For every CPA firm and accounting professional, the tax season is one of the most challenging times of the year. From managing hectic tax calculations to seamlessly solving client queries, every step is demanding. When we pair it with irrational client expectations and shorter deadlines, things become hard to handle.
So, how can you prepare for the next season to minimize these challenges?
With so much pressure, how can you prepare to deliver high performance?
Using Drake software hosting can help you align your IT needs with the tax season needs. And when you host your Drake software on the cloud, you get extra benefits like extended availability and easy collaboration. This way, you can eliminate some bottlenecks in your journey. Let’s see how:
Why You Need Drake Hosting This Tax Season?
Accountants already have their plates full. Cloud hosting can help you improve the efficiency of your business processes. From being able to streamline your process workflow to help you optimize your budget, Drake software hosting can assist you in multiple ways:
- Taxes Anytime, Anywhere
You may have multiple clients who look up to you to prepare their taxes, help them with returns, and offer them financial advisory. It is a busy time, and you need to use it to grab opportunities. Therefore, there’s no scope for spending this time managing your software and its availability.
With Drake software hosting, your legacy IT systems would never become a bottleneck. These hardware units should not stop you from doing your job, offering data, preparing returns, and answering the client. The cloud helps you eliminate this drawback of in-house systems.
The cloud helps you access your data anywhere and anytime. Your Drake application would be able on the cloud server through an internet connection. You need to login and start working from any location in the world.
- Easy Collaboration
In between a range of accounting and tax preparation activities, everyone wishes to collaborate. The traditional method requires formal emails, which is still not fast enough or effective enough.
Therefore, the cloud!
Cloud hosting can help in streamlining the flow of communication between your customer and your team. Every stakeholder of your business gets secure access to the cloud, which means your customers can edit the data and include relevant information.
Your team and the client can practically work on the same file from separate locations at one time. To understand this, think of Google Sheets and how multiple team members can edit and view data at the same time. The latest version of the sheet is stored, and view permission is offered by the sheet owner (role assignment). In the cloud, you have this feature to collaborate better and interact quickly with the customer.
- Security
During the tax season, if there’s one thing that pulls you down, that is the security of your tax data. There are multiple cyberattacks, phishing emails, tax scams, and other breaches that cost millions to organizations.
As a tax firm, you need to take preventive and proactive measures. You can’t lose your client’s data or risk your reputation and lose a lot of money.
However, managing security in-house is difficult. You need to improve the entire security structure, including updated systems, better network control, intrusion detection monitoring, antivirus, antimalware, audits, and access control.
With Drake hosting, you can ensure data security without all this hard work. Your cloud service provider secures your data at multiple levels: network, physical, admin, and endpoint.
Here’s what you get with the right cloud hosting service provider:
- Data encryption for everything that goes in and out of the cloud instance.
- Multi-factor authentication to securely log in to the system.
- 24*7 monitoring of the network.
- Access control to monitor who can or cannot see certain data files.
- Intrusion detection and prevention system to find attacks sooner than later.
- Disaster Recovery
Even when you are too comfortable with the office infrastructure and IT support, you can’t avoid a set of things. What if a disaster hit your city? For instance, a flood. Your office would be flooded, and every system and device in your office would stop working. What will you do then?
These unfortunate situations may be uncommon in some areas but still possible. So, it would help if you had a contingency plan. The cloud is your plan.
When you host your Drake software on the cloud, you get access to multiple servers. Your data is stored on various redundant servers placed in multiple geographical locations. So, all your tax preparations are simultaneously copied and updated on every server.
When a disaster hits your area, you can still work because the cloud would be functioning. You can help your clients file their returns on time to avoid penalties.
- Multi-Device Access
There’s no harm in working on office computers and storing data on a hard drive. But, once you are out of the office and the client calls to make changes in the tax reports, what do you do?
Drake software hosting helps you open these files on your phone, tablet, or home computer to cater to client needs.
Another common scenario is when a hard drive fails, how will you recover data or access it? It would help if you waited until the IT team fixes your computer and helps you access data again.
Drake software hosting means you can open the same software and its files on any device. Nothing is stored on the host computer, so you haven’t really lost anything. You just need access to another device and an internet connection.
- Better Uptime
When the tax season actually arrives, every accountant needs more time and accessibility. But, with various computer units and load on the network, you can face considerable downtime.
With the cloud, that is fixed. Most providers offer 99.999% uptime, which means you will have access to your files and software all the time. The downtime would be much less than anticipated, so it won’t end up costing you a lot.
This is possible because of the server redundancy of the cloud. Even when one server fails to return your requests to access data, another will return and offer you the data you need.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that tax season is challenging and demanding, but it is also full of opportunities. If you help a series of clients, they will come back to you in the next tax season. So, focus on your strategic roles of serving the client and leave other issues, such as collaboration, access, and security, to Drake software hosting.
Find the right provider and move your Drake software to the cloud for a better, smooth tax season.
