CLOUD ACCOUNTING OVERVIEW

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2 INTRODUCTION Successful Legal Professional not only need to focus on growing revenue and expanding their practice, but they must continuously monitor their business finances in order to maximize growth, plan their resources, and work with their accounting advisor to minimize their tax implications. Often however, the pursuit of growing a sustainable legal practice takes a higher priority over managing the day to day finances, this lack of time coupled with ineffective accounting technology can result in sluggish growth, higher accounting fees, and potentially unnecessary higher taxes. Cloud accounting can help your legal practice regain control of your finances, streamline your accounting process, and provide greater access of real-time data anytime, anywhere and on any device. This guide will explore some of the major benefits of cloud accounting, discuss our preferred accounting platform, some of its most important features, and how cloud accounting can make your legal practice efficient and profitable

3 CLOUD ACCOUNTING OVERVIEW What is cloud accounting? Cloud accounting is the use of online accounting software to manage the business financial records, data is stored on remote servers and accessed through any internet connected device rather than stored on a computer physical hard drive. investment in data servers, ongoing system maintenance and expensive overhead costs to secure their sensitive client data. Which cloud service provider is best for my practice? There are many cloud accounting providers in the marketspace today however, our accounting firm used exclusively XERO for its highly secure data infrastructure and powerful features, a must for legal professionals. How secure is cloud accounting? Xero stores all of our clients accounting information on highly secure corporate grade servers, with system redundancies and continuous backup in different data centers located in multiple geographical areas. This approach allows a small legal practice to mimic the same data security and data redundancies enjoyed by large multinational companies without the huge capital 1

4 THE BENEFITS OF CLOUD ACCOUNTING FOR YOUR PRACTICE Traditional accounting software have the following limitations and problems: The data in the system isn t up-to-date and neither is the software. Costly charges associated to accounting backups. Upgrades are expensive, and time-consuming with little to no help from customer support. 4. Everything runs online, there s nothing to install and everything is backed up automatically. 5. Upfront business costs are reduced version upgrades, maintenance, system administration costs and server failures are no longer issues. Five ways cloud software benefits a legal practice: 1. Clear overview of the business financial position in realtime. 2. Multi-user access makes it easy to collaborate online between different members of your firm, and your accountant. 3. Worry-free maintenance means legal professionals can spend more time doing what they love rather than worrying about accounting. 2

5 REAL-TIME CLOUD ACCOUNTING PUTS YOU PRACTICE IN CONTROL OF YOUR FINANCES Benefits of the Xero Dashboard: Xero allows our clients and our firm to collaborate in real-time as we work and view the same financial information. At a glance, Xero provides important information related to your practice including: A summary of your bank accounts balances. Visibility of how much money you have coming in and going out. A watch list of important accounts that need to be monitored. Expense claims that need to be reimbursed. Ability to drill down information at the transaction level. Better visibility of cash flow. All relevant business information in one single screen. 3

6 INVOICING AND BILLING WITH EASE Cloud accounting allows unparalleled benefits when it comes to invoicing and billing in fact, our cloud accounting platform allows our legal professionals clients to generate invoices quickly and efficiently from virtually any device. Most of our clients often invoice for their work while on the go using their tablet or smart phones. With Xero you can: Schedule invoices to be automatically generated on a regular basis saving the tedious task of re-keying recurrent invoices. Set automatic reminder when invoices are overdue. custom branded invoices directly which can be paid directly online. View at a glance Invoices owed to you and Bills you need to pay. Quickly identify overdue invoices and bills. 4

7 POWERFUL REPORTS ALWAYS UPDATED Cloud accounting allows both our firm and our clients to generate real-time financial reports which are always updated and available. This is an essential ingredient for greater collaboration with our firm. The ability to quickly run projections, providing us essential information for ongoing tax planning. To identify ongoing opportunities to minimize our clients tax liability. For our Clients: The Xero cloud accounting powerful reporting feature allows: The ability to generate comprehensive Financial Reports. Real-time information about the Balance Sheet, Income, Expenses, and Cash-Flow. The ability to export all reports in PDF and Excel format for presentations or further analysis. For our Accounting firm: The Xero reports allow: The ability to analyze our client s financial records to see if your practice is meeting financial goals. To support our clients in identifying ways they can maximize their business performance. 5

8 CLIO AND XERO Clio is one of the most powerful and easy to use cloud based law practice management software, allowing legal professionals to manage their clients files efficiently and effortlessly. Clio has recently created a powerful integration with Xero allowing legal professionals the ability to: Automatically connect client invoices and expenses in Clio with Xero to unify the accounting and billing process. Create client expenses in Clio and have them automatically reflected in a Xero invoice. Seamlessly update the status of invoices from Clio to Xero. Manage cases and track your time effortlessly. Uploading supporting documentation to your accounting records. Since both systems are cloud based you can log in online anytime, anywhere on your Mac, PC, tablet, or phone and see up-to-date financials for your firm. All of these features translate in better management of your firm, streamlined processes, and as a result more time available to better serve your clients. 6

9 HOW POLARIS TAX & ACCOUNTING CAN HELP We believe that Legal Accounting doesn t have to complicated, instead we think it should be simple and beautiful, legal professionals understand that they need to outsource their accounting to a professional accountant so they can focus on their practice and their craft. However, the old fashion way of outsourcing accounting meant that clients were often left out of the loop when it came to understand their finances. Cloud accounting has revolutionized the way legal firms manage their accounting, allowing for true collaboration between our clients and our firm. Clients see what we see in real-time, as a forward thinking progressive accounting firm we have fully embraced cloud technology and forged a strong working relationship with Xero. Today we help our client s transition their accounting to Xero, collaborate and maintain their accounting data, help legal practices better understand their finances, and finally help our clients minimize their tax liability using real-time accounting information to implement tax mitigation strategies throughout the year. 7