How Cloud Accounting Is Helping Businesses Today

Outsourcing to virtual or cloud based services continues as a growing trend for companies that wish to keep ahead of the competition but has primarily been concentrated towards services like virtual assistants and especially IT services. From April through July 2010, Gartner Symposium surveyed 1,587 respondents in 40 countries to understand general IT spending trends and spending on key initiatives such as cloud computing. Participants were IT budget management professionals (CIOs, IT VPs, IT directors, IT managers, etc.). Four hundred eighty-four respondents participated in the drill-down on cloud computing and were asked how their organization’s current budget for cloud computing was distributed, as well as what their estimate was for spending next year.

“The cloud market is evolving rapidly, with 39 percent of survey respondents worldwide indicating they allocated IT budget to cloud computing as a key initiative for their organization,” said Bob Igou, research director at Gartner. “One-third of the spending on cloud computing is a continuation from the previous budget year, a further third is incremental spending that is new to the budget, and 14 percent is spending that was diverted from a different budget category in the previous year.” Now that we understand that the market for cloud based services is continuing to grow, how exactly is the introduction of virtual accounting services helping companies?

Without having to look any further than our local news papers, we all know that company down sizing is happening everyday to try and cut costs, hopefully allowing businesses to ride out the troubled economy. The problem with this practice, aside from leaving millions of citizens without a job is that when the economy recovers, new employees will have to be hired and trained. This process makes a business slow to respond to a changing market and in today’s society, the ability to quickly adapt can make or break a company.

Cloud based services can rid a company of this issue so it should not be surprising that a accounting department of this kind can help just as well. Cloud based accounting departments are beneficial in that the corporation can reduce or increase services to accommodate current needs. Businesses using virtual accounting departments maintain full control over their finances but have the benefit of getting only the accounting work they need, no more and no less. Businesses that do this often find the advantages of using outside accounting so great they never bother growing their internal accounting capabilities.

The advantages to using a virtual service are obvious, especially if you are someone who has implemented the use of one. There is no reason why the versatility of a virtual accounting/bookkeeping department should be overlooked due to the fact that we live in a rapidly evolving economy.