The term “cloud” is used these days to refer to places on the Internet where data relevant to you or your business is stored. As computerization has spread throughout our lives, and become much more portable, much of our important information can be vulnerable to accident or theft.
As the capacity of the Internet increases, the cloud offers a solution to the problem of data security, so long as it can be made safe and secure.
Lohn Caulder now provides a free and secure portal for clients that makes it easy to upload electronic data to us, via the Internet.
When doing this for the first time, you must first contact us, so we can create a dedicated account for you on the portal site.
Then, all you need do is click on the “cloud” symbol on the opening page of our website (it’s down at the lower right), or by going to www.lohncaulder.com/cloud. You must enter the special password that we provide you – but you are free to change this password to something you’re more likely to remember.
Once in, you will notice a familiar ‘look and feel’ to the site, in that it allows you to ‘choose files’ from wherever you may have stored your data (your local computer, an area network, or some other location), and put them into a ‘files’ box. Then you just click the box to “upload files”, and an exact copy of your data is transferred from its current location to this spot in the “cloud” – with the added comfort of knowing that this data is safe and confidential.
And you can send us anything: accounting data, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Adobe pdf files, or virtually anything digital.
Once you’ve placed data on the portal, we are notified automatically, and we can then assign the task to a preparer.
Many of our clients have already used this service, and tell us that it’s a much faster and more convenient way of sending data than any other method. And a whole lot better than printing out many pages of ledgers, and shipping us a large box of documents.
Microsoft Outlook, for example, has a standard attachment limit of about 10 MB, which, these days, is easily exceeded by today’s accounting software. If you’ve run into this problem in the past, you know how frustrating it can be to work around it. Our portal eliminates this problem. If your Internet connection is not high-speed, it might take several seconds to upload – but high-speed connections should be no problem at all.
We encourage you to ‘test drive’ this new service. You’ll like it.
