Many accounting professionals have experienced the avalanche of paperwork triggered by a client. You know what we’re talking about: the wadded-up receipts, the coffee-stained records and the handwritten notes that require keen deciphering. While it’s not exactly life-threatening, the paper deluge is overwhelming—and honestly, has no place in firms anymore. A cloud-enabled accounting solution lets you move from the traditional on-premises configuration on your office computer or data center and into the cloud where it resides in an environment fully managed by experts.
You may wonder how you can leverage cloud technologies with your clients. We’re here to tell you that the answer is the Rightworks cloud. Our customers rely on us to bring their accounting-based desktop and legacy applications away from the paper avalanche and into the cloud.
Here are the top five benefits of cloud-enabling your QuickBooks Desktop with Rightworks.
Collaboration
Firms need to understand that how you interact with clients not only impacts your experience, but their experience as well. And while sorting through their paper-based documents might be the form of collaboration some clients are used to, it’s not the way modern firms work. Many clients expect service in real time, and that means kicking time-wasting technology to the curb.
With a cloud-enabled solution, a client gains the ability to log in and access their financial data from any device or location (with a secure internet connection, of course)—and so do you. With the Rightworks cloud, you can access all your business-critical applications anytime, anywhere.
Simplicity
Running the traditional—and local—instance of your accounting software is a lot of responsibility. Not only are you responsible for maintaining financial and personal information, but you’re also responsible for keeping it secure. Although it may not feel that way—well, until there’s a problem.
But when there is a problem, your entire business is at risk. IT burdens like network maintenance and application upgrades to security patches take a lot of time and energy to maintain. With a managed cloud environment, you get away from playing the role of IT consultant (or paying IT consultants) and back to helping your clients.
Security
Hackers are getting smarter and smarter. And week after week, it seems, another cyberattack hits the news. It can be easy—even tempting—to tune this out. Or maybe you think your information isn’t at risk or isn’t important enough to be the target of a security breach.
But firms are a target, so you have to be vigilant in blocking all (not just some) types of cyberthreats. Your clients trust you to secure their data—and protection is paramount when so much personal information is online. Customers cloud-enable QuickBooks Desktop with Rightworks because we make security our top priority.
Backups
Cloud solutions don’t just protect you from outside intruders or events. They also elevate security via backups, providing protection against something as catastrophic as a natural disaster like a hurricane or fire…or something as small as an employee spilling water on their laptop or inadvertently deleting data.
When you use cloud-based sites and services like Rightworks, it’s no longer a major problem when something major (or minor) happens. As I mentioned earlier, we prioritize security. And that means real-time data replication and nightly data backups. We have you covered.
Productivity
When you’re working in the cloud, your entire book of business is available to you—and to those you designate—in one cloud computing environment. This doesn’t just make it easier to run your business; it makes it far more scalable. Full access to client files anytime and anywhere means you can standardize your offerings. There’s no more worrying about supporting different QuickBooks versions or missing client information.
And when you’re not maintaining IT systems, running backups or chasing down client files, productivity is sure to rise. With this time freed up, you can be more strategic in your service offerings and take on an advisory role.
Moving to the cloud means you may have finally suffered your last paper avalanche.
For more information on hosting QuickBooks in the cloud, get started here.