I was thrilled to be able to meet accounting professionals on Queensland’s Gold Coast last night as a guest speaker for CPA Australia. Professionally moderated by Dr Ian Sims PhD, Griffith University Senior Lecturer in Accounting, the event focussed on cloud computing and it’s practical impact on the accounting profession.
What struck me most was the range of accounting professionals and the roles they undertake. The profession is so diverse – there were financial controllers for large corporates/government/education, partners and associates from accounting practices, students of accounting and business information systems and entrepreneurs with an accounting background building their own startups and interested in the opportunity cloud computing presents.
After some brief presentations from online accounting solutions providers we undertook a panel discussion and took questions from the audience. Here’s a view from the panel:
The audience asked great questions, including:
What degree of customisation is available in your software?
The ability to use custom fields exists in some screens to track specific information. Invoice templates can be fully customised to suit your own businesses’ look and feel. The Webservices API provides the most customisation by allowing other software and web applications to interact with Saasu just as humans by creating, deleting, reading and updating transactions.
What is it like for clients of an accounting firm to make the transition to cloud accounting?
It was great to meet in person Saasu Gold Partner Colin Chandler from Mulraneys who responded to this question. Colin talked about the “paradigm shift” change in the way that accountants manage their client’s business using cloud accounting. Colin found that he hasn’t had to convince his clients to make the transition: once they see the benefits of ubiquitous access, collaboration and the move toward a more value-added relationship with their accountant, they were happy to make the change and experienced the benefits immediately.
Can you restrict access to users?
User Roles in Saasu allow you to control exactly what you want your employees, bookkeepers, advisors or clients to see in your accounting file.
Can I access my data after I leave the service?
If you need to leave Saasu we offer export formats for your data. Saasu then archives your data for 7 years. If you decide to come back to Saasu we require a minimum payment of 3 months subscription value to re-activate your file.
Overall a great event and the accounting industry are very enthusiastic about the opportunities of cloud computing.
Great to hear Tony.
Wish I was there!
Colin is a lovely man too, I have worked with him before and very knowledgeable.
It is very interesting reading about your presentation to Accountants on the Gold Coast.
Hopefully the word is getting out there about Saasu and how effective it can be.
Thanks Gae, I was thrilled by the positive response to us – there’s so much interest in us at the moment – south-east Queensland is such a growth area in particular. I hope to get back for more events there soon.
Tony,
I really appreciated your great contribution to the evening. The feedback I have is that participants found it both informative and enjoyable. I guess it is a measure of their intest that questions kept on coming when I announced that drinks and nibbles were available. Again, both personally, and on behalf of the committee thank you and Saasu for your participation.
That’s great to hear Ian – thank you for organising a great event and I look forward to catching up with you when next in the neighbourhood.