Financial advice for franchisors
'Cloud' computing
How online, or ‘cloud' computing, can benefit the franchise world is revealed by Gary Turner, UK managing director of Xero
Cloud computing is one of the fastest growing areas in technology, but what does this mean to the franchise world? Well, it has the potential to reduce costs and dramatically improve efficiency, which may explain why franchisors and franchisees are proving to be among the fastest growing adopters of this new computing model.
Let's start with a quick definition. Rather than software applications and data residing on a PC's hard disk, they are stored and accessed over the internet. It has a simple parallel with the way we consume electricity.
Today, few of us choose to run our own household power generators in favour of the zero-maintenance option of obtaining our power from a national utility supplier. We simply flick a light switch and the power is there; without the worry of buying, servicing, refueling and keeping our own power generators ticking along.
Cloud computing follows the same principle. Updates are carried out remotely, by the software provider and because the applications and data are securely stored ‘in the cloud', there is no risk of them being lost if a PC, server or hard disk crash. Payment is usually a low cost flat monthly fee and there are no expensive software licenses or upgrade costs to worry about.
Franchise benefits
While any business can obtain benefit from switching to online software, for the franchise community, in particular, online accounting is possibly the ‘Holy Grail'.
Since online accounting software is always available, always up-to-date and easily accessible from any PC (or Smartphone) with an internet connection, every stakeholder in the franchise partnership - franchisee or franchisor - can be given safe and secure access directly into the live accounts and management reports of any franchisee business, all instantly online. At a stroke, this marks the end of all the classic management challenges of inconsistent reporting from various different franchisee accounting packages and late or patchy visibility of franchisee trading performance.
Such heightened levels of visibility and timeliness of reporting across an entire franchise business regardless of geography or time-zone is something that was previously available to global players with the deepest pockets. With subscriptions typically costing less than £1 per company per day, the new generation of online accounting systems are now effortlessly affordable to even the smallest of operations.
Cash management benefits
Throw in the fact that online accounting offers new ways to more effectively manage daily cash flow, whether tracking daily when outgoing payments are due, or to check if an invoice has been paid, but the latest online systems even incorporate live bank account feeds, so managing cash can at last be truly ‘real-time'.
To summarise, cloud computing has come of age and it is finally being focused on what businesses really need. But for the franchise community, using online accounting to streamline franchise management could well turn out to be Nirvana.
