Benefits of Hosted Solutions
Marc Rosenberg, CPA
The following is excerpted from an article written by Roman Kepczyk, CPA, appearing on the CPA Practice Advisor website on May 22, 2014.
The “Cloud” and hosted solutions continue to garner interest from accounting firms, but there is a lot of confusion about the types of hosting, available applications and the overall reasons for firms to consider hosted solutions.
Just about every firm today is already using some hosted applications, such as online banking/payments and payroll processing, tax and accounting research and forms. Firms are already using or looking at Microsoft’s hosted Exchange instead of building and maintaining their own Exchange server.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Association for Accounting Administration, the two leading hosted applications that have contributed the most to optimizing firm productivity are Xpitax’s XCM workflow solution and Thomson Reuters’ GoFileRoom document management.
In addition, CCH is expanding their listing of hosted applications and Thomson Reuters’ Virtual Office hosts their entire suite of accounting productivity tools along with QuickBooks and Microsoft Office. As you can see, the combinations of applications that firms can run in a hosted environment are almost endless. Firms are even having their entire network hosted by an independent local network integrator in their own data center. National integrators like Cloud9, Real Time and Xcentric host entire network infrastructures and all the firms’ custom applications in their facilities.
In general terms, when the cost of a hosted application is less than what the firm is paying to run it themselves, and that application is more secure and better supported, the firm should consider transitioning to the hosted application. …
Roman’s book, Quantum of Paperless, contains 32 mission-critical processes that can be tailored to any firm to help them optimize their productivity.
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