I was sitting in the office the other day and noticed that my colleague, Gillian, and myself were sitting working entirely on the internet. She was updating our accounting transactions on the rather brilliant Kashflow, and I was processing payroll on the unbelievably free Payroo.
Cloud Computing is the term being used for these types of applications, accessed entirely on web servers through a browser, and it is an exciting area that poses real threats to established software vendors.
Solutions tend to be cheaper (often free), easier to learn, better supported, easier to share (internally and externally) and with minimal setup and hardware costs - typically nil!
With complete office suites such as GoogleDocs gaining acceptance too. Next time you are looking for software for anything, check whether you can do it 'in the cloud' before you shell out the cash.
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7 comments:
Users of cloud computing need to be aware of the potential risk of losing data. No one has yet told me how you recover 2/3 years of bookkeeping if the company goes broke and the data just isn't there one morning. I have just tried to log onto Payroo and I'm getting a "Page Load Error" - hopefully just a temporary outage.
It is essential that backups are made - but those which provide backups tend not to do so in an easy to use format - and people forget.
Kashflow is good - we provide a link and a special offer on our site. Others are good too - but there are an awful lot of them, with more coming on line every week, and I wonder how many can actually survive.
Thanks for some very useful comments, John.
(By the way, Payroo seems to be OK now!)
These are far from insurmountable problems for a fledgling industry, and I am sure they will be overcome in a short space of time.
I still think the traditional software companies have much more fundamental issues to face up to.
It would be great if you had a roundup post of some cloud accounting services. I've got the one my accountant provided me with, but I would be interested in seeing some of the alternatives out there.
I tent to just stick to the offline versions, but the fact that I could access it anywhere using a cloud version does appeal.
Mark
I'll see if I can do that in a future post.
Hi I came across site
http://www.cloudaccountingservices.com
and was sponsored by existing well known software vendor
AccountExact.com so I believe what you are discussing is beginning to happen.
Cheers
Reply to Anonymous
It would appear that the link you have provided does not show a cloud accounting service as it says "Small Business can download our simple easy to use payroll software".
The essence of Cloud computing is that no-one downloads anything.
I want to join a cima courses. This information will be very usefull for me, thanks
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