Replies (8)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Setting all that aside my concern is that the providers are selling hard to the man in the street. Experience so far indicates to us that the man in the street thinks it is wonderful and does everything for him. Unfortunately it doesn't and it also makes VAT errors very easy to achieve. VAT claimed on non-vatable invoices are common and VAT is often claimed where no invoices exist. One new client achieved a VAT overclaim of £1,581 in the year before he came to us. Easy to do because of the way the systems operate but painful to correct.
So I wholly agree that human error is the weakness but the software providers tell the public how simple it is to use their systems but it isn't if the public has no experience of bookkeeping software.
Stormy waters ahead I think and HMRC's claim that VAT errors will disappear is likely to prove rather false - but no surprise there.
I have already moved several clients back to spreadsheets and bridging software as they simply could not cope with cloud software.
All for pushing forward, but forcing people to do it will not work. I hope the bridging option is still there for a few years.
Hard to argue with someone with a straightforward in and out spreadsheet where errors jump out at you as opposed to the various cloud providers.
Common sense says : Cloud is a computer that belongs to someone else and could be located anywhere in the world.
Although we are "reassured" that data is encrypted, this is misleading. If I can access my data, then it is not encrypted. All it takes is for my password to be compromised.
The whole cloud bandwagon seems to derive from the notion that we love to be connected to our confidential information anywhere , anytime. Is that so?
Yet, despite all the data breaches and hacked private photos and document, the populace out there seem to still be seduced by "cloud".
It is just a timebomb as some people are already starting to discover.
Strangely, I have yet to come across a medium -sized or large firm accountancy firm that actually put their own accounting data on third party cloud. It seems it is good enough for their small clients but a no no for themselves.
I agree that the biggest threat is from Humans, but my concern is/are the data centres themselves.
How susceptible are they to physical breaches?
Why not hack a data centre and infect it with ransomwear?
These may well be easily answered, but as the man in the park, it is a concern I can see.
Surely this has always been the case whatever the medium - right back to the days of Bob Cratchet and lots of handwritten ledgers. It is about appropriate policies and checks and balances in whatever system you use and ultimately someone who has enough nous to look at the results and have a feel for their accuracy. I am not convinced that errors just leap out of spreadsheets myself - but each to their own! I much prefer reviewing balanced up accounts on QuickBooks whether in the cloud or on the desktop.
No such thing as "on-premise system".
It's "premises", so the description would be "on-premises".
One of my bug bears.
Inclined to agree that fretting about particular issues with cloud software is not the point.
I once worked for a major plc at their head office and the servers with all the group financial data and legal records were physically stolen because the co secretary decided to let his sons scout group have access to the building out of hours. The back ups hadn't been done for months because of a bug that the it department knew about but had done nothing to fix.
Sorry, I'm going off-topic but this reminds me of a quoted PLC in Ireland, many years ago when I was an audit trainee (DP then, pre-IT). Disk drive with debtor records loaded, didn't work. The conscientious worker then loaded each of the previous backups in turn. Unfortunately, the read-write heads were faulty and were destroying the disks each time. Company had cash flow problems for a few months while trying to reconstruct.