Nobody likes a busy cursor. With AccountRight Live, we are constantly challenging ourselves to get things up to speed. Our recent trip around Australia and New Zealand confirms that it’s top of mind for those using AccountRight Live.
We think it’s pretty simple - AccountRight Live needs to run as fast as you do. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a bookkeeper, a casual user, the owner reviewing the business, the pay officer paying the team, or an accountant doing the end of period.
So what constitutes speed in the cloud?
1.Workflow
In an online world, speed isn’t just about a chunky new machine. Speed is affected by the number of steps you take to complete a task. This is called workflow. If there are too many roadblocks it becomes frustrating and slows you down. Remember the pop up calculator in the amount field? That was workflow pain.
2. Amount of data
Speed is also affected by how much data you have. We’re always surprised at how different businesses are. Some have thousands of cards, some have ten. Some have hundreds of items, some have five. The size of your file - the number of transactions you do and records you have - affects how long it takes to view a list or report.
3. Connection and processing speed
The speed at which we can send your numbers to our servers and how much data we send affects how fast you can move on to the next task. Although this is somewhat governed by the speed of your internet - upload and download - if we send a heap of unnecessary data or our servers aren’t crunching your numbers efficiently, it’ll take longer than it should.
So, how can we make AccountRight Live sing in harmony with you?
There are things you can do, and there are things we can do. The first point is to check your machine and make sure you have enough grunt. We publish our minimum specs, but to get a good experience you can use a great tool called Speedtraq.com There’s a lot of numbers there, but if you get your system information and find your processor name and look it up on SpeedTraq, any rating time less than 10 is going to result in a slow experience. If it’s below 5, your machine won’t cut it.
Your internet connection speed plays a big part in the cloud performance. You need high speed internet (at least 0.5Mbps) on upload to get a good experience. Check out Optusnet Speedtest. There are heaps of equivalent sites but that’s what I use. If your upload sucks so will your experience of AccountRight Live.
From our end, we’re going to hit workflow and raw system performance, and we’re reengineering the backend of AccountRight Live to squeeze every last drop out of it so it works as fast as you need it to.
And the good news is that you won’t need to wait long to see some big improvements. The team is now working on these changes to include in the next AccountRight Live update. While your experience will not be as fast as desktop software, we’ve set the bar high for ourselves to be the fastest cloud accounting system by the end of the year. We won’t fix everything in one release. It’s a journey that’ll continue for a while. But we think the changes we’re making in the next release will put us on a great trajectory to improve your experience.
