and computerized business support systems, and it’s a pretty good bet that your firm is already using it.

So, let’s not spend our time asking a silly question about whether or not it makes sense to “take the practice to the cloud”.  The obvious answer is “yes”, and the time is now.

Make sense?

J

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