How to Prepare for the Switch

Author: Keith Huggett

Ever lost a significant chunk of critical financial data stored on your hard drives or network? If so, you know how difficult and time-consuming it was to recover. You may even have lost sales during that period because of your information breakdown.

Recent studies indicate that a loss of 20 megabytes of accounting data costs around 21 labor days and $19,000 to reinstate and/or re-enter. And when 44 percent of data failures are directly attributable to hardware malfunctions, you can easily see the rationale for moving your data to a cloud-based accounting service, which will store your applications and data on remote servers that use the Internet to exchange information with you. Specialists at these firms are committed to remote network security, integrity and backups.

However, the last thing you want is to lose your data while making the transition to cloud-based accounting. Here are a few tips to help keep your data safe.

• Back up data securely before the move. Though it's rare, problems can crop up during the transition, causing corruption or loss of data. Having a backup will allow you to restart the process.

• Do not work on data while you are in transition. Data that is in flux is not safe, and can cause system problems.

• Make sure that your inhouse employees are properly trained. Studies show that 32 percent of data loss can be attributed to human error. Staff should be thoroughly trained on the transition to cloud-based accounting and know how to use the new system.

• Although your data will be housed on cloud-based servers, your employees will likely access information and work through laptops, tablets and PCs. To avoid data corruption due to viruses, be sure that all hardware is properly protected with antivirus and anti-malware software. Free programs like Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes provide easy protection against this type of data loss.

For more information about making the transition to cloud-based accounting, contact us at The Tax Office today. We're experts in both technology and accounting, and we'll offer the support you need every step of the way.