Small Business Cloud Empowered


By Denise Loter-Koch

Like the advent of the locomotive, the cloud creates business opportunities that simply weren’t possible before now. Get up to speed fast in May at an exciting cloud-empowered Portland event.

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By Denise Loter-Koch

Like the advent of the locomotive, the cloud creates business opportunities that simply weren’t possible before now. Get up to speed fast in May at an exciting cloud-empowered Portland event.

2014 was a tremendous year for the maturation of a brave new world of technologies for small business accounting and management, but I emphasize that this “new world” still resides in the future for most SMBs (small to medium sized businesses).

image004Certainly there is nothing inherently “wrong” with the old world, except the product makers of the rapidly receding 20th century never anticipated most of the technologies that businesses of today must make use of. For example, Ecommerce, smart devices, and paperless offices.

And then there is the emergence of seamless synchronized business processes and real time accounting services that can provide today’s SMB with instant up to the moment financial information on the business health, while requiring significantly reduced manual entry bookkeeping. How? With bank feeds and QuickBooks software and 3rd-party cloud add-ons, including mobile banking, cloud-based employee time clocks, business expense and receipt virtual archive and accounting sync, as well as the plethora of options in BI products…the list is long and growing exponentially.

Disruptive innovations are an inevitable aspect of our evolving business environment, and just as innovation is primary to human and business evolution it’s just as natural for businesses to seize opportunities created by this explosion of innovative new small business technologies.

A quarter century ago, it was revolutionary that a small business operator would purchase a computer to manage their own bookkeeping records. New products suddenly flooded the market in the ‘90s that provided freedom for business owners and were adopted by millions of small companies.

“But new technologies often come with some unintended drawbacks. For example, with the new “distributed” computing model, accountants started to lose control of the general ledger because they could no longer be the gatekeepers of entries to the general ledger. And as client-based accounting software has flourished, tax preparers continue to receive even bigger messes from clients than in the old shoe-box days,” says Accounting Technologist Doug Sleeter.

Small businesses falter and fail quite frequently, at a rate of 80% according to SBA statistics. At my company, ebs Associates, we are on a mission to help businesses to beat those odds. With that goal in mind, ebs is hosting in May a one-of-a-kind event for business owners, entrepreneurs, office managers and accounting professionals, qb empowered Northwest.

Empowered Northwest is an event not to be missed, featuring business and cloud strategies with educational courses led by the most influential thought leaders and technology experts in the industry. Participate in interactive educational sessions and have plenty of time for networking with other professionals in every stage of the conference.

When a paradigm shifts it is like the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates leaving the landscape forever changed. The cloud has created a paradigm shift as radical as the industrial revolution for small businesses and consumers alike. For companies and startups that haven’t yet made the most of it, the opportunity to re-envision products and services and create innovative new ways to add real value for clients and customers is beckoning.

The year 2014 heralded a turning point in the maturity of the digital age. Nearly three billion people – 40% of the world’s population – now use the Internet according to the latest figures from the United Nations.

So where can this digital shift take you and your business? With the Internet of things, businesswise the cloud as a mechanism is no longer the primary focus. Rather, what’s important is the benefit that digital can bring. In this respect, it’s not about the engine, it’s about all the new places that engine can take you.

I personally invite you to board this exciting train for a two-day adventure orientation of all things cloud-empowered, at qb empowered Northwest, and then prepare to take your business to the next level and beyond. Learn more at www.empowerednw.com and if you are a QuickBooks Enterprise User, register free, on me!

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Author Bio: Denise Loter-Koch, President/CEO, ebs Associates, Inc.

Denise is an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor, nationally recognized QuickBooks educator and industry expert, and an Intuit Advisory Council member. Denise draws on more than 30 years of experience assisting business owners, managers and bookkeepers with their accounting and bookkeeping, as well as teaching bookkeeping, accounting and QuickBooks classes, webinars and seminars throughout the western United States. A former corporate controller, Denise founded ebs Associates, Inc. in 1982. She has developed one of the foremost teams of Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors and has taken her company to the highest ranks within the Intuit community. Today, ebs Associates is recognized by Intuit as one of only a select few of its Premier Resellers authorized to sell and implement Intuit products; Denise also serves on the Intuit Advisory Council where she represents the voice of the Intuit Resellers and accountants on issues of strategy, product development, programs and services for Intuit’s Reseller Division.