I was recently sent a link to this article on the ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accounts in England & Wales) website, about how accountants should be offering portals to their clients. The key point is that rather than emailing highly sensitive documents back and forth (which is not very secure), accountants should allow clients to download them from their web portal, and upload signed versions and other required documents.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I have used Dropbox in the past to share things with my accountant because I worry about using email for that sort of thing. But a portal would potentially offer a lot more functionality. This of course applies to any business which shares data with their clients, not just accountants.
In fact, this ties in rather nicely with some collaboration and project management software which we're trialling with a couple of customers at the moment, and plan to roll out as a full service offering this side of Christmas. The software in question is FengOffice, a powerful piece of open source software, which we'll be offering in conjunction with our UK-based specialist hosting partner, Dudobi. It'll run on servers in Dudobi's secure data centre so there are no data protection issues with the location of our customers' confidential business information, which can be a problem with cloud-based offerings.
The great thing about FengOffice is that while it acts as a great web-based collaborative workspace, it's also a lot more than that. It can be used as a CRM system, for tracking professional time, or just for capturing all information about a client or project in one place.
This is not yet a finalised offering, but I'm very interested in hearing from any businesses who like the idea and would like to test it out.
==Update==
We are now a reseller for FengOffice and are able offer help in setting you up on their full hosted platform.
No comments:
Post a Comment