– This article was last updated on 20 September 2021-
Cloud computing is a vast area that includes email communication and social media, home entertainment and personal files storage, public services and private business – and, indeed, anything else that allows for storage and access of data online rather than on your hard drive.
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As businesses increasingly look to cloud services as a means to make their practices more efficient and competitive, we take a look at some of the ways that cloud computing can save your business money:
Expense Management Software
ExpenseIn’s expense management software provides a clear example of how cloud computing can make huge cost savings across an organisation. Reclaiming VAT relies on the accurate, comprehensive recording of outgoings with the retention of receipts. If you have a team of business travellers who regularly pay for petrol, accommodation and meals alongside other claimable essentials, any lost receipts – an inevitability – cannot be included in what you claim back from HMRC. But with receipts captured and retained via our app and expense management software, those receipts can’t get lost – and over the course of a financial year or quarter that’s a significant saving.
Learn more about how going paperless with business expenses can save your company money, here.
Addressing Inefficient Practices
Cloud services are designed to cutback on inefficient practices, often reducing workloads by hours per month. Example: managing expenses according to company policy traditionally requires hours of filling spreadsheets which are then pored over by the accounting team. This invariably raises a number of questions and data must be resubmitted, and pored over once more. This is a deeply inefficient way of completing a task, with the accumulated hours of work considerable. With our software, however, expense management is a simple process; expense data is collated as it is generated, hours of work are saved, and there are less human costs as a result.
Rent, Energy, IT Costs
If you require an on-site storage facility for paper records that can mean entire rooms’ worth of essentially wasted space. Meanwhile, in-house servers need space too, but also temperature control and often in-house expertise. Cloud computing services negate the need for this kind of extra office space and the associated high electricity bills and IT costs.
Cloud computing already handles a huge amount of how we use and store our information. By looking for further ways to move our data-management requirements away from the limits of our internal setups, businesses can become much more efficient in what they do while saving costs at the same time.
