Managing business finances can be intimidating – lots of clients to deal with, piles of invoices and payment receipts to cater to, and a large team of employees on the payroll. This is where QuickBooks accounting software can be your best friend. Once you have selected and purchased the right version of QuickBooks accounting software, you can proceed with streamlining various accounting tasks related to your business. Irrespective of whether you have a small business or a bigger enterprise, there is a suitable QuickBooks version available for you.
But is it all you need for efficient financial management? You are missing an important piece of the puzzle here, which is cloud technology or cloud-hosted QuickBooks. For many business owners like you, it is unlikely that you have access to an advanced in-house IT setup and maintenance team required to run applications on local servers. So, in this post, we will look at how you can finance management easier for you with QuickBooks hosting.
Before we get to the benefits of cloud-hosted Quickbooks, here’s a brief introduction to the importance of this technology.
Why Has QuickBooks Hosting Become So Important for Businesses?
If you are like most businesses, complex IT issues and software glitches might have taken away the ease and productivity with which you deal with accounting tasks. A common part of the work for your accounting and finance team would be to deal with technical issues. To gain a competitive edge in the current, fast-paced business spheres, efficiency has taken the center stage in place of traditional ways of handling books and payments.
QuickBooks software first comes to the rescue. As a powerful tool, it has all the accounting features you would need to create the first impression. Still, it is extra important for you to know about hosting QuickBooks on the cloud and how to use it to proceed toward various business goals.
While having an experienced accounting team does matter, letting them utilize QuickBooks hosting is going to be powerful. With 77% of workers believing they are more productive during remote work, it’s time for you to embrace the advantages of cloud hosting.
5 Ways in Which QuickBooks Hosting Helps with Financial Management
Saves funds needed for IT maintenance
The most crucial part of financial management is budgeting and it is also the hardest one to get right. The technical needs of one business mostly vary from the other. Accordingly, they need to invest in IT setup, servers, and software to maintain operational efficiency. With QuickBooks desktop software hosted on on-premise servers, it can be the case of trial and testing to find how much money you would need to invest in it to prevent downtime for the entire team.
Cloud-hosted QuickBooks is quite an ideal solution to save on the required capital for a few reasons. First and foremost, the hired cloud solution provider will invest in the server setup, so you do not need to set funds aside for an in-house IT setup upgrade. Second, all these financial benefits are paired with increased efficiency at work.
Reduced staffing requirements
The number of technical team members, in general, depends on the scale at which your business operates. Having a few IT professionals is essential to achieving error-free operations. Now the question that you might have in mind about using QuickBooks is –
Do you need to hire more IT staff members when using hosted QuickBooks?
The simplest answer – No.
With QuickBooks on the cloud, you can get rid of the need to hire additional IT team members. There is no in-house server required, hence no more man-hours for IT setup, connecting individual computers to the common server, or scheduling regular software updates.
All these IT tasks are well taken care of by the third-party cloud hosting provider at no extra cost other than the pricing of the hosting plan that you have selected. Besides this, you can also monitor the workflow and benefit from real-time updates related to the financial side of your business.
Scalable resources at your fingertips
If yours is a Small & Medium Business (SMB), it is quite expensive to own in-house servers. Even if you need one server and a few technical staff members now, you would need to invest more in them as your business grows. While using QuickBooks software for your business, IT resource management is yet another essential aspect related to financial management.
When you switch to cloud-hosted QuickBooks, the scalability of computing resources does not come up as a challenge. The related expenses are held by the QuickBooks hosting provider you hire while you only pay for the hosting plan you select.
As an example, you can start with the ‘Essentials’ hosting plan offered by Ace Cloud Hosting – an Intuit-authorized commercial host that is priced at $34.99 per user per month billed annually. If the need arises, you can scale it up to the ‘Business’ plan with which the pricing only goes up to $39.99 per user per month billed annually.
Minimum paper usage
Whether you believe it or not, you cannot eliminate the use of paper for various accounting tasks or payments related to your business. Besides this, if accounting activities involve using paper, it is often challenging to avoid manual data-entry errors or calculation mishaps. At most, you can minimize the use of paper by switching to digital notes and accounting files related to business expenses.
On one side, QuickBooks accounting software replaces traditional accounting methods with digital accounting that does not require using paper and pen. This way, you can avoid inefficiency related to miscalculations which have the potential to lead to significant losses. All the bills and invoices are generated in digital copies which further saves the cost of bulk printing and contributes to a greener environment.
On the other, there is Quickbooks hosting that further allows authorized users to access or modify accounting files in real time. This even reduces the exchange of digital files between your team members.
Automated data backups
Envision your team work on business data files that have account information for payments and invoices received from customers. Once everything is done and finalized, they gather all the documents on one main local computer system for later use. The next morning, the unfortunate paved their way to their doors as that main computer’s operating system crashed, leaving all the hard work go in vain.
Like every business owner, you would never want anything like this to happen to you. If you are expecting anything more from cloud-hosted QuickBooks, have your eyes fixed on the data backup facility that comes with these offerings. Work on QuickBooks on the cloud, save your data there only and leave your worries aside. Even if one cloud server fails, you will get access to the data replicated on other servers linked together.
To learn more about how to switch to QuickBooks cloud hosting, read this complete guide.
