Accountant

[Effendi]

and 'three server locations' is a private cloud...

Agreed, based on the old RAID model. However, it is not a big fluffy cloud that half the worlds businesses store their data in making it a target for every wannabee hacker out there.

 

[Effendi]

I’d argue that rather than being the latest money making business opportunity for the IT/IS, cloud is the opposite. It has enabled the provision of software as a service, which has destroyed swathes of well paid jobs in the IT industry. Jobs that previously flogged and installed stand alone, dedicated infrastructure that was put of date the day it was installed.

SAAS, meanwhile, has enabled small and medium businesses to take advantage of IT that they could never previously have envisaged using. In many cases it has provided a platform to build a business that simply could not have existed twenty years ago, e-commerce being an obvious example.

How do you think credit cards are processed if not in the cloud? How does the payment gateway in the shop where you buy your groceries work?

All they have done is taken the analysts, programmers and data managers and hidden them behind a Chinese screen called a cloud. You don't get the service for free, you are still paying for it, maybe not as much, but then you will not be getting a truly bespoke service, more of a generic one size fits all solution. As you mentioned in a previous post an ideal solution for a small enterprise, especially if the management have no high level programming skills.

 

[bobthebuilder]

All they have done is taken the analysts, programmers and data managers and hidden them behind a Chinese screen called a cloud. You don't get the service for free, you are still paying for it, maybe not as much, but then you will not be getting a truly bespoke service, more of a generic one size fits all solution. As you mentioned in a previous post an ideal solution for a small enterprise, especially if the management have no high level programming skills.

No, that is not what they have done at all.

They’ve created a huge and varied suite of tools and applications that enable and help their customers to operate their businesses in a professional manner. They’ve responded to market demand and built generic, customisable solutions that work. As a result, it’s a very different business world from even ten years ago.

Take accounts, the original subject of this thread. You solution for the small business is to file paper invoices and receipts and take them to your bookkeeper once a month to “do the books”. So your books are always a month out of date and are, at best, only a record of what happened in your business over a month ago. But use Xero properly and your books are near live; I can tell you what the cash situation in my business is today, right now. But that is not all; I cam use the feed from Xero to model any number of scenarios in in my business and inform me of my resource needs. That kind of stuff wasn’t available to big corporates a decade ago.

Next, look at sales, marketing and CRM. A decade ago, even some big companies ran their CRM on a spreadsheet! Now they all have properly integrated systems that track the customer / client from first contact through purchase / contract into after sales care. So now I can operate my three micro-businesses on the same CRM platform as mega-companies like Southwest Airlines, Toyota Marriott and Lilly. The same system that government department are using to manage customer experience. And what’s more I can scale as I grow, without ever needing to re-platform.

I think you are totally out of touch with this. No-one bespoke anymore. They want easily customisable, reliable out of the box systems that don’t need an army of IT geeks on the overhead. Nor do they want managers who are paid to manage their business applying their “high level programming skills” when they are supposed to be managing the business.

As for security, I think once again you are out of touch. Between them SalesForce, Shopify, Xero and Square, the four key cloud platforms we use, have over 2 million clients. None of them have ever been the victim of hacking. None of them have lost client data. All of them operate to the highest statutory standards of data protection and all have the top level of credit card security. Their businesses are built on providing data security; if they weren’t secure, they’d go down.

 

[chuggafugga]

Well thanks for your advice @bobthebuilder and @Effendi

I've actually now got Xero set up and decided to start shelling out for the monthly license.

Paid 300 odd quid for one year subscription to onesaas for the integration of the e-commerce set ups and gradually it's all coming together, have learned essentials and now cracking on

I've actually learned that 300 quid is actually saving me a HELL of a lot of time as well as well as the risk of human error in data entry etc so also good solution for those running a side business and generally does all the hard work for you.

 

[Diko]

Simplex D account book, job done.

 

[SkippedOnce]

Accountant. Any suitable applicants?

 

[chuggafugga]

Accountant. Any suitable applicants?

Did end up deciding to go with a cloud based set up and take it all to a CA my uncle referanced over to me.

Xero is pretty much a good starting package for a learner like, keep a track of incomings and outgoings, scan reciepts etc records of bills, all online based, and also gives integrated access to my business account with Lloyds and my paypal account so it's well balanced.

Now the head ache is knowing when my tax year END is and what is expected but I'm sure pretty much I can look online for that.

 

[Mr_Relaxed]

Did end up deciding to go with a cloud based set up and take it all to a CA my uncle referanced over to me.

Xero is pretty much a good starting package for a learner like, keep a track of incomings and outgoings, scan reciepts etc records of bills, all online based, and also gives integrated access to my business account with Lloyds and my paypal account so it's well balanced.

Now the head ache is knowing when my tax year END is and what is expected but I'm sure pretty much I can look online for that.

Give your accountant the links and they can access Xero themselves. I use Xero for a small subsidiary in the US and the CPA out there we use for local filing goes into Xero as required.

For tax filing, might as well use the accountant, as they have the software already for handling tax returns, as well as your statutory accounts (assuming you are a Limited company).