One of the things that I notice while working with clients over mediums such as Twitter is that there are a lot of small businesses that outsource their administrative work to virtual assistants (VAs). Most of these VAs tout their ability to use many types of mainstream accounting products but what I never did understand was why there was such a small push for cloud based products.

Web based accounting actually performs their duties at a low-cost and provides an easier way of managing bookkeeping. There are accounting solutions out there that allow multiple company support and ways to keep all of the bookkeeping in order when it comes to tracking multiple businesses. It also makes it a lot easier to accomodate the VAs since much of their data is virtual. But in the end, here’s the key point on why your VA should be using a cloud format for your accounting needs instead of an offline one:

Do you trust your VA enough to secure your business’ financial data?

A VA that uses offline accounting products does not necessarily understand how to secure and protect your financial data. Do they backup your books? Is it stored on the same drive or a separate drive. How often is this process done? Is it encrypted or out in the open? A cloud based service however, needs to take security into account and provide your business with as much redundancy as possible. Most services not only transfer your data via SSL, but also provide redundancy on the backend. Your data should be on hot-swap RAIDs and probably also have a cold backup solution.

Don’t get me wrong. Nothing wrong with VAs, nor if they use offline products. But the real question as a business owner is if you want them to work on your data without some guarantees of backing up your financials. And a web based accounting can provide all of that for you, and your VA without fail.