How can cloud accounting help during the COVID-19 lockdown?

A move online may be just what your business needs during the coronavirus crisis. Page Kirk's Oliver Lumb discusses the advantages of the cloud.

While the country is on lockdown, everyone is working from home unless absolutely necessary in order to keep our NHS and keyworkers safe. This includes company book-keepers and external accountants. As a result, it's impossible to conduct face-to-face or one-to-one meetings. Your accountant can't visit company premises and you can't provide your accountant with the books and records to prepare your accounts. This can cause undue and unwanted stress during these uncertain times, but there is a solution!

Cloud accounting systems (e.g. QuickBooks or Xero) are a good low-cost option. They are accessible to non-accountants, making them ideal for a small businesses, which may not have the resources to hire an in-house accountant. A cloud system, coupled with an automated invoice processing service, allows you to digitally store all of your documentation on a secure, GDPR-compliant system. You can then grant your external accountant access to the live system, which brings the following benefits;

Giving you flexibility

As a full-time manager of your own company, you may be too preoccupied during the day to sit down and post invoices on a system you can only access in the office. Cloud software can be accessed easily by any computer with an internet connection, allowing you to do your book-keeping on the go or whenever is most convenient for you.

Keeping track of your deadlines

With live access, your accountant would be able to keep track of your VAT returns, as well as notifying you and providing assistance if a deadline is approaching or the return has not been processed, saving you money by helping to avoid late filing penalties and giving you peace of mind.

Providing ad hoc assistance

There may be a scenario where you enter into a transaction which is unfamiliar to you and are unsure how to make the correct accounting entries. With cloud accounting, all it would take is a phone call to your accountant and they would be able to remotely connect to your live system and walk you through the correct process. With both of you on the same screen at the same time, you'll quickly gain confidence and everything will be correctly posted.

Easily preparing your accounts

Once you have finished posting all the transactions for a period, all you need to do is either make a phone call or drop an email to your accountant, who will then immediately be able to plan your accounts around their workload and start looking at your financial statements as early as possible. Your accountant will be able to pull all the reports they need, saving you time by reducing the need for you to run the reports yourself and re-learn what you only need to do once a year. (Your accountant will be used to running the same reports every day.) There is also the added benefit of reducing environmental impact by minimising paper usage, as you'll no longer be making copies to send in the post. You'll also save your company storage space, as a digital copy of records are sufficient to fulfil your statutory requirements.

Easily posting correcting adjustments

Once the accounts have been prepared by your accountant, any accounting adjustments (such as depreciation or the corporation tax charge that previously they would have told you to change) could be easily posted directly to the system, by either you or your accountant. This ensures that at all times, the accounting system agrees with the statutory accounts and avoids any confusion.

For more information, or to enquire about the services that Page Kirk can provide, do not hesitate to call us on 0115 955 5500 or email us at enquiries@pagekirk.co.uk.