No matter how successful, fast growing or fabulous a small business is, few owners would complain of having too much spare time. Finding those extra minutes, or if they are lucky, hours to work on the business other than day to day operations – those rare moments, are also the most crucial for a business’s long term success. Sometimes family time loses out in the clash between a busy business and the owner’s lives.
Many small and medium-sized businesses are husband and wife teams, operating with staff or alone. Often it is the wife who prepares accounts and looks after a lot of the bookkeeping. To these women, accounting in the cloud offers the greatest potential to free up some well earned ‘me time’.
Cloud accounting is well past the ‘new’ stage with many mature products and services now available – and they are all competing for the attention of Australian small and medium businesses. Hundreds of businesses that made the switch to the cloud were surveyed about their experience and they reported on average a saving of 10 bookkeeping hours per month.
To the person doing the bookkeeping, that extra day or so every month can be used for greater productivity or more family time. To the person paying for the bookkeeping it’s win-win as they have access to up-to-the minute dashboards of their business and can reassign staff to more productive tasks. Even when they are out of the business, they can view an up to the minute snapshot of their position from a caf , lounge or hammock.
“It’s fine to live for your business, but that doesn’t mean committing your life to the boring repetitive bookkeeping that goes with it. The cloud is a game changer in this respect,” says RSM Bird Cameron Accountants Director of Business Solutions, Andrew Sykes.
To software engineers, these are beautiful algorithms that automate accounting. To SME owners, it’s a working time machine.
“Clients are telling us of the time savings and streamlining they are experiencing in their business, but we see additional benefits as their advisors. We always have access to the latest version of their accounts and we can actually work with them on it at the same time. No disks back and forth, no need for backups so we can really spend our time as accountants focusing on the more important aspects of the accounting advice than handling data,” he said.
Time savings
Because bank statements are automatically matched up with invoices, expenses categorised and any credit card statements brought in, all that’s left to do quite often is manually allocate a few items.
Typical business report reconciliations that took 50 minutes only take 5 after setting up on the cloud. Of those businesses most say they enjoy a little more family time, but others do use the extra time to do the important on the business rather than in the business thinking.
1 hour seminars – 6 things to know about the cloud in 60 minutes
RSM Bird Cameron is holding free face to face introductions to accounting in the cloud. These are jargon-free easy to understand sessions providing advice to help SMEs decide if accounting in the cloud is right for them.
Some of the benefits to SMEs
* Take orders at a trade show that go directly into your system.
* Tradesmen can issue invoices on site and track payment electronically.
* See graphical views of your business’s finances – from a caf lounge or hammock.
* Never need to back up data to a thumb drive or disk.
* Unshackle yourself from a single accounts computer.
* Upgrades, updates all happen automatically
* Your data is secure and always at hand – on desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet.
Businesses that have made the switch
“Since switching to AccountRight Live, I haven’t looked back. The flexibility of being able to log in from home or work has made a huge difference to the way I do business.”
Karen des Bres, Automated Music Systems “Bank reconciliation in Account Right last week took an hour, this week on Account Right Live with bank feeds only 5 mins. It doesn’t get much better.” Debra Anderson, Legally BAS
“You can have people like MYOB Consultants, your bookkeepers, your accountant all logging into the one file and help you to run your business effectively.” Leanne Berry, The Numbers Game
MYOB Cloud Accounting
Free introductory
sessions over
Wednesday 12 March,
Thursday 13 March and
Friday 14 March.
To register, please contact:
[email protected] or phone
02 6217 6317.