online accounting – Page 2 – Cooper Mann Consulting

November 3, 2020

Where in The World is Your Data?

Where in the World is Your Data? Even better.. where would you like it to be? In a datacenter near you? In a datacenter far away from you? Maybe you’d like your production system nearby, but backups stored on the other side of the country. Or perhaps you want redundant systems on each coast as well as something somewhere in the middle.
With Microsoft Azure as your platform, you have all the choices in the world, literally.

Microsoft Azure is the platform of choice for businesses of all sizes, offering virtualized infrastructure and services that can be tailored and tuned to meet the unique needs of any organization. No longer tied to on-premises infrastructure, companies find that they can implement better and more comprehensive solutions because they have the agility to adapt systems to immediate needs while retaining the ability to adjust as conditions change.

With Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 Services, NOOBEH enables businesses to focus on transformation and improving efficiency, not the IT that supports it.

NOOBEH cloud services, part of the Mendelson Consulting team, sets up Azure infrastructure and manages it for their clients. Business users focus on getting their work done, not on the IT supporting it. NOOBEH QuickBooks on Azure services give small and medium size businesses the most flexible and resilient infrastructure available to run all their desktop and network applications.

Because QuickBooks is rarely a standalone solution, NOOBEH QuickBooks on Azure services have no limitations on what add-ons, extensions, integrations or other applications the business may need to use. All the software a business needs can be deployed on the platform, allowing the company to keep its information systems and assets secure, fully-managed and available when and where they are needed.

While NOOBEH uses Azure platform and Microsoft 365 services to continue to deliver new capability for private sector users, Microsoft is advancing innovation in the delivery of connected services and computing power for private and government sector users wherever it is needed. Azure Modular Datacenters represent a partnership that delivers computing and communications capacity anywhere in the world… and beyond.

Microsoft Azure Modular Datacenters and SpaceX

The Azure modular datacenter is basically a “data center in a box”. It comes with everything needed to deliver computing capacity anywhere in the world.

“We designed the Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) for customers who need cloud computing capabilities in hybrid or challenging environments, including remote areas. This announcement is complemented by our Azure Space offerings and partnerships that can extend satellite connectivity anywhere in the world. Scenarios range from mobile command centers, humanitarian assistance, military mission needs, mineral exploration, and other use cases requiring high intensity, secure computing on Azure.”
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-the-microsoft-azure-modular-datacenter/

It has power and everything else it needs, and now it also has the connectivity needed, even when there is no (zip, zero) infrastructure. Microsoft has partnered with SpaceX, using SES satellites to bring Internet connectivity to remote areas.

“We can connect via satellite links any element on the Earth to another point on the Earth..”
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/microsofts-new-data-center-in-a-box-will-use-spacex-starlink-broadband/

They’re calling it part of “a multi-orbit, multi-band, multi-vendor” approach to connectivity. That’s pretty cool, if you ask me.

It takes the whole bookkeeping in bunny slippers philosophy of “work when and where it works for you” to an entirely new level.

Make Sense?

September 16, 2019

How Accounting Professionals Can Improve the Profitability of Their Existing Business Using Cloud

Working Closer with Business Clients

Accounting professionals are increasingly asked to provide more meaning behind the numbers they report on. Small business owners care about the bank balance and their tax bill, but they care far more about how profitable and productive the business is operating. And small business owners care about how they can improve performance – earn more profits and keep more of it. Accounting professionals can help their small business clients do this more efficiently using cloud and hosting technologies.

Small businesses need their accounting professionals to take a more direct level of involvement in support of daily processes than larger companies do.

For small and mid-size businesses, the accounting office may be asked to handle bookkeeping, payroll processing, bank account reconciliations, paying bills and invoicing customers and more. In order to have close access to the information and applications supporting these processes, it becomes necessary for accounting pros to be able to connect remotely to client systems. This isn’t a new requirement, but the technology available today to make it work allows for closer and more immediate interaction between the client and the accounting professional.

When a small and growing business runs their applications on a cloud platform, the variety of users that need to work with the information are able to access it regardless of where they are located because the Internet becomes the network. This model doesn’t in any way require that businesses adopt web-based applications instead of the desktop applications they have come to rely on. Desktop applications like QuickBooks, Sage50, Microsoft Office and more can be hosted on cloud platforms, allowing business users to login and use the software they are familiar with and that supports their various processes.

With a cloud hosting model for running business applications and storing business data companies can take advantage of fully-managed deployments of their software and systems without having to employ the IT staff to implement and manage it all. This allows small businesses to have the advantage of high performance IT without the typically high-cost budgets required to support it. The other advantage is that the accounting professionals working with the business are able to access the systems in real time from their offices or other locations, enabling the close working relationship the business needs.

The key value proposition for the accounting professional is the improved profitability to be found in existing client engagements.

Whether it is through an increase in the number and type of services offered to the client or through an improved level of efficiency found with operating on the hosted system, professionals can increase revenues and reduce costs of supporting existing clients. That’s the secret to success in working with the small clients: earn enough working for them while at the same time keeping their costs down so they can grow into larger more profitable business clients.

