6 Cloud Solution Tips for moving your tax to the cloud

Modern accounting firms use tax software solutions for accomplishing tax filing activities. Tax season is a busy time. There is plenty of room for increased efficiencies with a cloud solution. Try these tips to move your tax practice to the cloud.

1. Choosing the type of cloud, you need

Clouds are private and public. IT resources get shared with others in the public cloud, but you can have your cloud service in a secured boundary. The service provider will manage the application deployment, scalability, data security, maintenance, and fixing of IT issues. There are subscription fees for the service. A public cloud delivers cost-effectiveness as shared infrastructure. The private cloud, on the other hand, provides you complete control of the cloud environment. The service provider will do the necessary configurations. Cloud solution resources will be dedicated and won’t be shared.

You can choose the right type of cloud solution based on your requirements. There are some notable cloud-based software-as-a-service applications as well that can help your practice. It saves the effort of moving ‘on-premise applications to the cloud. These SaaS applications are already on the cloud and offer importing invoices automatically, help you process and send it to a third party too securely.

2. Selecting the Right Cloud Solution Provider

As with any product, it is better to go with a reliable service provider. Keep these points in mind
when you evaluate cloud service providers.

Uptime: Uptime is the availability of your tax applications and data in the cloud.
Most cloud providers offer 99.99% uptime.

Support: Choose a cloud service provider who offers 24×7 support as your tax practice may
have an international clientele. Clients may need access at their own time zones.

Disaster recovery: Disaster recovery ensures your application and data are on the cloud
and is available in case of any infrastructure issue or natural disaster. The cloud packages
usually contain disaster recovery features.

Data security: Data security is a significant concern today. You deal with sensitive
client information that will have to be kept safe. You must check that your cloud provider
uses security features like role-based access, multi-factor authentication,
end-to-end encryption, and others.

Data backup: Data backup is essential for your tax information. You need to ensure that
tax data gets backed up regularly, at least daily.

3. Create a cloud adoption roadmap:

 It makes sense to prioritize which tax and finance applications will move first to the cloud. It is advisable to move applications in a piece-meal approach and sequence. Using this approach, you can analyze the performance and efficiencies delivered in your respective tax department.

4.  Establish performance baselines:

You need to analyze the tax process performance before moving to the cloud and after moving to the cloud. Once you have the data, comparison of process efficiencies is simpler. You must include the following parameters for comparison – Response time, Application performance, User experience, and Cost Savings.

5. Trial cloud migration:

Moving your tax practice to the cloud is critical, and you need to ensure there is no data loss.
You can check and see your tax application performance in the cloud and be satisfied before
moving other applications to the cloud.

6. Completing the cloud transition:

The trial run gives a fair idea of how your tax processes run on the cloud solution.
After a successful trial and you can move other applications to the cloud too.

Conclusion

Delivering efficient tax and financial services include application availability on the cloud.
Cloud technologies help you with competitive gains and cost-effectiveness.