Coronavirus impact: Chartered accountants, small business houses shift to cloud accounting softwares

These businesses, chartered accountants, small and medium enterprises are now slowly shifting to new tools to comply with their clients and collaborate with their teams effectively.

Thus, making this need to be addressed at the earliest through best possible solutions to be secure and easy to manage.

To help them strengthen their understanding and knowledge of taxes and compliance several new tools are making entry replacing the traditional accounting methods like Bhaikhatas, age old -data entry systems.

Many start-ups and existing accounting tool providers are innovating new software products to cater to this urgent need.

There are 3 categories of people which still exist: one who had already moved to an online system, second one who has not yet moved to online and cloud based solutions and the third category are those who were in dilemma and have moved partly to the online system and partly still in offline mode.

So, what is the future? Has lockdown shifted the CAs of the country towards a new style of working?

Well! Yes, indeed the lockdown has shifted CAs to new tools.

"The future certainly lies in cloud computing and cloud compliance. Cloud-based computing is the way forward, during this lockdown several businesses want to move to cloud-based products for the ease of use. This has also been reiterated by the world economic forum," says Archit Gupta, Founder, and CEO, ClearTax.

"The situation is not expected to improve in the near future and cloud is the way to go. This can help CAs stay compliant and pay the tax dues on time. ClearTax software uses advanced automatons to reduce manual work. While focusing on speed products our engineers have built complex codes to provide to 50 plus validations that a customer can use to avoid incorrect flings," he adds.

Similarly, Kapil Rana, Founder and Chairman, HostBooks Limited says, "the current COVID-19 scenario has put forward many questions about our preparedness on IT infrastructure, IT capabilities, and above all our mentalities towards business in such peculiar and uncertain situations. Businesses are facing difficulties in managing and fulfilling all the process and compliances."

"There is one thing this situation has taught us and that is the urgent need for businesses to switch to SaaS-based cloud solutions from traditional methods. This scenario has opened up a huge market opportunity for cloud – based accounting and compliance applications.

New age features like single-source data entry, single click return filing, collaborative platform, business intelligence, inbuilt data management system, updated with statutory changes, cost-effective and easy access.

Businesses are extensively using online collaborative platforms to allocate work within their team members, auditors, and consultants. They are also opting for softwares that provide them access to company records needed for various compliance requirements with the right amount of inbuilt security features," he adds.

HostBooks is a start-up providing all-in-one automated business solutions to manage accounting and finances.

Thus, the ones who have already moved to the cloud are efficiently managing their work in this lockdown as they are in the cloud and their data is with them anytime, anywhere on the go.