How cloud accounting is creating new data opportunities

Today, most accountancy practices are alert to the time and cost they can save by migrating to the cloud. Making the shift away from servers has long been attractive to future-focused partners and practice managers keen to grow their firms and maximise efficiency.

Like all technologies, however, the cloud has evolved, presenting new opportunities and business uses, particularly concerning data. How are practices with well-established cloud infrastructures taking advantage?

Tracking compliance risks and KPIs

Unlike on-premise accounting solutions, cloud-based platforms give practices 24/7 global accessibility to their data and accounting tools. Data entered via a cloud setup can be immediately accessible to selected advisors and their clients.

From a basic reporting point of view, readily available real-time data is driving better communication between practices and their clients, delivering an up-to-date financial position without the need for manual data entry.

However, better reporting and increased transparency are just the tip of the iceberg for cloud-related data opportunities. With real-time data, advisors can build real-time proactive accounting strategies for their clients. They can also track, analyse and identify patterns that may highlight potential compliance risks or fraud in respect of certain regulations and standards. Similarly, they can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and conduct financial data analysis that may help to identify new growth opportunities for clients.

It’s also worth noting that cloud-based accounting is usually easily integrated with other business systems, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and payment gateways. This enables seamless data flow between practices’ different functions.

Faster decisions for client strategies

Another advantage of real-time data analysis is that it enables practices to make informed decisions fast. With fresh data for revenue, expenses, cash flow, and other financial metrics available in real-time, advisors can quickly identify trends or anomalies to adjust client business strategies nimbly. Helping customers stay a step ahead of opportunities or threats is a big differentiator for practices.

What’s more, many practices are putting cloud-based data into their predictive modeling and forecasting tools to add clarity to what the future could look like for their own practices and their clients. Advisors can run analytics on both historical and real-time data to get a view of future scenarios, which may help them to give better advice to guide strategic client business decisions around pricing, resource allocation, and investment.

Cloud is crucial for AI in accounting

While not every practice is looking to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) immediately, all should ensure their technical infrastructure is primed to support advanced analytics and AI. Automation and AI are key features in today’s competitive data strategies; for practices looking to integrate these technologies, the cloud will become critical.

With AI increasingly capable of tasks such as expense categorisation, invoice processing, and financial reporting, it makes sense to host data in the cloud to make it available for automated repetitive tasks and streamlined workflows. Cloud infrastructure is also crucial to maintaining the steady stream of data required to feed and train AI applications, which rely on real-time information to produce insight and to ‘learn’ over time. The cloud also offers unrivalled computational resources, which is a critical requirement underpinning AI deployments in accounting.

As practices integrate AI and analytics into more processes, they will also begin to develop their own applications. In such instances, the cloud can empower them to customise and deploy AI applications through APIs. It can help to democratise access to data and facilitate accountants’ development of AI tools in a no-code, low-code environment.

Cloud-based accounting data key to growth

The cloud is giving practices a unique opportunity to innovate and stand out, and to use data to keep up with the rapid pace of change. With real-time data securely and immediately accessible in the cloud, advisors have endless opportunities to develop and improve business processes and to add new high-value services. We look forward to seeing cloud-based data strategies fuel new digital business initiatives for practices as they maximise their technology investments to drive growth and resilience.

Wolters Kluwer will be exhibiting at Accountex London on the 15-16 May 2024 at ExCeL. 

You can register for a free ticket here. 

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