Turning Cloud Spend into Strategic Value: Why Finance and IT Leaders Need a Closer Look

Accountancy practice management software has come a long way. Today, features like automated billing and reconciliations are easily integrated into the day-to-day practice workflow of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK customers.

Our employees work side by side with our customers to create and manage these solutions – driven by a deep understanding of their needs and addressing the rapid changes in their environment.

However, it’s often hard to look beyond improving performance in day-to-day operations. Amid Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions, accountancy practices and their clients are dealing with an unpredictable economic landscape. Future business planning can appear daunting.

However, technology can support accountancy practices (and their clients) in making informed business decisions, and planning for the future. In the first part of our Accountancy Practice Management for Future-Fit Growth series, we’ll explore how they can use technology to define and easily track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Doing so gives practices closer control of performance tracking, and deeper insights that will inform strategic growth plans.

Saving Time

For several decades, business technology platforms have enabled practices to track performance metrics that they have customised. This highlights areas that qualify for improvement and underpins strategic planning.

Contemporary technology, such as CCH KPI Monitoring, makes setting up KPIs faster and easier for accountancy practices than ever before. This is vital today. The current business landscape demands that firms assess and amend KPIs more frequently, based on fresh market variables. KPIs such as client retention rate and business time-to-recovery have become increasingly prominent performance indicators in the past year. If clunky technology makes KPI management difficult, practices have less time and insight to plan future growth.

Reducing Risk
CCH KPI Monitoring makes it far easier to track KPIs and report on them. This is fundamental in minimising risk. For example, if a KPI is set to track and escalate debt filtered by overdue dates, the ability to easily set alerts and automatically generate reports is critical to practice performance management.

Some practices are manually running monthly reports to measure KPIs. Others are running real-time reporting engines, a key feature of CCH KPI Monitoring. This latter solution allows practices to review essential data at any time – covering both performance management and compliance requirements. They can do so remotely or on-premise.

This means that firms can assess issues before they become problems, and thus act proactively. Real-time reporting is a true asset in building a future-fit practice.

The Proof is in the Practice
A number of Wolters Kluwer customers have been using CCH KPI Monitoring for several years now. Our customers look to us when they need to be right. Ryecroft Glenton has successfully integrated CCH KPI Monitoring with its own system. This consolidates information from several sources, including CCH Central and CCH Practice Management.

“We can use the year end date to trigger a sequence of reminders. Have we asked for the books? Have they been received? If a request to a client has been outstanding for a certain period, the partner will receive an alert via email. For limited companies, we can monitor the corporation tax and Companies House filing deadlines – as well as the different deadlines for pension schemes”

– Ian Smith, partner at Ryecroft Glenton

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Cloud has transformed how accountancy firms and their clients operate. It does all of the good stuff it’s supposed to: agility, scalability, and innovation at a pace that traditional infrastructure simply can’t match.

But with that flexibility comes the challenge of understanding and managing the financial side of your cloud estate.

For finance leaders, cloud spend is no longer just an IT line item. It’s a strategic investment that needs to be visible, predictable, and aligned with business goals.

Cloud Isn’t the Problem, but Lack of Visibility Is

Let’s be clear: cloud isn’t broken. In fact, it’s working exactly as intended with resources scaling up and down as needed, services are consumed on demand, and innovation happens faster than ever.

The issue is that the financial reporting around cloud hasn’t kept up. Costs are often spread across multiple providers, teams, and projects. Invoices arrive in different formats, with little context. And you’re left trying to piece together a coherent picture from a patchwork of portals and spreadsheets, with costs continuing to rise on a monthly basis.

This lack of visibility makes it hard to answer basic questions like:

How much are we spending on cloud?
Which departments or projects are driving that spend?
Are we getting value for money?

Without clear answers, budgeting becomes guesswork, and opportunities to optimise are missed.

The Finance Function Steps In

As cloud spend grows, so does the need for financial oversight. CFOs and Finance Directors are increasingly stepping into the conversation, not to slow things down, but to ensure that cloud investments are delivering measurable value.

We need a shift towards both cost control and better decision making:

Forecasting future spend based on real usage trends.
Identifying areas of inefficiency or overspend.
Accountability for where and how the spend is being used.

We also need to build confidence among boards, partners, and clients that cloud is being managed responsibly and strategically.

Enter FinOps

That’s where FinOps comes in. It’s a discipline that brings finance, operations, and IT together to manage cloud spend collaboratively. Think of it as the bridge between “what we’re using” and “what we’re paying for.”

For accountancy firms, that means:

Breaking down cloud costs by team, project, or client.
Setting budgets and alerts to catch overspend early.
Identifying idle resources and shutting them down.
Giving each stakeholder visibility of the usage and cost that is relevant to them, without overwhelming them with detail.

But that all takes time, tools, and expertise. And most firms don’t have a spare team lying around to build it from scratch.

A Smarter Way to Manage It

That’s why Quorum developed CloudCost iQ, a managed FinOps service designed specifically for organisations that need clarity and control over their cloud spend.

CloudCost iQ gives firms:

A single pane of glass across Azure, AWS, Google and more, which means no more juggling portals or spreadsheets.
Role-based dashboards so finance, IT, and business teams each see what matters to them.
Alerts for anomalies and budget thresholds, so surprises are caught early.
Expert guidance from FinOps-certified practitioners who help interpret the data and recommend action.

It’s not another platform to learn. It’s a service that works with what you’ve already got, and helps you make sense of it.

From Cost Centre to Value Driver

Firms using CloudCost iQ have reported significant benefits:

Reduced cloud spend through better visibility and optimisation.
More accurate budgeting and forecasting.
A cultural shift where teams take ownership of their cloud usage and costs.

But perhaps the biggest shift is in mindset. Cloud is no longer seen as a cost-centre, it becomes a value driver. With the right visibility and controls in place, finance leaders can ensure that every pound spent on cloud contributes to business outcomes. While IT leaders can have the tools and infrastructure they need to keep the business running smoothly.

Final Thought

Cloud has opened the door to new possibilities for accountancy firms. But we need to manage it with the same rigour we apply to any other investment.

That means using the right tools and insights to be proactive instead of reactive.

With CloudCost iQ, that’s exactly what we’re enabling. If you’d like to have a chat with Quorum about this, you can sign up here: https://bit.ly/CloudCostiQ-Request

Aug 2025

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