How Accountants can Secure Clients’ Sensitive Financial Data?

Keeping your clients’ accounting data secure is one of your very big responsibilities. The data contains sensitive information regarding business. So you should offer highest level of security to prevent all such financial data from getting damaged, hacked or disclosed to any third party. Taking right precautions can ensure more data security and your clients would value your professional support as well.

Being professional account service provider you must do the below practices to ensure strong data security –

Make your login password strong enough – Your login password shouldn’t be easy to guess. Don’t use something like 1234 or your date of birth or anything that hackers can easily guess using different sophisticated tools. You shouldn’t share your login details with anyone else in your organization. Share it to someone only in case he/she works with your business accounting software for dealing your clients’ accounting details.

Change your password – Keeping your password unchanged for long time could be risky and there are many professional hackers who can make a guess on it. So it’s always better to make a habit to change your password at least once in 3 months. This habit can help you to provide more data security.

Multi-factor authentication – This is another step to offer you more data security option. You can add this functionality to your accounting software account so that users need to pass one more verification process like putting the code in system they received in their registered mobile number.

Implement Data Encryption – Data encryption process would make your data security double. In this process your entire data would be transferred to a code which is not readable to one who doesn’t have the key stored in your local hardware.

Make your WiFi security stronger – You must use strong password for your wifi network and data encryption system. This can protect guest networks to stay away from accessing your network.

Take regular backup of your files – Taking backup of your financial files containing sensitive data of your clients is really a very good practice. This can help you to supply all the data once your system gets any virus or malware attack or your system hard drive gets damaged etc.

Update your accounting software – Keeping your accounting software updated always offers you additional data security. Changing your password, using multi-factor authentication, implement data encryption and updating accounting software all these combined activities can keep all your clients’ data secured from any misuse.

Use a single system - Accessing your sensitive data from multiple devices can reduce the security of your accounting data. It’s better to install your business accounting software in a single system in your company and access your data only from there.

Avoid keeping old and sensitive data for long – To ensure more security to your clients’ data you should avoid keeping sensitive information like credit card number, back account details etc. for long time. Also try to delete old data from your system. Such practices can assure more data security.