Cloud empowered accountants save up to three hours a day

posted in Uncategorized

Accounting software can revolutionise businesses – saving time and money, while freeing up resources for more important work. It’s something we’ve always believed, and it’s confirmed by our new study of 230 accountants, financial directors and staff across nine provinces in South Africa, conducted in partnership with World Wide Worx (WWW).

In particular, cloud-based software can help accountants save up to three hours a day, ensuring better value for their clients. Can cloud-based accounting help your firm?

Crunching the numbers

First of all, let’s look at some of the key numbers from our survey:

Accountants and financial advisers with heavier workloads already recognise the importance of cloud technology (71% of adopters work more than 40 hours a week, compared to only 39% of non-adopters).
Fifty-seven percent of cloud adopters spend less than an hour a day on manual processes, such as entering data or sharing calendars. By comparison, 79% of non-adopters report spending between one and three hours a day on such tasks.
Non-adopters are twice as likely to spend more than an hour a day chasing up emails and other documents than those who use cloud-based software.

Keep in mind that this happens every single day. And if you add this up, using cloud-based accounting software could offer time savings of up to fifteen hours a week. That’s an average of 54 hours per month or 27 days per year: an entire annual holiday allowance plus change.

Cloud-based accounting is the future

In our survey, 75% of non-adopters said they were planning to migrate their records to the cloud soon. This shows us that there is growing awareness of cloud technology and the benefits it offers.

Amazingly, 16% of respondents said they hadn’t heard of the cloud, didn’t understand it, didn’t think it was secure, or that they have no intention of migrating in future. There are advantages to using these services – and if cloud providers can communicate them, they’ll see great returns.

Time saved is only valuable because you can use it elsewhere

So how might accountants use the time that they could be saving? Accountants were asked what they would do with extra time from a range of activities, with a list of options:

Some 37% of all respondents said they would allocate extra time to work-related activities. Seventy-five percent of this group would dedicate this additional work time to business development. In other words, delivering more value to more clients.
Of those who chose leisure activities, 30% said they’d spend it with their family, and 22% intend to relax on the beach.

Overall, then, switching to cloud-based accounting software could increase your efficiency and versatility at work, as well as allowing you to achieve a better work-life balance.

Why be a number cruncher if you can be an adviser? Check out the findings for yourself here.

The post Cloud empowered accountants save up to three hours a day appeared first on Xero Blog.