The Journal of Accountancy reports that doing business in the cloud should cost less than doing business on-premise.   A survey of 1,000 accounting firms found that 70% of respondents increased their use of web-based applications in the cloud between 2010 and 2012, and that cloud accounting is becoming more popular.

The article suggests doing a three-year amortisation of upfront costs for an on-premise application including servers, software licenses and installation plus estimated maintenance for 3 years and comparing that to the cost of subscribing to the cloud version of the product for three years.

“This can be applied to partial versus full cloud conversions and should be done on an application-by-application basis to determine whether there is cost savings by moving each application to the cloud,” said the Journal of Accountancy.

• In most instances, by moving accounting functions to the cloud, an SME could expect to reduce support costs …