subject: Tax Accounting: The Cloud silver lining [print this page] Tax Accounting: The Cloud silver lining Tax Accounting: The Cloud silver lining
Technology has its roots firmly entrenched in almost all aspects of our lives. It's crystal clear by now that tax accountants won't be keying in data for a very long time. More pressure is being impacted on the accounting profession to include cost implications for greater efficiency in the tax preparation space by the implementation of the cloud. This has far reaching implications by the fact that we are wired to disincline change and the fear of job cuts in the whole anthem of cutting down costs.
Tax accounting is slowly but surely lessening on human intervention and more accounting firms are slowly bearing the fact that their firms have to transform in the way they conduct business with the advent of cloud computing solutions to small and medium business organizations.
The concept of remotely available information through cloud accounting brings a great deal or benefits and advantages to tax accounting. Cloud accounting offers utility computing where individuals and corporate entities can buy access to virtual storage space and even data centers, thus allowing them to expand exponentially in their IT infrastructure without any additional costs, instead of signing up to subscription-based access to programs (SaaS).
The following are benefits which cloud computing would bring to tax accounting:
Automation: The cloud makes it easier to manage tax processes where human intervention is used to populate tax software. Work processes like keying in documents to the tax software and converting manual audit documents which are time impacting, will be a thing of the past.
The cloud brings forth a greater control and collaboration between a firm and its partners and other entities that it provides its services to. Their online feature provides convenience and provides quality service to the client. The software in the cloud' means that it is available in any computer which is connected on the web.
The cloud also provides for remote access of the software which basically means that one can use from any location without necessarily being restricted to install the software to specific computers.
It also reduces maintenance costs since the vendor takes the responsibility of taking care of the software and servers. This in effect reduces the cost of hardware and personnel training, which in comparison to on-the premise environment the client pays for the hardware, software as well as storage space. This allows the company to focus on strategic organizational processes instead of diversion of resources.
The quantities of applications that tax accounting/accountants and their customers need to conduct business are available in the cloud. These include, but are not limited to, enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, tax preparation, workflow, bill management, sales tax and payroll processing.
Soon, the cloud will be the only operational platform, and all manual entry into the accounting systems will be faced out some say in as near as 5 years according LaFollette. They predict that in 10 years, there will be almost no premise-based software.
To get started click here to access a Cloud-based Tax Accounting.
