Hosted Desktop for Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Tax Consultants

We see a lot of interest in hosted desktop solutions for accountants and others involved in business accounting.  A significant majority of our customers use our platform to run accounting packages including Sage Accounts, Encore, IRIS and Quickbooks, as well as bespoke applications or those developed in Microsoft Access.  One of the reasons is the ability for companies to share the application instantly with their accountant or bookkeeper without having to go through the hassle of backing up and restoring databases.

If you work in accounting, tax consultancy or business finance take a look at some of the reasons other businesses in this sector have moved their IT to a Hosted Desktop solution:

• Application Sharing

Traditionally businesses would invest in complex IT systems to provide a network platform to run their line of business accounting package. With hosted desktop solution that expense and hassle is removed and replaced with a secure, reliable, flexible and cost effective system that can scale to suit the business needs.

• Run the application you want.

If you run an older version of an off the shelf accounting package you may not be able to enjoy all the benefits that the cloud computing revolution can bring.   So the software vendors oblige you to upgrade to their latest version, often moving to a subscription model so you are paying for life.  With a hosted desktop solution you get all the benefits of cloud computing but can run any version of your software you like.  We still run Sage v12 (circa 2006) on a hosted desktop.

• Flexible Working

Many businesses outsource their bookkeeping and accounting, and many bookkeepers and accountants work from home, or employ staff who work from home.   A hosted desktop solution means that everyone involved can work on the same live data.  Some of our customers have a generic account called “finance” that they share between their bookkeepers, accountants and other people who only need occasional access.   They can take turns to use the finance desktop.

• Reliability and Security

While some accounting software companies have developed whole systems that are web (cloud) based there is always a trade-off and you lose some features and functionality.  Other vendors have implemented “interesting” cloud based synchronisation solutions to try and provide the same flexibility you get from cloud computing while still retaining the feature rich desktop application.  These inevitably suffer from corruption when things don’t sync correctly.  We’ve had accounting firms move to our hosted desktop platform following problems with Sage Drive, and also concerns over the bandwidth requirements for Sage Drive. On a hosted desktop those problems go away.

With hosted desktop everything, including the desktop application and the database runs in the cloud.  No applications or data are held on your PC, so everything “just works”, and if the Internet goes down, no need to panic, everything will be there just as you left it when it’s back up again.

Moving to our service is easy and from only £34.00 per month

For accountants moving to hosted desktops is very straightforward, all the setup, installation is done for you and we’ll help you with data migration.   It’s also risk free, you can test your applications with copies of your data to make sure everything works as expected and then cut-over with a final data copy when you and your business users are happy.

Hosted desktops cost from as little as £34.00 per user per month, that’s less than your average mobile phone contract.