Pat yourself on the back: Another tax season is in the books. As business resumes a somewhat normal pace, we know some owners are asking if they should do it all over again next year. Instead of contemplating an end, consider operational contingency plans to streamline tax season for 2023. Among the topics to consider are IT systems and security.
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In fact, when asked, firm respondents said they believe firms will run entirely online without on-premise servers, with 33% of respondents estimating it will happen in the next three to five years, while 32% thought it will be less than three years. So what’s holding firm owners back?
Our team helped about a dozen CPA firms make the transition to the cloud and supported teams during tax season. Many use Thomson Reuters’ UltraTax or GoSystem Tax RS, Wolters Kluwer’s CCH Axcess or Intuit’s Lacerte during tax season and cite these essential tools as one of the reasons they hesitated to transition. One of our lessons learned during tax season is these systems continue to work seamlessly, faster and more efficiently in the cloud environment, when correctly set up.
During tax season, accountants need efficiency. What we know to be true is this: During tax time, those tools have heavy use. Users login at the same time and servers slow down. They cannot handle the demand. CPA subscribers watch computer screens as circles spin, pages load or branded buffering images do their thing. It’s frustrating because those software systems are so essential to today’s tax business, and waiting means downtime.
As you look to the 2023 tax season, here’s what it takes to move to an advanced cloud-based tech tool. Clients expect it to be hard and time-consuming, but it isn’t, and there are a lot of benefits.
- Control. Imagine having an isolated cloud environment accessible only to your firm via a virtual private cloud. All tax software systems are hosted in your VPC and work the same as if you had downloaded them to a computer hard drive. Now your firm has control to scale, to decide when software updates are accepted, and to streamline workflow. Best of all, the team does not share critical tax season software system servers with millions of other subscribers, which means no buffering and slowdowns.
- Cost. A server is a capital expenditure. It can cost thousands of dollars and becomes a depreciated cost on the books. Typical all-in fees for a cloud service are a recurring monthly fee that includes software patching, network monitoring, upgrades, hardware installation and support tickets paid per user.
- Access from anywhere. During tax season, most CPAs feel tethered to the office, focused with heads down. Working from the cloud means working from anywhere.
- Backups. We ask, and often business owners don’t know, the last time their server backed up. Cloud systems do constant backups.
- Security. Cloud systems are more secure. Accountants store and are responsible for a lot of private client information, including Social Security numbers, tax documents, payroll and more. If a staff member’s laptop is stolen, there’s no data stored on a hard drive. It’s all in the cloud and a thief cannot get access without the password. Risk is reduced.
- Uptime. Cyber-thievery is at an all-time high, and yes, someone in your firm is likely to push a button they shouldn’t. Operating in the cloud and having those consistent backups means reinstalling information onto a computer from a backup before the wrong button was clicked. Reinstallation takes a few hours. It’s highly likely the computer is still operational too.
When migration from a server to the cloud is done right, yes, it takes a project team’s focus, but there’s minimal downtime for staff.
Here’s an example: Let’s say a midsized business has 50 employees. The company server is long past its life, and critical decisions need to be made in 2022 for 2023 tax season. Between data review and analysis, then transferring each staff member’s desktop to a cloud-based environment, with final sign off, the transfer could take a week. The staff doesn’t stop working or need long-winded training. They simply click an icon on their desktop, login and go to work. The new system has loaded their desktop, so they see everything the same way they did before the transfer to the cloud.
Bottom line, if your team is ready to shift to the cloud next tax season and it feels overwhelming, remember that moving to the cloud means minimal disruption without capital expenditures. When you add up the overall benefits, it makes sense why six out of 10 firms have already done it.
