How Making the Move to the Cloud Will Streamline Your Tax Practice

Although the accounting profession continues to debate adopting new tech like AI, the cloud—previously a bone of contention among accounting and finance professionals itself—has finally been accepted by the industry. More CPAs than ever are benefiting from the cloud. Although the exact numbers vary depending on which source you read, estimates suggest that at least 60% of accountants have made the transition.

If you aren’t yet one of them, or if you’re new to cloud-based technology, it’s important to understand exactly why making this change is so advantageous, especially during tax season. Here, we’ll go over three crucial ways making the move to the cloud will streamline your tax practice.

1. It makes communication easier and more efficient.
   During tax season, you spend countless hours communicating with clients and team members, answering questions, requesting and sharing documents, letting clients know about important tax changes to be aware of, and so on. This communication can pick up into an especially frenzied pace the closer the deadline gets. Instead of doing things the old way, which frequently involved playing a frustrating game of phone tag, rifling through heaps of paperwork that clogged up your desk, or trying to keep track of way too many emails, the cloud offers a new, simpler method. You can quickly share, request, and even store all important tax documents online in a secure, centralized hub. This makes it far easier for your clients and team members to access the documents, leave comments when necessary, and otherwise collaborate and communicate to get the additional hours of work that come with tax season done.
    
   And there’s more: When things are running smoothly at your accounting firm and clients are being communicated with in a timely manner, not only will your client retention rate go up, but so will the rate at which satisfied clients refer you to other people.
2. It frees up your time to focus on higher-level tasks.
   The manual work that comes with administrative tasks is a huge time-suck. It’s particularly problematic during tax season—a time of year when accountants, already overworked and stressed, are looking to restore their work-life balance, not have it go further off-kilter. Let’s consider this common issue that plagues many teams: finding documents is time-consuming, as there’s inconsistency in how people name and save documents. You can remove this issue by creating folder structures in your document management system and relying on automations to keep structures consistent across teams, projects, and clients. This consistency increases productivity – everyone will know where to find what they need – and enhances collaboration. You’ll also have more time to focus on higher-level work, like strategizing ways to grow your tax practice and working closely with your clients to ensure they’re satisfied.
3. Using the cloud increases cybersecurity at your accounting firm.
   Cybersecurity is important for many reasons. It’s crucial to building trust with clients, to maintaining a good reputation as a tax services provider, and to avoiding the gut-wrenching expense and psychological stress that comes with a data breach (just to name a few). The cloud is a far more secure option than email, especially when it comes to exchanging sensitive documents with clients—something that happens in abundance during tax season. Cloud providers have multiple levels of security, including encryption and multi-factor authentication, to ensure only authorized users can access data. This is an extra layer of security against cyber thieves, who are all but lying in wait for tax season so they can steal unsuspecting taxpayers’ financial information and, worse still, their refunds. Cloud accounting software also performs backups and software installations automatically, and the software vendor will take care of security and maintenance for you on their end. The backups in particular are incredibly important to ensure no valuable client data is lost if something happens.
    
   By using the cloud, you and your clients can rest assured your firm is protected. Additionally, work at your firm will be more streamlined because there’s less of a chance things will be interrupted by a costly and time-consuming data breach.

Move Your Practice to the Cloud with SmartVault

Experts and leaders in the accounting profession use SmartVault’s document management system and client portal because it’s user-friendly, helps with compliance, has bank-grade security, and stores all documents in one centralized hub. To see how SmartVault can keep your data safe and elevate your workflows, schedule a demo with us today.