State of Online Accounting Industry – Q&A on Software Advice by Michael Koploy


I was contacted by Mr. Michael Koploy, Software Advice, to have a look at his then recent article; State of Online Accounting Industry.

The importance of this article is that it gives an insight about Accounting Software on Cloud, from 3 of the leading Online Accounting Software solutions. 5 important questions and you are well informed by the answers. It’s a great read and well informative.

I would like to share my views on this.

Advantages:

1. Cost – That’ll be the driving point for any one who want to go online.
2. Less/Zero Maintenance – You don’t have to worry about downtime or H/W maintenance on server or related resources.

Disadvantages:

1. Depends on providers. You can’t just trust everyone and anyone who provide an online solution. There were some recent outages from industry’s leading providers, such as Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
2. Since it’s pay as you use, you have to limit your usage if you have to get some benefit out of. When I say that, I mean, I may not have one live environment and one test environment for the price of only one environment. If I insist to have, I may have to pay for that.
3. If I have to restore a backup due to a severe mistakes, I can’t do it immediately. I don’t even know whether my service provider maintains a backdated backup or not.
4. No Accounting Software is used AS IS, without a single customization(s). If I do require a customization, then my online accounting software should have an ability to import it and get updated with.
5. Whenever there is a major update to the parent product, I may or may not have a choice to decide on whether I actually want it or not. As always, a major upgrade also include additional cost depending on HOW major it is.
6. People may not feel like THEY ARE CONTROLLING THEIR DATA. I capitalized that, because, that’s a huge question everyone would want to ask before adapting to the change.

In my humble opinion, everything else could be 100% online (Public Cloud), but Accounting Software should be a hybrid (Private Cloud). In that way, there will be a balance between cost, maintenance and others.

VAIDY