Nikhil Sangani is a Chartered Accountant at small, north-west London practice Sage & Co (no relation to the software brand). On its website, Anlo highlights the “unparalleled insight” that has stemmed from its embrace of cloud software, adding: “If you had told us when we started Anlo that it would be possible to input expenses in real time through our phones and have them properly assigned and categorised, we probably would have laughed.” Meaningful changes She notes: “I decided right then that we’d have to move the entire practice to Xero.” That impressed the clients, because we’d always sent those documents as separate PDFs.” And I could send those clients management reports straight out of Xero, containing an income statement balance sheet, age analysis for debtors and creditors and a cash-in, cash-out summary. The instant reconciliation was phenomenal. “That month,” she says, “I managed to export and import data for a sample of 10 clients. In December 2016, Louca began to use Xero in the cloud. When Anlo expanded to the UK, the geographical spread of the business made its desktop-based infrastructure untenable.
And as we added more staff, we faced delays if people were off and weren’t around to log in and pull the relevant data off their machines.”Īs the firm grew, Louca found it increasingly difficult to balance work and family time, and often toiled through her holidays. Plus, Louca says: “There were always data corruptions.
If a client’s books were particularly large, data backups were an hourly routine. Then she’d give me the data on a memory stick and I’d feed it into Pastel, restore it, get the trial balance and compare the financials.” As I grew the business, I employed someone to do the spreadsheet processing and back up the data. “I did everything on spreadsheets first,” she says, “and transferred the data on to Pastel. When Anlo launched in 2009, Louca used desktop package Pastel – from Sage-owned, South African developer Softline. Hailing from Johannesburg, Annja Louca is Director and Founder of Anlo Financial Solutions, where she now runs the firm’s Edinburgh branch. Plus, cloud platforms can interface directly with each other, helping you to streamline workflows.” Unparalleled insight “Cloud applications create opportunities to renew your client relationships: as clients can also log into the system, you are able to collaborate with them – in real time. In light of how technology has moved on, that is potentially not the most innovative or intuitive way to work, Pay explains. It also supports a traditional client interaction structure: your client hands you their reports, you export them to the desktop app and then ask the client to check how it has represented the data.” You’ve bought the package, you own it and can use it however you like. “One feature of desktop that has always appealed to accountants is control. But there are other important advantages, too, relative to those inherent in desktop software. Pay notes that remote working is much easier on the cloud, because the provider takes care of all the infrastructure and connectivity. “The pandemic has definitely shifted some behaviours, and there is an appetite to move to the cloud.” Innovative working “Many firms are on that journey,” he says. That certainly chimes with what ICAEW Head of Data Analytics and Tech Ian Pay is seeing. In March, a global survey from accounting software brand Caseware found that the vast majority of firms were planning to harness cloud computing in the coming months. Now, more than halfway through 2022, that endpoint is drawing ever nearer. It would support the cloud-based QuickBooks Online only after that date, heralding the end of an era. Intuit announced last autumn that it would discontinue the UK desktop version of QuickBooks after 31 January next year. As well as having to wrap up their clients’ accounts by that crucial year-end date, firms and practices that currently use QuickBooks Desktop must focus on planning for its absence.
0 kommentar(er)
