Each month we blog about various aspects of fintech and wax lyrical about why you should be on the cloud etc… Why do we do this? Because it’s the future of record keeping and tax both because it’s made such massive advances from typical desktop/legacy software and because it’s already started with Making Tax Digital VAT submissions.
This month we thought we would take a little step back to try and explain how, as technology improves regardless of the sector, eventually it just becomes the norm and those who don’t embrace it will get left behind.
If we take telephones as an example – originally phones only came hard-wired into homes purely to make calls. Now most homes don’t even have a landline, and the phones we use are unrecognisable from the ones we had back then. We’ve progressed through wireless phones, faxes, original mobile phones to smart phones that come with Wi-Fi or 4g and 5g – we now use them for everything!!
Our phones are now capable of replacing our camera, calendar, map/sat nav, bank and wallet amongst many other things, as we usually set up our phones bespoke to our individual needs. For one of our team (guess who?), his phone acts as his Walkman (yep… he’s old enough to have had a Walkman, on which he listened to his Robbie Williams album *the shame is real*), his gas and electric hub and his baby monitor.
Our point is that our original hard-wired phones did exactly what we needed them to do. We all had an A-Z in our glovebox, a camera fully loaded with a 36-exposure film, and a file-a-fax organised beautifully (maybe). Times change though, and we now have better versions of most of these things at our fingertips in one pocket sized device.
We could have picked any area of our lives where tech has been embraced to improve useability, functionality or simply the offering it makes.
Accounting and finance is now part of this world… we’ve moved on from bags of receipts, through manual cashbooks/ledgers and on to standalone computers/software. Each was better than the last and made a step in the right direction, but now we have “The Cloud” and the step forward is actually a giant leap!
Cloud brings automations, efficiencies and accuracy to your accounts, it can use A.I and analytics, to transform your accounting/finance functions, from data entry to debt collection or cost control to management reporting. It can be linked with your bank accounts, your sales platforms and stock systems taking away the tedious repetitive hours spent by businesses.
The next generation of business owners are starting with this as the standard and if you’ve not already moved with the times, they’d look at what you’re doing and balk at how laborious and slow it all is.
How can we help?
We’re recognised by some of the biggest software suppliers as the best advisors they have, we have hundreds of happy clients that we’ve either set up this way or converted from legacy systems and have had excellent feedback.
If you’re still not using the cloud or you would like to find out more about how it could benefit you, please contact our digital advisory team by emailing fintech@haroldsharp.co.uk or call 0161 905 1616.