Start the New Financial Year With Your Head in the Cloud
                     Start the New 
Financial Year With 
Your Head in the 
Cloud
The new financial year is here. Accountants, 
bookkeepers and business owners are in the middle of 
finalising financial year documents for the taxman, 
creating PAYG statements and not only doing month 
end, but year-end. 
It’s a traditionally busy time for the financial and 
accounting part of the world. I saw a status update on 
Facebook the other day which made me smile. 
“Don’t see my husband for 30 days at this time of the 
year #marriedanaccountant “ 
I am going to make the assumption that perhaps her 
husband is still following the traditional method of 
desktop accounting because if he was using cloud-
based accounting programs and practices, there would 
be less hard graft and more automation. Less of the 
long work days and more of the getting home to see his 
family. 
The new financial year is a great time to regroup and 
look at where there are opportunities to improve in all 
areas of business. And it is the perfect time to make any 
significant changes to bookkeeping and payroll 
processes. 
As a business owner or bookkeeper if you were thinking 
of the accounting side of the business across to the 
cloud, now is the perfect time to do it. 
Here’s three reasons why:
1. Mind space
At this time of year you are right in the middle of the 
end of year accounting, payroll and tax tasks. You can 
see what isn’t working and is. Strategise for change 
NOW while you are experiencing firsthand the 
problems of remote desktop accounting and introduce 
new ways of doing things while people are exasperated 
with the old way. You’ll get more internal uptake that 
way too. Look at programs such as Xero Online 
accounting software that offer features such as 
automated bank reconciliation and real time reporting 
– perfect for this time of year. 
2. On the Go
Many of our clients at Cornerstone are small to medium 
business of all shapes, sizes and services. But what they all 
have in common is the trend towards running ‘mobile 
businesses’. By that term, we don’t mean the dog washer 
who comes to your house or the mobile mechanic, we are 
talking about people doing business on the run. Gone are 
the days of having to wait until you get back to the office to 
action something. With cloud accounting and some 
fantastic user-friendly bookkeeping and payroll software 
such as Intuit QuickBooks, you can approve a leave request, 
update a project’s profit and loss statement or revise next 
week’s roster while you are on a building site, at a 
networking event or (if you live in Sydney!) stuck in traffic. 
3. Clean slate
The new financial year is the perfect time to start with 
a clean slate. We all try (!) to do this on a personal level 
on January 1 of every year, so why not do it from a 
business management and accounting perspective at 
the beginning of the financial year? There’s less back-
tracking and adjusting. It’s a fresh new start. 
So make the 2015-16 financial year your own. Make 
business practice resolutions to take the financial side 
of your business to the next level. Breathe new life into 
your accounting and payroll processes to save time and 
money.