Liquid’s Cloud Accounting Leads The Way in Cloud Standards (and lets you download your data whenever you want!)

Liquid Accounts has become the first cloud company to comply with and sign the BASDA (Business Application Software Developers’ Association) Cloud Vendor Charter and is first cloud accounting company to let you export your data from their software whenever you like.

Matt Holmes, MD of Liquid Accounts said, ‘Back in December we released a file export button which allows you to download your information from Liquid whenever you like.  This could be for back-ups, analysis, to use in another software package, to give to your accountant, or even if you want to move away from Liquid and try something else.  This was the only thing we were missing to comply with the Charter and we see it as a guarantee to our customers – we believe that once you start using Liquid, you’ll love it, however, the great thing about cloud accounting is that it gives you more flexibility and choice and it’s not a one-size fits all solution, so if it’s not for you, that’s fine.  At the end of the day it’s your data, not ours, so why would we hang onto it!

‘But saying that, at the other end of our customer lifecycle, we also want to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to set up their account and see the benefits of Liquid for themselves.  That’s why we’ve recently launched a free easy data import from Sage or Excel/csv.  And we’ve changed our sign-up process so that you don’t have to enter any payment details until you’ve completed your month’s free trial of the full working version of the app plus any additional modules you’d like to try.  Plus we’ve got a test version of the application (known as a sandbox) that’s instantly available for you to play around with, on the website, at any time.’

As Chair of the Cloud Computing Special Interest Group for BASDA, Matt has been heavily involved in creating and launching the Charter, which was launched at the beginning of the year.  It is designed to reassure customers that software developers and vendors have thought through the issues that are important to them such as back-ups, data management, reliability, accessibility, and security, and it lays down minimum standards for compliance.

Matt commented, ‘This sort of initiative is incredibly important, as cloud computing as an industry is still relatively new.  However, for it to achieve its predicted growth and become mainstream we need to be working together to create firm foundations, clear standards, best practice and most importantly, trust.  And as one of the pioneers of cloud and cloud accounting in the UK, and one of the longest-standing and most established cloud companies we are in a position to help create and set those standards.  In particular we pride ourselves on our 5-part login process, which includes a randomly generated company code and password as well as a personal login for each user.  This allows your administrator to change everyone’s login or lock everyone out if necessary (if for example, someone leaves your company or you have some sort of security breach).  This is on top of the standard case sensitive passwords, and encryption that you’d expect.’