“There is no such thing as luck. Luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Ice T “

In this podcast I talk about the steps required to migrate to Cloud Accounting.  Last week’s episode talked about how Cloud Accounting connects you more easily to your numbers, navigating your business present & future with ease.

Your mobile phone can double up as part of your Cloud tool kit, it also is useful for making calls!

The 3 stages to Cloud Migration, Onboarding if you want, are covered, these stages are

Stage 1: Preparation

This involves

✅Agreeing on the applications to plug into

✅The people in your business to involve

✅The training and support required

✅What products, services and/or projects to track

✅The date to go ahead

✅The Cloud version that suits the business

Stage 2: Transferring

This is where the heavy lifting part is carried out.  It is the transferring & setting up what your business wants and needs, and covers

✅Existing financial info

✅Customer & supplier records

✅Bank accounts

✅Meaningful account headings

✅Information Display Dashboard

✅Sales invoices and quote templates

Stage 3: Go Live

All is ready for your new Numbers world to go live. Once that is done it's all about moving forward

In This Episode

• Knowing the stages involved in Cloud Migration, i.e. getting ready for Cloud Action
• 
  
• The part that your mobile phone plays in running your Cloud Systems
• 
  
• Using your Cloud Accounting system to help your business keep the cash wheels moving
• 
  
• Developing your own Numbers confidence and decisions
• 
  
• Take more control of your numbers to help make you money, survive and thrive

Links

https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast/id1500471288

https://play.google.com/music/m/I3pvpztpjvjw6yrw2kctmtyckam?t=I_Hate_Numbers

https://open.spotify.com/show/5lKjqgbYaxnIAoTeK0zins

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast

https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business–Economics-Podcasts/I-Hate-Numbers-p1298505/

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers Podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

Hi folks. It's Mahmood here with another weekly episode of the podcast I Hate Numbers. Now, far from hating numbers. I mean, why would you? Then, this show is really about getting business owners out there, getting you guys to get a bit closer to your best business friend there is. It's a friend that's not going to lie to you.

It's a friend that you can rely on in times of calamity, prosperity, and calm. It’s your business numbers. Your business numbers give you direction, give you energy, enable you to give you the business that you deserve, enable you to prosper, and it helps you navigate. Now, don't get me wrong, there are other things that are important in your business,

not dismissing that at all, but if you don't have numbers in part of your business DNA, then you're going to have a very difficult time getting your business to do what you would like with it. Now, today's show we've talked about previously, numbers about how we capture them, those records. We've talked about paper. We've talked about spreadsheets. We've talked about different devices.

We've talked about the importance of why those transactions need to be captured. So, what you spend, where your money comes from, who you owe money to, who owes you money. All those things that exist in your business, if you don't collect them in some methodical structured way, then effectively you're not really going to be able to tell a great deal about what's going on in your business.

You're going to rely on what's in your memory. You're going to rely on what your intuition says here, but let's get real. This is about running your business, so you need to make sure you understand, extract, and you need to work in real time. So, many businesses out there, the closest they might get to their numbers, the closest they'll actually have an understanding of what's going on in their business will probably be an annual exercise where they give the information to their accountant or advisor.

They might do that work themselves and they'll figure out how much profit they've made. They'll figure out what's going on in their business and do their obligatory tax returns, et cetera. That's cool, but that is not the way that you want to run your business. You need information to give now. You need to set yourself milestones.

You need to give yourself accountability. So, what we need to think about today is we touched on what we called the cloud last week, and the cloud is not some angelic thing we are sitting on here. It's a term that originated back in the 1990s when technical people, believe it or not, were trying to draw diagrams of technology systems.

The cloud was a good visual representation to them. If you do anything, like you've got any online subscriptions, if you do anything where you don't actually have a physical pc, that's basically the cloud my friends. We're not going to be talking specific about a particular package. That's not the purpose of this podcast.

That's not the purpose of this show. Every advisor, myself included, have got their own particular favorites, but let's not think about a specific product that you're going to go. Let's think about the cloud and when we've made that wonderful decision to migrate, what do we do next? Now, a few things first. You might be thinking, well, you've not really convinced me, Mahmood, so what's the benefit of the cloud?

