Business software with a local backup facility?

[AJL308]

My accountant wants me to change business software and is pushing something called Xero which is as cloud based thing.

The thing is that it has no facility for saving a local backup copy of my business records to a PC which is physically in my position. Everything is saved on their servers/cloud.

I've been doing a lot of thinking on this and the more I mull it over the more and more insane it seems to me. They (the software company) are asking businesses to consign their entire set of financial records including every single transaction, customer record and other piece of essential information to their 'safe' keeping. The records of the business are essentially under the control of a third party and not the business which owns them.

If for any reason Xero decides to deny you access to your records, or looses them, or has them stolen, or destroys them, or goes out of business and has their assets seized then you are fked - well and truly.

Why would anyone choose to do this with their business records? It just seems entirely irresponsible to me. Or am I missing something glaringly obvious?

[AJL308]

Bikerjon said:

It may seem like a giant leap of faith but moving to cloud based systems has a lot of advantages too. Your accountant will be able to login and you can access from anywhere. I actually think that many cloud systems are far better designed and easier to use than legacy software too.

I'm not objecting to the fact that it's cloud based, as such, and I'm not saying that it doesn't work. The thing that I object to is the entirety of my business records, 100% of everything, being entirely under the control of someone else. If they decide to deny me access, or loose my data or it gets stolen or destroyed then I'm Royally fked.

Sooner or later it is a certainty that one of these companies will loose data or get hacked or go out of business meaning that potentially thousands of businesses will loose all of their data. That will be cataclysmic.

Why would anyone do this? It just seems staggeringly irresponsible of anyone who runs a business.

Surely it cannot be a terribly difficult matter to enable the system to create a local backup copy so that the business can have independent access to it's own records?

[AJL308]

Junior Bianno said:

Funny the different ways people look at things. I always hated Sage as I never trusted the backups. It had to be done manually, or at least scheduled. Backups were then emailed to accountants and bookkeepers - very little version control, and old backups ending up all over the place. You ended up doing ridiculous things like taking physical disks home.

Now we never have to think about it. Backups are all automatic, and with the type of enterprise grade hosting that Xero use it's not going to disappear. Xero is itself has over 1m subscribers and growing rapidly. If anything were to happen to Xero from a business standpoint it wouldn't happen overnight. Anyway - you better get used to it - everything is going one way and that's to the cloud. Systems on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud probably run more of your life than you would care to know...

Backing up Sage is easy, I've just done it. Close the Sage software, it ask's whether you want to back it up, press 'yes' - it saves the file.

You can then email the file anywhere you want or stick it on any other physical storage device. Simply emailing it to my self via my own Hotmail account creates a remote copy of the file and I have LiveDrive back up my entire PC so another remote copy there.

How can you possibly say that Xero won't disappear? You don't know that and saying it is total guesswork. Neither can you say that if something happened it wouldn't be overnight; Barings went down overnight (I know it's a totally different business but it still happend) so it CAN happen.

As I've mentioned, it's not just stuff disappearing - what happens if they simply say "Sorry, we don't want to let you get to your data today" or someone hacks them and hold them to ransom.

I don't really care if Amazon has a melt-down or gets hacked, the most I loose is my account details and order history, anything else is Amazon's problem. If the entirety of my business records become inaccessible then I'm fked and so is anyone else who uses the same system.

[AJL308]

alock said:

Xero Terms of Use said:

5.3. Backup of Data:
You must maintain copies of all Data inputted into the Service. Xero adheres to its best practice policies and procedures to prevent data loss, including a daily system data back-up regime, but does not make any guarantees that there will be no loss of Data. Xero expressly excludes liability for any loss of Data no matter how caused.
...
8.4 Xero may take any or all of the following actions, at its sole discretion:
4. Terminate this Agreement and Your use of the Services and the Website;
5. Suspend for any definite or indefinite period of time, Your use of the Services and the Website;
6. Suspend or terminate access to all or any Data.

https://www.xero.com/uk/about/terms/

Thanks, but no thanks.

Agreed. They are basically saying "If we decide to block your access to your data then we will and there's fk all you can do about it, Oh and we can be as careless as we like about protecting it and you have no recourse".

How on Earth do the expect you to comply with 5.3? The only way to do that is to enter everything into Xero plus another record keeping system which..err...defeats to object of using Xero, surely?

[AJL308]

surveyor said:

To be honest Xero are looking fairly strong at this moment in time.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/xero-passes-1-million...

Barings was pretty strong (as far as I understand) the day before it wasn't any more. It was destroyed by one bloke acting entirely independently. Lehman's? Enron? Pan-Am?

[AJL308]

jamoor said:

Bullett said:

These are all sensible questions.

I worked for a services company that had a data centre/hosting/cloud division. Billion £ turnover, so not small fry. Went into receivership and effectively the administrators could hold customers to ransom over their data/services. A proper s**tstorm that was.

This too, nobody knows whats going to happen which is a concern.

And this is the problem. If Xero does a Barings and they have literally no money left or all the employees get sent home then what happens? If they have no money to pay the leccy bill what happens to their customers data? What happens if it turns out that they have been involved in massive levels of fraud like Enron or Madoff and the Serious Fraud Office/Police/FCA authority seize their assets including their servers in order to preserve evidence?

[AJL308]

surveyor said:

AJL308 said:

Junior Bianno said:

Funny the different ways people look at things. I always hated Sage as I never trusted the backups. It had to be done manually, or at least scheduled. Backups were then emailed to accountants and bookkeepers - very little version control, and old backups ending up all over the place. You ended up doing ridiculous things like taking physical disks home.

Now we never have to think about it. Backups are all automatic, and with the type of enterprise grade hosting that Xero use it's not going to disappear. Xero is itself has over 1m subscribers and growing rapidly. If anything were to happen to Xero from a business standpoint it wouldn't happen overnight. Anyway - you better get used to it - everything is going one way and that's to the cloud. Systems on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud probably run more of your life than you would care to know...

Backing up Sage is easy, I've just done it. Close the Sage software, it ask's whether you want to back it up, press 'yes' - it saves the file.

You can then email the file anywhere you want or stick it on any other physical storage device. Simply emailing it to my self via my own Hotmail account creates a remote copy of the file and I have LiveDrive back up my entire PC so another remote copy there.

How can you possibly say that Xero won't disappear? You don't know that and saying it is total guesswork. Neither can you say that if something happened it wouldn't be overnight; Barings went down overnight (I know it's a totally different business but it still happend) so it CAN happen.

As I've mentioned, it's not just stuff disappearing - what happens if they simply say "Sorry, we don't want to let you get to your data today" or someone hacks them and hold them to ransom.

I don't really care if Amazon has a melt-down or gets hacked, the most I loose is my account details and order history, anything else is Amazon's problem. If the entirety of my business records become inaccessible then I'm fked and so is anyone else who uses the same system.

A million people think you are wrong. Actually it's more than a million, as Sage, Quickbooks and Kashflow all have similar offerings in the marketplace.

I don't believe that one million people have given a thought to it. Lots will have done and decided to use it because it's easy. If a cloud based service has a major outage, say for a couple of days, a million people will st themselves and whine about how they 'Had no idea this could ever happen - they should have told us"

[AJL308]

surveyor said:

AJL308 said:

Barings was pretty strong (as far as I understand) the day before it wasn't any more. It was destroyed by one bloke acting entirely independently. Lehman's? Enron? Pan-Am?

Sage?

Don't care. Desktop software on my PC with backups that I am in control of. Sage could wind its self up tomorrow and I'd never notice.