All of the above issues have been pretty much eradicated through the introduction of cloud bookkeeping software over the past decade. Nothing to do with the ability of the accountant to process a set of accounts and tax return.įast forward to today. Or worse still, your accountant would forget to remind you not to make changes – resulting in the need to key in all of that lost data again (and a whole world of hassle!) when your accountant passed the “live” copy of the data back to you.Īs a result, the nature of the accounting software itself was sometimes to blame for the worsening of the client-accountant relationship.

This meant that your bookkeeping was getting out of date by the day – with the process taking weeks or even months. You would probably hear the accountant remind you not to make any changes on your own instance of the software until they had finished the accounts and tax returns (as any changes you made would be overwritten when you restored the ‘live’ data backup). Of course, you, the business owner, would probably be paying for this extra work that was not budgeted for. If not, they would probably have to come to your premises to export or print off the reports that they needed to get the job done – secretly hoping that they don’t forget to get something – making them appear unprofessional and apologetic for wasting your time (and theirs). The accountant would then pray that their version of the software was at least as up to date as your version – to ensure data compatibility. The accountant would need you to take a backup of the software’s data, probably copying it onto a physical USB stick which you would have to post out to, or pass over in person to the accountant. In order for your accountant to prepare your year end accounts and tax returns, they would need to ensure that they had the same software installed on their own machine(s). Take the most advanced of those three older systems, desktop bookkeeping software. Gone are the days when business owners had no option but to use pen and paper, spreadsheets or clunky desktop bookkeeping software packages. There is no disputing it, cloud bookkeeping packages, such as Xero, have revolutionized the business owner to accountant relationship.

What does xero accounting software do