I am a strong believer that the technological movement will revolutionize the accounting profession, and I want to be on the forefront of it all. Earlier this year I left my consulting job to start my own practice centered around cloud accounting. I targeted the startup scene. The business leaders that needed an accountant or bookkeeper were sold and they kept referring me to more of their entrepreneurial connections. Somehow they just didn’t connect with the brick and mortar accountants. It was rather easy to win these entrepreneurs over because my firm stood for much of the same things that they stood for, namely forward-thinking innovation.

What I want to address in this blog post are not the clients that I’ve won, but actually the few that have decided not to go with my firm unless we did their accounting the way that they are used to. As a new business owner, it is difficult to turn away business. I found myself preaching the benefits of what I could do for their business. When they start telling me that they don’t want or trust technology they leave me with two choices: take their business and do it their way, or tell them that I cannot service them.

Today, I had an interesting chat with Jamie Shulman, co-CEO of HubDoc about this very topic. He offered this tidbit that came from one of his business partners. Business data needs to be stored somewhere and there are limited number of choices. Paper? Your local computer network? Nothing is perfectly secure. A business needs to be able to weigh the risks to make a well-informed IT decision and not just make a blanket statement about not trusting technology. Being overly cautious about making a technological investment can be risky in and of itself.

There are many small businesses and not all of them are ready for cloud accounting. This is okay because there are many accountants that will service these businesses. I decided quite early on that Fint Cloud Services would put the interest of innovative businesses first and focus on what these businesses need. Putting our forward-thinking clients first means minimizing activities that would take resources away from this mission.

I will be showcasing some my clients through this blog in the coming months so stay tuned!

Your Start Up and E-Commerce Accountant

Jenny Tran, CPA, CMA