We're not big enough to justify that and I would say put that thought process out of your mind. Whether you are a small acorn business that's just starting up, or your aspirations in your business, because you want to reset a different work-life balance is that you want to make a modest income, you're not about conquering the world, or whether you're a large growing oak-tree-size of a business that wants have a big impact, wants to spread themselves outside of your locality. Whatever your size,

cloud and digital accounting is there for you. Numbers we know can tell you what you're spending money on, can tell you what your future direction is going to be, which customers are more profitable for you. There are some. They'll tell you which customers are actually losing you money and there will be some.

They set you milestones. You can drill down. You can look at things like how much am I making per project for each customer category. All those wonderful things, we need to get that data, those transactions in there. Some of the immediate benefits for me for the cloud. I've dealt with businesses and clients that are very small, very modest amount of income, and we're talking a few thousand. To them, are very large there.

So, there is an application of package that suits all budgets, all different businesses, and the great thing about the cloud, it crosses different business types. So, if you're a social enterprise, if you're a charity, if you're a private business, it makes no odds. You know, a cloud solution, keeping a hold of your numbers crosses across all those different sector boundaries. Now, benefits.

First of all, you've got a very powerful computer that you probably carry with you, and you probably on it far too much just like myself, and that's your mobile phone. Your mobile phone can double up as your portable computer. You can do things like scanning in information and if you get fed up with bits of paper, those Amazon receipts, lots of different applications like PayPal, emails

where we’ve got invoices here. If your desk is anything like mine, which is a bit cluttered, luckily you can't see that, then you can dispense that. Your computer, your phone acts up as a scanning device. You can upload. You don't even have to keep the document because it'll store it and scan it in for you. You can keep a track

on what you're spending. You can, believe it or not, use this device. Doesn't matter, you don't have to be physically located in an office anymore. You can issue invoices out to your customer. We've talked about the importance of getting paid on time. Well, my experience has been that if you tap into the cloud and you use that to generate the invoices to your customers, use that as part of your armory for chasing up those customers

that might be a bit naughty. You'll find your credit control dramatically improves as a result. You can see who owes you money, how old that debt is, and it gives you much more power. You can set up a dashboard. Log in once a day or however often you wish to. You can see immediately just like a dashboard in a car, what's going on.

So, you can see as a headline how much money is in your bank account. Good to know. You can see how much profit you're making. Good to know. You can see what your sales activity is. Good to know. You can set your dashboard to whatever's important in your particular business. Security. No more having to worry about physical backups.

You know, it's all done for you and it updates the system, it’s done automatically. You can generate, and for me, the real power of a cloud system, yes, it does great things in the productivity side of things for capturing data, for recording data, for putting things where they are, and don't run away with the idea,

by the way, this is a simple tick-box exercise. Oh, it's easy. Putting things into computers is just straightforward, but effectively remember that old acronym of GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. So, you've got to have some understanding where they go, just like you would do with anything here, but it's the access, it's the real-time information.

It's about saying, how much profit have I made today? How much profit did I make against the milestones I've set myself? Am I actually making profit in these particular projects that I'm running? Am I making profits in these particular directions, these customer groups, you know. So, the the, the questions that you have unanswered, you don't have to wait

for an eternity to get that answer back. As long as your data's being captured and it's there, you can really drill down and you can look at the reality of your business in so many different ways. There is a cost, by all means. The cost predominantly is the initial setup, which we're going to deal with later on in this podcast.

It's going to be dealt with also in terms of the maintenance of it. Relatively modest, but compared to conventional systems, you'll find what you get back in terms of benefits, time saving, power, releasing the number of energy into your business here is going to far outweigh the cost and the investment of doing it.

So, for me, it's a no-brainer. Think of it like a spreadsheet on steroids plus. Now, having said that, let's think in terms of what do we need to actually do to actually go from whatever we're doing at the moment into embracing the world of the cloud? You have to take two perspectives, I think here.

Number one, what do you have at the moment? If you're a new startup business, you've not really done anything at the moment, then the transition to the cloud is going to be quite straightforward. You set the system up. You've got to think about before. Preparation is really quite an important thing here.

There's an old saying about piss poor preparation for planning. I'm not going to talk, expand it too much, but you really got to prepare before you start using something, just like you would in anything. So, think about what do you actually want from your system. So, if you are a business that offers different services, one thing that I would probably suggest is look at your different services.

Those are the different ways the money comes into your business, and you want to be able to track and record each of those here so you can see what you're spending and what you're generating by way of sales. Apps. See, if you’ve got a website, if you're a membership platform, if you are using other third-party software where you are gathering data, you may want to plug that in and connect to your cloud system.

