Mostly about saving money and time. The pros of Cloud Commerce far outweigh the cons. Imagine being able to check your financial information while shopping or even fishing.
The ‘Cloud’ is a term for describing software delivery and data housing over the internet. Until recent years most business owners have used software and kept data on their computer hard disk. Software updates had to be downloaded and data had to be backed up and a copy kept offsite for security purposes. Data had to be transferred between bookkeepers, businesses and accountants. So how can Cloud technology impact your business? Quite simply, it's a good way to reduce costs, and speed up access to your information. Traditionally, bookkeeping has been a very paper intensive practice but with Cloud and Smartphone technology, bookkeeping can now be managed far more efficiently and with far less reliance on paper. Probably the biggest benefit of Cloud Commerce is the ability of business owners and advisors to work on live data anywhere, anytime. Staff can work from home at midnight if it suits them; advisers can fix up issues that business raise without having to travel to get the ‘true’ data and reduce the risks associated with loss of access to files and apps. Most of us have been banking in the Cloud for many years now and Cloud Commerce is the next step. This even means accessing your accounting data via your smart phone such as iPhone or Blackberry.
- Once... the bookkeeper had to enter all transactions and had to perform bank reconciliations, check each bank transaction from bank statements against the accounting system and tick them off.
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Now... pretty much all of the Cloud Accounting systems have bank feeds which means they are linked to the bank account and entries are automatically fed into the system. The system recognises the amount of the bank transaction and matches up with its own transactions.