With technology evolving rapidly, advanced solutions are constantly appearing our way. Cloud-based QuickBooks, for instance, offers many benefits that can completely transform how you run your small business.
If you are a small business owner, running it could be a daunting task, primarily when you perform your accounting tasks manually. Such activities not only consume a lot of time but also a lot of effort, even for doing the simplest of tasks like data entry. This is where a cloud-based QuickBooks solution could come in handy.
Want to know how the cloud-hosted QuickBooks solution can help your small business mitigate these challenges? Read this blog post to get the answer and gather valuable insights into using the cloud-based solution to its optimum level.
What Cloud-Based QuickBooks Solution Has to Offer Small Businesses?
1. Finance Management
With cloud-based QuickBooks in place, you get an excellent opportunity to manage your finances. For example, one of the QuickBooks features allows you to link your bank accounts with the application and check all your financial records. Besides, you can minimize paper use and contribute towards a clean and green environment.
In addition to the above, with a cloud-based QuickBooks solution, you can enter the due dates of invoices that often get generated in your company. If required, you can directly print the checks from the cloud-hosted application. Moreover, with every financial transaction being recorded, you can retrieve them as and when needed.
2. Cost-Effective
As a small business owner, you’d always prefer to look for ways to reduce costs to achieve higher cost-efficiency and profitability. The cloud-based QuickBooks gives you an excellent opportunity to accomplish this. It is because you don’t have to invest in IT infrastructure as you can access the application and your company files remotely.
The remote working feature allows easy access to your accounting resources through the internet, which means you don’t need any dedicated on-premise devices. Besides, when you opt for cloud-hosted QuickBooks from a reputed cloud hosting provider, you get round-the-clock technical support, eliminating the requirement to invest in hiring any in-house IT personnel.
3. Security and Reliability
Security of data is paramount for businesses of all sizes. A threat to the server storage features or leniency in data transfer processes in a network can lead to data security threats. Locally backed-up data may also suffer if the data is lost accidentally or due to viruses and spyware.
Hosting QuickBooks on the cloud can easily overcome this challenge as data storage is done in the safest way possible. When you opt for cloud-based QuickBooks, all your data is kept in highly protected data centers. In addition, you get multiple backups of your files, enabling you to retrieve them whenever required. The data transfer process is also secured as the highly encrypted data transfer protocol ensures the high-end security of all your transferred files.
4. Seamless Collaboration
Sharing data or your company file with a cloud-hosted QuickBooks solution is much easier and quicker. For instance, one of your accountants is on a business trip to Korea and needs immediate access to a company document at midnight. With QuickBooks hosted on the cloud, your employee can find the document through the online systems, rather than waiting for colleagues to get back to the office, find the document, and send it via email.
Unlike traditional on-premise accounting solutions, cloud-based QuickBooks allows cost-efficient multi-user access simultaneously. As such, all team members can work together on the same file, edit them if required, and update the document in real-time. Such an advantage eliminates creating and managing multiple files with different versions. Above all, you can set accessibility controls by restricting someone’s view and edit access to a file.
5. Automatic Upgrades
One of the critical aspects of present-day business is staying up to date. As a small business owner, you should always keep your doors open to allow the latest features and updates to penetrate so that you get a competitive edge over your competitors.
When you opt for a cloud-hosted QuickBooks solution from a hosting provider, they will take care of all your software upgrades. You don’t need to keep track of the updates, as your service provider will ensure automatic updates for your business.
6. Easy Scalability
Hosting QuickBooks on the cloud gives you the freedom of scaling your business quickly. For example, instances might happen when you anticipate a spike in QuickBooks users. In such cases, you can contact your cloud hosting provider and ask for more servers or higher bandwidth to accommodate those additional users. Once your requirement is over and you no longer require the additional resources, you can inform the service provider to scale down the requirements. In this way, a cloud-hosted QuickBooks solution gives you the flexibility to adjust your requirements as and when required.
7. Round-The-Clock Technical Support
You may require technical assistance with any technological solution at any time of the day. Factors like hardware issues and natural calamities can often lead to downtime. In an on-premise QuickBooks solution, such matters may take a few hours to a few days to resolve, drastically impacting your business. Besides, all your accounting tasks will get delayed, and your reputation could be at stake.
Cloud-based QuickBooks enables you to get round-the-clock technical support from the cloud hosting provider. Whenever you encounter any challenges associated with a cloud-hosted QuickBooks solution, you may contact your hosting provider via phone, email, or chat anytime.
Final Thoughts
Cloud-hosted QuickBooks is fast becoming the way forward for many, especially small businesses. Features like remote access and round-the-clock IT support significantly contribute to the goal of cost-efficiency as you don’t need to invest in expensive IT infrastructure or in-house IT personnel. Secondly, you can ensure the safety and security of all your mission-critical accounting data as they are stored on remote cloud servers across multiple geographic regions.
Accounting becomes much more manageable and cost-effective with all the dynamic features of cloud-based QuickBooks. Should you want to bring a 360-degree transition to your small business, then hosting QuickBooks on the cloud is the best you can do.
