Like a lot of firms last year we received the news that Microsoft would no longer be supporting Windows XP and Server 2003. I have to admit that I kind of smiled because all of a sudden our firm was going to be forced into making some sort of decision as to the direction we would take in the future: Do we invest in another server or, as I preferred (and had already been pushing for), cut the umbilical cord and move to "The Cloud". After much consideration and angst I won out and decided to make the move.
We are a small 2 Partner and 6 Staff tax and accounting practice in Passaic County. We were using Proseries for tax preparation and Quickbooks for client write-up. Other tools that we used were Phoneslips for scheduling and phone messaging, CFS for after the fact payroll and Microsoft Office including Outlook.
The first step was to look at each of these tools and see if they could be used. We quickly found out that several of these programs were not available as a cloud based solution.
We contacted a hosting company, Cloudvara, and spoke with them about the feasibility of having them host our software. Yes they could and at a very reasonable cost. The kicker...Intuit does not support Proseries running in a hosted environment. We took a step back to evaluate other software solutions and quickly found that most of the pure cloud based tax solutions we explored are pay-per-return or prohibitively expensive. As a firm we do approximately 1,000 1040's and 400 business returns. Our tax preparation software costs were going to go through the roof! So, Lesson 1 was that if you plan on saving money by moving to the cloud that probably won't happen. We decided to cross our fingers and stay with Proseries even though Intuit wouldn't support it. Tax seasons one and two were fairly uneventful and any problems that we did have were resolved by Cloudvara's support.
Office ended up being a no-brainer. Cloudvara included an Office license with each virtual desktop. Fantastic!
Writeup was another issue. One of the goals of making this change was to break our dependence on Intuit and Quickbooks for reasons that many practitioners understand. We recognize that we will always need some licenses for Quickbooks but we really wanted to get away from buying 8-10 licenses each year.
We looked at a lot of solutions and finally settled on two. I am a huge proponent of Xero. While it works best with a client that wants to do their own bookkeeping I have also found that it can be used for writeup with the right type of client. For those of you not familiar with Xero, one of its greatest features is that it allows you to connect to the clients bank account and automatically import transactions into the software. Xero is a purely browser based program and as such you and your client have access to the same information at anytime and from anywhere you have a browser. The best fit in terms of writeup are clients that do a lot of online banking. If you want to learn more about Xero go to their website or contact me.
Secondly we needed a Quickbooks replacement. After looking at several products we settled on Accountantsworld suite. We found Accounting Power an excellent substitute and we have now began to utilize their other products for time and billing, portal, and have even began offering live payroll to our list of services. Again this is a browser based solution.
So what have I learned so far:
1. Moving to the cloud to save money, at least at this point in time, is probably not a realistic reason.
2. Staff buy-in is ultra important. Most people resist change and will fight for the Status Quo.
3. Plan for the move. Evaluate your software and make sure the solutions you chose work as well as you hope. Your old software may not fit the bill. We actually have changed our model three times!
4. Talk to others that have already done it. Their experience is invaluable.
AND
5. I'm 54 years old and was born 30 years too early...I LOVE this stuff!
Read Part 2: Taking Off: Mid Air Turbulence & Quick Update