The cloud system is not your ecosystem, the center of it. There may be other things that are going on on your website. There are other things that are going on in other sort of social media feeds. You might have stock, you know. You may have a business that's got different applications. Join them all up.

For me, the power of numbers is not just the financial transactions, it's the other things that you connect it with as well. And that's going to be in a future podcast when we drill down that even more. Think about if you going to communicate that into your organisation. So, if you're a one-person operation, you are the person that you communicate to.

If you've got lots of people in the organisation, then you are going to have to tell them. You have to take them on that journey with you. As you make that transition, make sure they're involved in the conversations. Make sure they're involved in what they need from that system. And then also think about the training and support that you need.

If it's a transition, if it's new to you, you may need training on the technology. You may need training on how it should work. But remember, fundamentally, it's about giving benefits in your business, so that investment in training and support at the beginning will re-rewards as it goes down. Now, the day of the migration. This is where effectively a little bit more of the information gets involved.

So, if you are transferring from an old system to a new system, don't have that be a barrier. There are lots of different ways of getting your old historic information into a new system. It also gives you a great opportunity to revisit what you're doing at the moment and thinking, okay, do I like the way things are described?

Do I like all the headings that are going in there to describe all the different monies that I'm spending? Think user-friendly. Don't think jargon. Think about your customer accounts and your supplier accounts. Are they up to date? So, it gives you a good opportunity to tidy up what you've got at the moment before you start afresh here.

Set up your bank accounts. Again, for me, one of the powers of cloud is how much heavy lifting is taken away from you. So, things like bank feeds, the bank accounts you want to connect, and what I mean by that is it doesn't gobble up the data. It means you can have a bank account now. You can have your application, and every time your bank account gets updated, every day, that information can be streamed automatically into your new ecosystem.

Set up the headings how you want information displayed, and then ongoing. So, effectively, who's going to be involved in access to your information? You can tear it. So, some people can have putting information in. Some people can be read only. You could limit what some people read in your organisation. So, all those things you need to think about, they sound top heavy, they're not.

If you plan it well, if you execute it well, you are going to have a fantastic time ahead of you and so much power is released. One thing I would probably say though, ladies and gentlemen, is that you've got to think in terms of the technology that you're using at the moment. Is it fit for purpose? So, as you go through here, as you go through all these things and you're thinking, what do I need to do?

You've got to think in terms of, do I need to train any of my staff that needs to be able to get access to the system? Do I need to train myself? Do I need some familiarity with what's going on? Biggest thing that you'll need in terms of investment is a good, decent internet connection. So, unfortunately, the downside of the cloud is if you don't have access to internet, it doesn't make it impossible -

well it does actually, because you can't operate it - but a good internet connection is really all you need. Devices, as long as it connects the internet, you know, that's fine. There's a great phrase that I’ve heard from Bill Gates, he didn't tell me personally, but it's one I've come across here and it was something we're always mindful of. I certainly am.

And he says as follows, the first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second, which I love is that, automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. So, this is a good opportunity for you to see your workflows, how things are going on, and to make them better.

I've given you a flavour of the, what I call, onboarding, migrating to the cloud. Something I'd fairly recommend. Something, I would say whatever your size of business is, you need to embrace it. And the reason I say that, I'm not a software reseller, that's not the name of the game for me, but to actually grab your numbers by the scruff, to be able to release the power of those numbers to actually help you navigate your path, to help you get the best you can out of your business and make money,

and become prosperous. You need information, and information comes from numbers, and the key to that is getting an engine that sits there neatly, gobbling up all the raw data, all the transactions, and spewing them out to not only satisfy the authorities, but to satisfy your thirst for information. Guys, listen.

Hope you've got some value out of that podcast. If you want to hear some more information, get more details here, I'll put it in the show notes. Got tons of information to share with you. More importantly, I'd love if you could download, have a listen. If you think it's worth a thumbs up, recommend it to your friends.

We get to share and spread that message of numbers by getting you guys to give us a thumbs up, to listen to it. We're going to tell you about what's happening in the future shows as it comes, but for now, have a fantastic week and grab the cloud and ride it and surf it. We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show.

We hope you got some value. If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode. We look forward to you joining us next week for another I Hate Numbers episode.