Revealed: Why accountants choose Google Apps over Excel

And the dealbreakers that keep others from moving.

Of all the industries vulnerable to Google’s attack on the Microsoft-dominated business productivity suite market, accounting would have been thought the least open to change.

Accountants and their customers spend many hours wandering through pages of spreadsheets, calculating balances and projecting cash flow. Such champions of Excel would surely be the fiercest defenders of the Microsoft Office empire.

However, a growing number of accountants have shifted their IT systems from all Microsoft to mostly Google Apps. Several accountants in Australia and the UK whose firms had made the shift to Google told BoxFreeIT they had been happy with the move and were gradually weaning themselves from Excel to the lesser-featured Google Spreadsheet.

“We have Excel mainly because it’s the mainstay but we barely use it except for opening client documents,” says Guy Pearson, director of Sydney-based Interactive Accounting. “It’s good to have it as a backstop.”

Google Apps accountants appear to have one common goal – to end their reliance on in-house servers. This is driving a move away from Microsoft software in general. Even though Microsoft has a cloud service in Office 365, it is complementary to the desktop software rather than a replacement of it.

“We’re trying to get rid of (Microsoft) Office. My aim is to throw out the server once tax is released and have everything (software) online,” Pearson says.

UK-based Dashboard Accounting shifted to Google Apps 15 months ago and has found that it needed Excel “quite rarely now”, says partner Ian McCall. Two programs, SalesForce CRM and Adaptive Planning financial forecasting software, only export to Excel. Most other functions are now done in Google Spreadsheet.

“Over the time we've been using Google their spreadsheet has come on in leaps and bounds and has the functionality we need 95%+ of the time,” McCall says.

One of the greatest attractions of Google Apps was the ability to work simultaneously on documents, whether with colleagues or customers.

“Version control used to be a nightmare, now staff can all work on a shared document, simultaneously if necessary,” McCall says.

Other benefits related to the nature of a cloud-based suite, such as the ability to access documents from anywhere. Accountants were happy to wave goodbye to the days of VPNs (virtual private networks) to on-premise servers.

“We used to use a VPN with Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint. Logging onto that was a nightmare from outside the office,” McCall says.

While smaller firms have been quicker to take up Google Apps, it is finding an audience among larger firms too.

Hayes Knight, a 330-staff firm, has moved nearly 50 people in its Sydney office to Google Apps. If all goes to plan it will roll out Google Apps to its other eight offices, says Ben Granger-Holcombe, director of Cloud Adapt, the IT services company managing the migration.

Granger-Holcombe says he expected accountants to be resistant to moving to Google Apps. “I thought that accountants were the channel that we wouldn’t really target. When we move big organisations over (to Google Apps) there is a subset, usually the finance department, that are so embedded in their macros that they do need a version of Excel,” he says.

In one case a 200-seat company moved to Google Apps and bought 10 OEM licences of Microsoft Office for the accounting department. “When we are saving them 40-50 percent on (the cost of providing) email and productivity they really don’t mind,” Granger-Holcombe says.

Cloud Adapt believes there is so much potential among accountants that it is creating a dedicated solution for the accounting industry based on Google Apps and Xero.

Next page: Google Apps' shortcomings that hold back others