Accounting made easy thanks to the Cloud!

Accounting, sounds familiar? Done some accounting lately? We've played with our personal accounting from time to time. But when it comes to a business, it's a totally different story. A business has more complex data which is waiting to be transformed into something useful. Hence an Accounting system takes center stage in enabling businesses to make rational decisions for the betterment of their future.

In an ideal situation, Accounts tell you how your business is performing, for this week, month and year which can be compared against the projected budgets or last year's performance. Accounting reports and other non-financial information helps businesses to focus on pumping money where it is most needed.

Coming up with these figures is the responsibility of the Accounting departments of a business. But can all SMEs afford a separate Accounting department? In the beginning, when the number of employees are less, there is less incentive for an Accounting department or let alone any sort of daily accounting. Most SMEs have opted to doing less accounting while others hire an external accountant to deal with it once or twice a week. The end result is that most SMEs don't see the big picture in time and therefore can't react accordingly.

Fortunately there are some good Accounting applications (Apps) out there, especially the Open Source ones, which can be downloaded free of charge. For example FrontAccounting allows users to perform many of their accounting activities and includes support for localization and other customizations. But unfortunately, setting up the software and maintaining it through regular updates may not be suitable for all SMEs, especially the non-technical businesses.

Cloud Computing offers a possible answer to this issue. There are a number of Accounting Apps that simplify setup and maintenance in return for a small monthly fee. When compared to acquiring or developing an Accounting system, Cloud based Accounting software can minimize upfront costs as well as running costs by not needing to have a dedicated IT department.

Hopefully by opting for a user friendly Accounting App, it will also mean that there won't be a need for a dedicated accounting department because a lot of the headaches will be offloaded to the Cloud. For example, by having the data hosted in the Cloud, it enables users a high level of accessibility from anywhere. This means for instance data can be pushed to the Accounting App via a Point-of-Sales (POS) terminal such as a smart phone.

We at ZoomBACloud have worked hard to bring an Accounting App for our SME customers. While our Accounting App is based on the Open Source, FrontAccounting software, we have paid special attention to increasing it's usability by offering an improved user interface as well as integrated help so where ever you are in the system, you can ask questions and get answers.

So give us a try by visiting http://zoombacloud.com (there is a free version).