Are you in the cloud? If not, why? If you answered, “it’s not popular and businesses in my industry don’t use it,” you’d be wrong. Cloud accounting and financial management solutions are now mainstream applications in business today, and over 73% of companies are using at least one cloud application to either augment or manage their finances—through front-end applications like CRM or automated solutions like expense reporting.
These insights, provided by the Cloud Accounting Institute, show that more and more businesses are recognizing the benefits and overcoming their cloud fears, having chosen cloud solutions already or looking to implement these solutions in the future.
To understand the current challenges and experiences of cloud solution adopters, the Cloud Accounting Institute (CAI) conducted its annual survey of U.S. financial and accounting professionals. The survey focused on current and intended cloud solution usage, benefits, concerns, expectations, and integration.
So what else did this survey find out about cloud adoption? Our key takeaways from this survey are as follows:
- Companies find current software lacks important features: Close to half of all respondents felt that their current system was only “average” at several key capabilities: Timely Financial Information, effective internal control structure and process, Reducing fraudulent transactions, and Managing performance in the context of business risk
- Finding the Right Partner is Imperative to Implementation Success: In choosing a cloud solution, one factor reigns supreme. This factor, finding a partner to add proper value and assist in implementation, was ranked highest; followed by ability to work with existing hardware, ease of implementation, and ease of use.
- Manual Processes are Draining Organizations: Companies using workarounds are seeing their time wasting away. Many organizations reported a 30% of time is wasted through an inefficient workaround, a manual process, or sub-optimal use.
- Integration is Key: Respondents reported that the top three benefits of tight integration are “reducing duplicate data entry” (70 percent), “achieving a single version of the truth” (63 percent), and “real-time reporting” (59 percent)
Looking for more insight? Download the entire 2015 Cloud Accounting Institute Cloud Accounting Solutions Best Practices Guide, hosted by InCloud360. Just fill out the information below, and we will send you the full report.
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