Now that we are out of the holiday season, it means we can look back, and can you believe that it’s only been about a month since Christmas?

It seems that a lot has happened since then, but maybe now that we have passed the inauguration of Donald Trump and its immediate fallout, we can get back to feeling normal. Or maybe in this holiday-season lookback, we can at least start to give some hope to those who are finding it difficult to come by.

This optimism can come in the economic realm, where numbers show that spending over the holiday season grew at a high rate. The growth was at least mild across many indicators, but was especially pronounced in the online realm.

This does not surprise me, as more and more people I know get the most value from their Amazon Prime membership around the holidays. Also, knowing people that have done ALL of their holiday shopping online is no longer rare and these numbers seem only bound to grow.

It stands to reason then that at the same time that those numbers are increasing, I have also noticed a marked decrease in the amount of people who worry about shopping online. Even those in older generations (traditionally the ones least accepting of new technology) no longer seem to have many qualms about inputting a credit card number online to make a purchase.

With all those dynamics in place, though, it does still surprise me that some people are still hesitant about embracing online accounting. If society is already pushing more and more of their transactions into cyberspace, why hold back from embracing that next step?

From my end, I not only have been moving to learn about such new types of accounting, but am impressed at what it allows me to do. Many of the traditional issues one has with an accountant, after all, happened with communication breakdowns and the ensuing waiting those breakdowns cause. If I am waiting on a couple answer to easy questions, of a few receipts, and my client is then waiting in turn for me to address them once received, those bits of time add up and can hold books from being finalized when they’re 98% of the way there.

Now, however, there are more ways to this communication to happen, more access to books on both sides of the relationship, and thus more ways to finish things quicker.

With that, reporting happens faster.

With that, reporting is more powerful because it more accurately reflects what is happening in your business as this moment

With that, why would one not want to embrace these new technologies?

Those who do not want to make the cloud accounting jump seem to most hesitant about security concerns. I hope then that this little anecdote about how much holiday shopping happens online helps illuminate why this need not be a giant concern. Sure, no one can ever 100% guarantee complete cyber security, but with that many online transactions happening, they are clearly coming with a level of security with which we are comfortable.

So if you have been reticent about making the cloud accounting jump in the past, we understand. But if it is something you would like to explore, we would love to hear from you now and see what we can do to help.