SaaS Models for Accounting Software

I can’t stress enough the importance of accurate and timely financial reports. Companies live or die based on the decisions management makes, and management can only make decisions by using the information they are provided. If that’s not enough incentive to have your financial and accounting ducks in a row here’s more motivation—basically all sources of potential capital needed to grow your franchise/business, whether it be debt or equity, will require accurate and timely financial reports before they will consider giving you a dime, and the IRS is always a motivator. Therefore, having strong financial and accounting processes and technology in place is crucial. This post will focus on selecting a quality accounting technology platform to host your accounting software and files.

You should consider a number of key issues when selecting your accounting software and platform. Some of these are:

• Security
• Ease of Use and Access
• Maintenance
• Scalability
• Cost
• Open API to allow quality 3^rd party “add-ons” that can really make your life easier

When it comes to choosing an accounting technology platform I am a big fan of the “Software As A Service” (SaaS) model. If you aren’t familiar with SaaS, Wikipedia describes SaaS as a “model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand”. Basically, you pay a fee (typically monthly) for a vendor to provide you with software (e.g. QuickBooks) over the web instead of downloading and installing anything to your computer. I like the SaaS model for accounting software because a quality vendor will take care of costly IT maintenance, back up regularly (preferably daily), provide high security, and allow multiple users to access your books at anytime from anywhere which bypasses the issue of clunky and complex VPN systems to remotely access accounting files that are held only on one computer’s hard drive that could crash or be stolen at anytime. I have also seen companies copy and pass accounting files back and forth among users via email but that is a pain, and you need to be extremely careful that you and/or your accountant is using the most up to date file. Again, SaaS models largely bypass these issues.

While looking for a SaaS provider of accounting software I researched a lot of vendors. A number of them will host any type of software (not just accounting) on their servers, but I ultimately decided to go with a vendor that specializes in only hosting accounting software. The company is called Linked CPA and they are can be found at www.tadonline.com (TAD stands for “The Accounting Department). LinkedCPA was founded and is still managed by accountants which have been a huge help for me during my two years of using their service. They understand not only my technology issues and needs, but the accounting world as well. The other thing I like about their platform, besides being affordable, is that they have been good to install third party add-ons to my franchise clients accounting files. The more popular add-ons are already in place and typically don’t come with an installation charge, but there is usually an additional monthly fee for hosting the add-ons.

Steve Guymon - CFO