Cloud, or your own computer?

I make one of the few cemetery programs that is not in the cloud, so take what follows knowing that. I have tried to write the case for the other side as well as its own makers do, because a board that decides this badly will regret it for a decade either way.

The case for the cloud, made properly

It is a good case. Cloud vendors put it like this, and they are not wrong:

• Hard drives fail. Office computers get stolen, flooded, struck by lightning, and thrown out by a well-meaning relative. Records held in one building are one bad afternoon from gone.
• Backups become somebody's job. In the cloud they are done by people who do them for a living, every day, without being reminded.
• Any computer, anywhere. The treasurer at home, the sexton at the graveside, the secretary at the church — same records, no copying.
• Nothing to install or maintain. No versions, no operating system to worry about.

If your association has nobody who will reliably put a copy on a flash drive, the cloud is genuinely safer than what you have now. That is not marketing. That is true.

The case for your own computer

The counter-argument is not that the cloud is unsafe. It is that it answers one risk by taking on a different one, and only the first risk gets talked about.

• A failed drive is a solved problem. It is solved by a copy in a second place. That is a flash drive in the safe, or in the treasurer's house. Sexton writes the backups on its own; carrying one somewhere else is the part a person does, and it takes a minute.
• A closed company is not a solved problem. If the vendor is sold, shuts down, triples its price, or suspends the account over an invoice that went to a board member who moved away, your position is whatever the export button gives you on the day you find out — assuming you can still log in to press it.
• Cemetery records outlive software companies. Yours go back a century and will be needed in another one. Very few software companies last thirty years. Almost every file format that matters does.
• Renting has no ceiling. A subscription is a decision you re-make every year, with the vendor holding the records while you decide.

The question to actually ask

Not "which is safer." Ask: if the other party disappeared tomorrow, what would we have?

With a file on your own computer, the answer is: the file, and every backup of it. With a cloud service, the answer is: whatever you exported most recently, if you exported anything.

That is the whole difference, and it is worth knowing which answer you are buying.

How Sexton handles the risk it takes on

Choosing local means owning the failure the cloud vendors are right about. Sexton is built to make that manageable rather than to pretend it away:

• Backups are written automatically, every time you use it, and the recent ones are kept.
• The whole register exports to plain spreadsheet files at any time — files that open in Excel, with or without Sexton installed.
• Export keeps working after a license lapses. You are never locked away from your own records to make you renew.
• One license covers two computers, so the office machine and the treasurer's machine can both hold a copy.
• An activity log records every change and the day it happened.

What is left for you is putting a copy somewhere that is not the same building. Nobody can do that part for you, and if that sentence worries you, the cloud may genuinely be your better answer. I would rather say so here than have you find out in year three.