Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 01:53 pm

As a small business there are times when I want to update the business accounts but am not sitting in front of the office computer.  It may be that I am on a trip (business of course) and want to enter some receipts into the system while they are fresh in my mind or that I’ve seen some money come into the bank account and I want to mark an invoice as paid.

There are several options that would allow me to do this, including using a remote connection (something like logmein) to connect to the office PC and update the accounts; or using some sort of online accounting.

Recently I’ve been looking into online accounting and it’s amazing the different solutions that are out there.  Most of the packages seem to be ones where you can connect to an accounts package that is online using a user-name and password that then signs  you into your own copy of the package that has your accounts in it. These packages are either hosted by someone like a firm of accountants or hosted by a service provider.

Usually these are advertised as being nationally available products with online accountants trying to get customers from right across the UK.  One slightly different, and refreshing, option that I’ve seen recently is a form of online accounting run by a firm of accountants called Mitchells who are based in Gloucester.  The reason this is such a refreshing change is that although you continue to do the basic bookkeeping you have the services of a local accountant that you can get to know and that can get to know you and your business aims & objectives.  So often online accountants seem to think that they only need to see the figures and while this is possibly true, from the authors point of view it is always good to be able to put a face to a voice on the other end of the phone or email.  This is why many people still prefer to deal with local firms of accountants rather than what might be a cheaper firm who are many miles away.

Whether you need online bookkeeping is obviously a business decision that only you can make as not every business needs to be able to access their accounts from anywhere in the UK, or even anywhere in the world.  If you do need this ability though it would be worth talking to your accountant (or if you are just starting out find one that has experience in online accounting).