Use Case: Streamlining a Small Accounting Practice

Problem:

Accountants, bookkeepers and other financial professionals often interact with their business clients via email. This means that sensitive bank account, payroll and tax information sails through cyberspace totally unsecured. Using email as a document workflow system also lacks any organized tracking or searching mechanism. This can result in difficulties tracking down documents for specific clients that are required for time sensitive payroll and tax filings. The result is usually an inefficient process managing piles of documents that is more costly to the client and limits the amount of clients each CPA in a firm can serve per period. The net effect is poor customer services and a lost opportunity to generate more revenue for the firm by servicing a larger client base.

Solution:

With Praura an accountant can create a separate secure console for each of his clients. This allows him to post communications, alerts and reminders, store forms and deliver documents back to the client in a secure environment. Each client has a single location to go to in order to access tax and payroll documents. Clients can seamlessly upload documents that they need to deliver to their CPA. His console will serve as a corporate library for each tax period and will allow the CPA to add value by serving as an effective provider of corporate memory for the client.

CPA firms with a partner-associate structure can create tiered libraries for clients where each associate is linked back to a partner. The partner will have insight into the work being done by his or her associates while each associate will have the ability to create client specific consoles. Partners can send communication and guidance to associates and associates can prompt clients with specific instructions. The result is a totally transparent environment where accountants can collaborate with clients and partners to ensure a superior experience for their customers.

Benefit Breakdown:

· Secure two way transfer of documents between clients and accountants
· Creation of a secure virtual library for each client account
· More transparent environment for partners and associates
· The ability to manage multiple accounts while out of the office

Welcome to Praura!

Praura is the only subscription based solution for managing your company’s everyday business risk.
Praura blends proven document management and archival functionality with basic disaster recovery and business continuity features to ensure that your information is secure, easily accessible and infinitely controllable.

The Praura concept was designed to be a viable infrastructure solution for today’s small and mid-sized businesses. At Praura, we were concerned that small and mid-sized businesses had to spend a disproportionate amount of money to achieve the same quality infrastructure as larger firms. We realized that this meant a huge percentage of businesses simply chose to operate without a safety net or misuse other technologies (such as email).

We set out to design a solution that pulled together much of the functionality found in many different products into a single platform. We decided that this platform should be subscription based for four reasons:

1. Businesses will need to keep costs down while supporting a more widely distributed and mobile workforce in the future in order to remain competitive.

2. Small and mid-sized businesses, especially those no in-house data center, needed a single solution that carried only nominal costs to protect their business information.

3. It is becoming increasingly important for small and mid-sized businesses to have access to simple tools that help them manage more outsourced and offshore work.

4. Professional services firms relied too heavily on email and needed a secure way to exchange data and documents with their staff and clients.

With this in mind Praura began to assemble a complete solution for today’s businesses. Did we try to include all of the functionality in the largest enterprise solutions? No, of course we didn’t. We believe that small and medium sized businesses wouldn’t purchase an enterprise solution even if they could afford it. This reflects the reality that many of these products have evolved to the point that they now include so much functionality as to render them nearly unusable for the typical business.

Keep reading to learn more about how your business can use Praura to reduce risk and lower your operating costs!