Working late at night, on long weekends, and having little time for yourself or your family? If you are like most professionals in the taxation industry, you often feel like letting the work dictate your daily schedule, particularly during the tax season. An average year in the life of tax professionals like you includes all of the above, plus
- major code changes
- new regulations, and
- complexities related to preparing your clients’ taxes
To streamline tax workflows, switching to Drake Tax software is one way to end the continuous manual processes and data entries. Drake Tax Planner, Drake Scheduler, or Drake Documents, there are several features of this advanced software that makes it a go-to solution for tax preparation needs. While you get it all with the licensed copy of this tax software, what about empowering it further with the help of cloud technology? This is possible when you switch to Drake hosted solution and hire a cloud service provider to fulfill your business needs.
If you are new to hosting business applications on the cloud, you might want to know more about Drake hosting advantages before making any decision. Let’s dive deeper to discover what Drake tax software on the cloud has in store for you.
Cost savings on in-house IT setup
If you want to decide whether to use Drake hosted software on an in-house server or cloud server, there are several aspects you must consider. Although both these options seem to perform similar functions in sharing, storing, and protecting information, there are key differences between the two in terms of user experience and cost.
Traditionally, tax professionals have chosen in-house servers to host applications and share files. However, it is essential to note that this option requires substantial upfront capital investments. While the servers can be configured to meet the changing needs of your business, you will also need a dedicated IT manager for maintenance and upgrade. All this makes up a significant initial investment for a tax professional to commit to.
If you have several members on your team and looking for an option other than an in-house server, dedicated Drake hosting will be pretty beneficial. It does not require upfront hardware and IT maintenance expenses and is suitable for businesses that outgrow data storage in less time.
Remote access to data and application
The tax industry's growing demand for cloud technology is remote accessibility of hosted data and software. Amidst the changing laws and rising competition, it has become increasingly important for tax professionals like you to access tax software on the go. If you prefer using Drake Tax software, you want to get things done even when you are away from the office or at midnight to improve productivity. This becomes even more important if your clients are widely spread geographically.
By using a hosted Drake solution offered by leading cloud service providers, you can not only access the hosted data from a remote location but also eliminate various risks and vulnerabilities. Potentially, any data file, software, or add-ons hosted on the cloud server can be accessed, utilized, and tracked remotely for your business benefits.
Easy scalability
One of the significant benefits of switching to cloud Drake over hosting it on an on-premise architecture is the ability to scale the resources quickly. For many tax professionals, this sounds like mixing science and technology into their world of taxes, which can be challenging to understand.
*What does scalability imply in relation to cloud hosting?
*
In simple words, it refers to the ability to scale the cloud resources up or down as needed to fulfill the demand. The scalability benefit of the cloud allows tax professionals to manage costs and resources better. You do not need to spend weeks or months before an expected high demand to overhaul the infrastructure, as in the case of on-premise solutions. Instead, your cloud solution provider already has the resources in place for you to scale up or down to achieve your business goals.
Once the demand for additional cloud resources - vRAM, storage, and computing power, is gone, you can revert to a suitable plan for Drake tax software on cloud.
Disaster recovery to deal with tough times
Natural disasters (like floods and earthquakes) or human-induced disasters (including malware intrusion or ransomware) loom over every tax professional, irrespective of the scale of their practice. It can result in loss of access to critical systems and data, a delay in preparing taxes for your clients, or a complete business shutdown. The consequence of any disaster can negatively impact your tax firm's productivity, revenue, and reputation, which is why it is essential to have a disaster recovery plan in place.
The next important question is - Should you invest time and money in developing such a plan by yourself?
The best part is that you need not worry about this after picking the best Drake hosted software. If a disruption occurs in the form of a disaster and causes loss of computing resources or data, your cloud Drake can still be accessed and recovered.
Besides this, you must ask the hosting provider some of the following questions to gauge their service quality:
- Can you have access to the backed-up data readily?
- How will you access the restored data and Drake application?
- How long will it take to get things back to normal after a disaster?
Seamless collaboration between teams
In technical terms, this is known as cloud collaboration - a method that allows various team members to work together on documents and applications hosted on a cloud server.
Envision the implementation and benefits of cloud collaboration for your tax firm while using cloud Drake -
You and your team members use their credentials to access Drake tax software on cloud simultaneously without facing any performance lag. You also find it easier to access the same tax data files in real-time and modify/edit them simultaneously. Your team members can also view different files hosted on the cloud and can see the changes made by others. All of this happens irrespective of the user’s location.
Cloud collaboration eliminates the chaos in handling multiple versions of the same tax files and the resulting human errors.
Conclusion
Drake hosting, with all its benefits for your tax firm, has the potential to give you an edge over the competitors. If you have plans to grow the scale of your business further, consider having hosted Drake as a part of the plan.
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