accounting
- Which is better for you, what is the best for your company and what are the differences?
cloud accounting Whether you do your own bookkeeping and accounts, you have a member of your team carry these out or you outsource to an external company, the system used for the recording of your accounts, the interaction with your systems and the reports that they produce can fundamentally alter your business. Cloud accounting is where your data and the software system is hosted and worked on inside of the cloud. The most recognisable example of this is Xero, a system that arrived in the UK in around 2010 and now has over 20+ million subscribers across the world. Desktop accounting, where the software is downloaded on to your company’s computers and from here it is worked on, was the way all accounts systems worked from the 1990’s to 2010, the most popular being from Sage. As with most software systems that are cloud based, you access the systems via a web browser, login to the system and to your files. The files are held within the cloud and are backed up instantaneously. You are generally able to export your company’s data from these systems but they do not,
yet, support back up’s on to your desktop. This is in stark contrast with desktop hosted systems where because all of the data is stored in your machine it can and should be backed up on it.
The negatives of having your data in the cloud system; - You are unable to carry out a back up to which you can restore to. You could carry out a trial balance, debtor and creditor schedule and then manually restore if necessary afterwards but this is not the same as carry out a normal back up and restore. - If you wish to leave a particular software company your data only remains on their system for a set period once you’ve closed your account. - Trialling some processes in your business will be significantly more difficult as your data in the cloud is always live.
