What if I told you that you could access your accounts software from any computer anywhere in your business or anywhere in the word, even if you only have a single user (one user) licence. That is only one person at a time can have access to the accounts of your business. What you need is a network and be sure that your accounts software can be setup to run over a network.

This week we set up a network where four computers could access the accounts system, but only one person at a time could use the accounts software. What this gave us was the ability to work from any computer to do our accounts and all our accounts data was now on a server that is being backed up every night. We no longer have to rely on a person remembering to do a backup or to leave on a computer at night to allow a backup to run. The server stays on all the time which means backups are done and we can turn off all the other computers at night.

Having a computer network allows you to store all your information in one place rather than spread across multiple computers in your office. Your word processing documents and your spreadsheets are automatically available no matter how many computers you connect to your network. This also allows all these files to be backed up quicker and more securely as they are all in one place. When you run a backup it only has to look in one place for the files it needs to back up.

Many people install their accounts software on one computer and that means that each time someone needs to access the business accounts they have to throw the user of that computer off and that user has to find somewhere else to sit and also find something else to work on.

So install the accounts software on the server and then install a client version of the software on every computer. The client vesion of the software is installed to allow you to access the accounts data that is installed on the server. This means that once the server version is installed it is easy to give a new computer access to the accounts software. You install the client software and tell it where the data is on the network server computer.

This only works if your accounts software can be networked. Not all accounts software can be installed on a server or networked.  You only need to buy one software licence at the beginning and then as you need them add a second, third and more licences as you grow. But what you have from the start is the ability to access your businesses accounts from any computer including your computer.

You can still set up security settings preventing those who don’t need access to the accounts software or to sensitive parts of your accounts system. But you get the convenience that anyone who needs to have access can have access from any computer.