As one who has recently made the transition to online accounting system from having the software based on a third party's PC; one who charged us every time data was entered and even for fixing any data entry errors, I'm sold on the idea, especially for small organisations.

But the accounting profession is about as conservative as you can get - its what we pay them for and when they get "creative" or "innovative" we ALL get into deep trouble - so you might expect some resistance when you rush in with the idea to your CFO, accoutnay, auditor or treasurer. AccountingWEB.co.uk has the lowdown Accountants bring Cloud summit down to earth

The Cloud accounting industry faces a long campaign to convince the accounting profession to adopt web-based applications according to a small group of practitioners who shared their views with developers at the Business Cloud Summit on Wednesday 2 December.

Whatever other commentators say, accounting software functionality is still important to practitioners. If they are going to shift themselves and clients from tried and tested programs, they will demand mature applications that match up on features and functionality right down to mundane things such as data entry.

“Accountants don’t feel comfortable pushing Cloud applications,” said Net.Accounting’s Tom Bristow. “If someone’s going to change, it’s got to be to something better than Sage or QuickBooks. If you’re inputting 300 transactions, you don’t want to have to click return after every single one.”

Having learned a particular accounting system - often recommended to them by their accountant - clients are reluctant to consider newer alternatives. Cloud accounting developers would grow more quickly by concentrating on start-up accountancy firms and new businesses than by trying to convert existing desktop software users from their current systems, the accountants advised.

To a man, none of the four accountants who participated in AccountingWEB’s fringe meeting at the Business Cloud Summit reported that clients were pushing for “Cloud” functionality.

[...] “Some clients would like a more collaborative approach, or to see live reports online,” said sole practitioner Nigel Simmons. Small businesses don’t like accounting and so Simmons created a firm based around a hosted QuickBooks environment to take the pain out of accounting for them. “We set up as a bureau so we do everything for them. That means we can avoid having to unravel all the knitting at the end of the period,” he said.

For those following the Business Cloud Summit on Twitter, the hash tag is #BCS09. More detailed coverage of AccountingWEB’s “fringe” meeting will be published in our Cloud accounting discussion group.

• Now that we have stopped paying a bookkeeper every time we want an invoice or payment entered or a report producing, let alone something correcting,
• now that we can login to our bank via our online accounting package and do the reconciliation with a few clicks,
• now that our staff can enter the invoices and payments and all the Trustees can see what is happening any time, from anywhere (and we are spread around the country),

there is no way i would go back without serious kicking and screaming.
What about you? Tell us the tale in the comments.

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