Page 12 - Best Magazine Summer Edition 2019

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ECONOMY AND FINANCE
ACCOUNTING & TAXES Going Mobile:
State of Cloud Accounting
Cloud accounting is one of By 2018, the number of cloud users had Mobile technology is an integrated
ballooned to an estimated 3.6 billion. That’s up from 2.4 billion in 2013, which was itself the product of rapid early growth in the late 2000s. There are many applications competing for what has arguably become the largest consumer market in the world, but cloud accounting remains a favorite entry point to the cloud for hundreds of millions of users. Canadian businesses are near the front of the pack for adoption of cloud technology. Between 2016 and 2017, the percentage of Canadian businesses doing business on the cloud jumped from 59 percent to 73 percent. That growth has continued with no sign of slowing down.
At the same time cloud providers were marketing a new way to do a company’s books to accountants and other bookkeeping professionals in the U.S. and Canada, another quiet revolution was taking place that would have just as big of an impact on cloud-based accounting as the original software did: mobile technology.
the most game-changing technologies to hit Canadian small businesses in the last century. While the business
of accounting hasn’t changed — it is still mostly a matter of collecting and making sense of data — the ability to affordably store and process that information in the cloud has the potential to change everything. To a certain extent, it already has changed Canadian business for the better. Cloud accounting is generally faster and more secure than desktop-based solutions. It’s also more flexible and adaptive than older methods of accounting, with a lot of promise on the horizon to get better and better.
Small business cloud accounting has been an overnight success years in the making. Starting with a few small experiments in the mid-2000s, cloud bookkeeping and accounting programs quickly found their niche and expanded into the industry standard.
solution for most or all small business cloud accounting needs. In addition to all the advantages of the cloud, mobile technology brought a few new selling points. For example, the integration of third-party apps. These are accounting and bookkeeping apps users might already have been using for years and be comfortable with, or new apps that added useful functionality to the job of running a professional set of books. Users of other apps might not have been eager to switch to a new system, so leading online accounting vendors made it possible to import data directly from the old systems and still use some of their best features in its own cloud ecosystem. This turned out to be a winning approach for small businesses in Canada and the United States.
Source: Intuit Canada
BY ROBERTO G. BELINGUERES
12
THE BEST MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019
WWW.THEBESTGROUP.CA
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