Save the date – Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 1:00 pm CDT. That’s when the Cloud Accounting Institute will sponsor its first Best Practices webinar. I hope you will join us.

Outgrowing QuickBooks is a gradual process. Unless there is a compelling reason to migrate, such as an acquisition, organizational inertia tends to take hold and delay the process of selecting a replacement. Just staying put seems like a safe option, but is it?

Let’s go back to the boardroom.  This time, imagine that instead of pulling data manually from QuickBooks and dumping it into Excel, you are using a cloud accounting application.

The General Ledger view is open in front of you. All divisions and offices in your company access the application over the Internet, as you do, and all transactions are written to the same database. So you – the CFO of your company – are looking at your company’s finances in real time. With a single mouse-click, you select Sales Budget vs. Actual by Location, and print it. A job that used to take hours is done in under a minute.

When your business has outgrown the entry-level accounting system QuickBooks, you will be experiencing one or more points of pain that might include:  excessive use of Excel spreadsheets, lack of required reports, frequent mistakes and the need for constant proofing. Each of these issues requires time, sometimes overtime, and possibly additional staffing.

One of the surest signs that you are ready to graduate from QuickBooks…

Tax time–two of the most dreaded words in any language. If you have to eat every meal at your desk and only see your kids when they’re asleep in order to keep up with tax preparation or reviewing returns, you know what I mean.

To me, what makes tax season so nightmarish is not just the mountain of data or the avalanche of schedules and forms. It’s that tax reporting means that you – as the controller, accountant, or CPA – find yourself face to face with the limitations of the company’s or the client’s accounting system just when there’s no time to do anything about it.  And you have to clean up the mess before you can apply your expertise.

I certainly hope that readers of this blog feel that they derive benefits from it. (And please use the Comment tool to let me know if that’s so and what else you want to read!) But members of the Cloud Accounting Institute can claim certain tangible benefits and this post will show you how.

If you sign up for a membership in CAI, I will share with you the AccessTekBusinessSimple (TM) questionnaire that I use with clients for requirements definition and cost/benefit analysis. In addition, Ian Campbell, CEO of Nucleus Research, has given us permission to distribute the latest, greatest version of  his company’s much-requested TCO tool, “On-Premise Versus On-Demand Rapid TCO Comparison.“

The old folks say there is nothing new under the the sun. That saying never made sense to me when I was younger. I belong to a generation that saw amazing inventions in computing and telecommunications come seemingly out of the blue to transform the way we live and work.

Now, with over 20 years of experience in providing technology services to clients, I see it differently. New things come out of old patterns. In computing, the pendulum keeps swinging between two poles: dedicated and shared resources. (Got kids? Watch them flip back and forth between ”That’s mine” and “Let’s share.” Same song, different verse.)

Art Rosenberg got me thinking about this with his “back to the future” blog  on the roots of interactive applications.

In my last post, I shared predictions that various observers of cloud computing had made based on their perspectives and the information available to them. I gave them precedence because the Cloud Accounting Institute has been in existence only a few months–not long enough to do much original research. But that is going to change, starting now and hopefully starting with you.

The Cloud Accounting Institute is launching its first survey

Making predictions is a time-honored way to celebrate the New Year. It goes along with making resolutions. In the depth of winter we pump ourselves up for a fresh start by asserting that we know where we’re going and we know what it takes to get there. So let me confess, I read lists of predictions and resolutions with a passion. I’d like to share two of this year’s crop with you.

Andrew Hickey’s “10 Cloud Predictions for 2012″ starts out, “Ok, ok. This time it’s for real. We’ve been hearing it for the last four or five years, but 2o12 is it. 2012 is the real deal. 2012 is, for lack of a better term, the year of the cloud.” You’ll see that statement repeated everywhere this year.

It is almost that time of year again – time to close the books on the current year and celebrate the holidays with friends and family. I wish you every success and happiness. At this time of year, I am very aware that the bottom line counts, but the people you love count even more.

In keeping with that, Season’s Greetings from everyone at the Cloud Accounting Institute! We will be taking time off for the holidays and you will not hear from us again until the beginning of the new year.  Come January, I will tell you about our plans for an awards program for cloud accounting project leaders. Make a New Year’s resolution to enter your project!