Is it safe to do my accounts online?

It’s safer doing your accounts online with Liquid than doing your accounts by hand or keeping them on your PC or laptop.  When using traditional, desk-top software, that is loaded and saved onto your computer, you can easily lose everything if that computer gets lost, stolen or destroyed.  Even if you take a regular manual back-up you have to remember to do it and ideally keep it in a separate secure location.  Otherwise, if the worst happens, both are at risk of being stolen or destroyed together!

Servers/Back-ups

One of the major advantages of using Liquid Accounts is that secure hosting of your data and automatic regular back-ups are included in your subscription, free of charge.

Both our software, and your data are stored on mirrored hard-drives in one of the foremost server farms in the UK (which is climate-controlled, bomb-proof, fire-proof, has a back-up power supply, is maintained 24 hours a day, and is fully secure).  We also save everything to servers in 3 other locations- so if, for example, 1 server failed, we’d still have 5 copies of your data.

Back-ups are taken automatically at regular intervals throughout the day and stored on these multiple servers in multiple locations.

Login

Another advantage of using Liquid’s online software is that you’re not tied to one computer and you can allow as many people as you want to have access to some or all of your accounts.  However, it’s important to look at the login procedure and check how robust it is.

Liquid’s login procedure is the most secure that you can have.  We ask for 5 levels of security information (company code, company password, user first-name, user surname and user password), which gives you the flexibility of having different levels of access for different users, and the ability to lock people out if necessary.  Plus, all our company codes are randomly generated making them virtually impossible to work out.  All our passwords are case sensitive and are encrypted using military-grade encryption processes.  This is in line with BASDA’s (the Business Application Software Developers’ Association) new Cloud Charter and the ICAEW’s (Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales) security guidelines.

Encryption

As well as our password encryption, all our software and your data transmission is securely encrypted.  For this we use SSL Encryption (the small padlock that you see at the bottom right of your screen when you’re on a secure web page).  This means that any information sent between your computer and our servers is encrypted and protected.  Liquid holds each company’s information in a separate encoded database, so that if someone hacked in or stole the server they wouldn’t be able to find out which data belonged to which company.

Dynamic URL

We also include a unique and randomly generated code within the web address whenever you are logged in (dynamic URL).  This code is automatically deleted from our servers as soon as you log out and means that someone can’t then come along and get into your accounts through the ‘History’ file.