MANAGEMENT

Paperless CPA Finds His Perfect Solution for Offsite, Online Backup

You know the feeling: You finally discover the perfect solution to a particularly vexing problem.

Justice

CPA Scot Justice (“The Virtual CFO“) knows the feeling all too well. But he’s also found his answer.

He reports:

I have to say on the front end that backups aren’t sexy or exciting, but they are critical to your company’s continued operations in the event you have a disaster strike your firm. Disaster can take the form of PC failure, natural disasters, and theft.

When I opened CPA for Small Business, LLC , I made the decision to have a paperless office. I was successful in doing this in the first year, but as my practice grew the mounting cost of off-site backups made this less desirable. So after a year or so, I moved to a quasi-paperless office. Under this system, I kept critical documents in a paperless format, but kept uncritical documents in my filing cabinet kept workpapers.

Last year, I made the decision to move back to a completely paperless office. This was due to the economical costs of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and CloudBerry’s Backup software.

CloudBerry Online Backup is a PC based backup client that allows you to save your documents to an Amazon S3 backup site. For a month, I tested the CloudBerry Backup and Amazon S3 Hosting before moving to it exclusively. I’ve been impressed with both Amazon S3 as well as CloudBerry’s AS3 client software.

More at The Virtual CFO.

2 Responses to “Paperless CPA Finds His Perfect Solution for Offsite, Online Backup”

  1. CPA Tech Nut

    Accounting and Tax Prep firms are also bound by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which requires all financial institutions (by definition this includes tax return preparers) to have a written policy in regards to safeguarding their clients data, and change the safeguards as needed with changes in how information is collected, stored, and used. While most small accounting firms don’t have the technical expertise to do this failure can result in serious fines. For this reason I recommend they make sure their file transfer is SAS 70 type 2 certified even if they aren’t publicly traded. SAS 70 means the system was audited by technically qualified financial professionals, and “Type 2” certification assures that the systems are audited regularly to make sure they are being kept up-to-date.

  2. Brian O'Connell

    For CPA’s keeping client files on off-site backups, you will want to make sure your solution is compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley Act if you provide service for a publicly traded company. This act requires all publicly traded companies to use SAS 70 Type II Certified datacenters. Here is more information http://www.cpasitesolutions.com/youget/cpa-website-hosting/cpa-website-security.php