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August 6, 2019

Better QuickBooks Hosting: Noobeh Cloud Solutions on Azure Help Businesses Avoid Data Loss, Improve Application Performance and Implement QuickBooks Integrations

They said back in 1999 that the desktop was dead, but desktop software is far from gone. In fact, application hosting services for products like QuickBooks desktop editions just keeps growing in popularity because it delivers the access, mobility and managed services businesses need.

Service providers have been hosting QuickBooks for years, and I’ve been right there all the way, ever since the model was originally developed. In fact, the company I worked with is still selling that original service model today while many other providers have come along to follow it and take advantage of the opportunity.

Using the cloud to support accounting and other business processes makes a lot of sense, and the best part is that it doesn’t require businesses adopt the online versions of the software that just doesn’t work as well. I have a background in accounting so I understand the issues of working remotely with clients, when the business is done in one place but the accounting is done in another. And I love the technology and finding ways to make it easier and more efficient to get small business accounting done.

The benefits of using hosted QuickBooks services are many.

Anytime/anywhere access and fully-managed service are among the most obvious benefits for QuickBooks desktop users, but the advantages of centralized information and applications, secure support for mobile and remote workers, and real-time integrations and analytics capabilities can be transformational for the entire business. Having the means to affordably extend applications to the entire workforce and keep everyone working with the same data in real time can become the foundation for improved processes, greater efficiency and better business performance.

Among the key benefits of the application hosting model is the fact that businesses are not forced to adopt software subscription services or invest their data in web applications that do not provide the functionality or features required. Even more, the business can elect to move their hosted system back to in-house computers, because the hosting is simply an alternative platform for running the software the business owns. You can take your ball and go home if you don’t want to stay.

With all the benefits of hosting QuickBooks, there are also risks involved, especially when working with shared hosting platforms.

Shared hosting platforms are architectures where the service provider spreads the cost of their infrastructure across many customers to help keep the costs down. Using conventional technologies to create divisions between customers on servers, networks and so on, services providers can deliver at a lower cost when they are able to generate revenue from lots of customers for the same pieces of equipment. As more customers are added, more servers are joined into the network. After a while, there are many servers handling the customer load.

Unfortunately, the greater the number of servers, the more complicated and costly it becomes to update the platform. This is among the reasons why many service providers have aged platforms, with server operating systems that are going out of support and offering only legacy desktop views. In addition to compatibility and modernization, a big problem with allowing the platform to age is that it becomes less secure and more difficult to keep protected.

Protecting against disaster is not the same as doing backups.

Many hosted QuickBooks customers have been faced with the ugly reality that their service provider backups are not enough to recover from disaster. This is largely the fault of the providers and is somewhat by design. Businesses hosting their financial and other business applications and data want to know that their information is safe and secure. Performing data backups is part of the promise of protecting customer data, so most customers believe that their service provider is backing up in a way that ensures the data can be recovered.

What most hosting customers don’t understand is that the provider backups are there to help the provider recover from disaster and not necessarily to get the customer back where they were.

Hosting companies know that they need to do backups so they can support customers when files get deleted or become corrupted. Hosting companies typically do regular backups of customer data, but they do not necessarily retain individual backup data sets and they often backup all customer data together. This means that the backup data is constantly being updated, and that fully restoring the data of just one customer may be problematic. Service provider backups are there to support the continued operations of the service provider and may not provide the level of archive or retention needed by the customer. Just to make sure their data is safe and recoverable, I strongly recommend that clients keep any hosted data archived in at least one other location off the host’s platform.

In just the past year, outages caused by malware have been experienced by service providers Cetrom, Skyline, Cloud9 and Insynq, demonstrating just how devastating an outage can be when the service provider doesn’t have adequate protections in place.

In many cases customers lost data because the service provider wasn’t able to recover it from compromised or nonexistent backups. Suggesting that customers should have their data backed up locally is never part of the marketing or onboarding with the QuickBooks host, but it is often the fallback position in times of trouble.

Perhaps the most troubling aspects of these provider failures are that many of the problems stem from the shared nature of the platform.

When we first started building QuickBooks hosting services the hardware and software to make it work was terribly expensive. To approach some level of affordability, a shared platform approach was developed. This allowed the service to scale while offering a lower cost of service to customers. When the services were initially developed, there was concern about protecting from viruses and Trojans, but the nature of malware in the wild was not nearly as troublesome as it has become. Things were manageable.

But technology has evolved and so have the threats and bad actors.

The smarter bad guys should be forcing platform providers to reconsider their shared management and delivery models.

Affordable computing resources are available from platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, offering small businesses the opportunity to have not only powerful and scalable platforms for their business IT, but also offering a means of operating privately. Not being forced to operate in the same network or on the same VMs as other companies means not having to worry about the behavior of other people or applications in your business network. It also means that the focus is on recovering your system if disaster strikes, not on recovering the systems of hundreds or thousands of other businesses at the same time.

Considering the move to a more private cloud hosting solution is an important way to reduce risk and improve IT performance for the business.

When they were in-house, the networks were private and no other businesses were sharing the servers. Moving to the cloud should not radically change that profile, and should offer customers the same privacy from outsiders and the same flexibility to implement whatever applications the business needs.

The Microsoft Azure platform provides this capability and businesses can benefit without compromising the budget. With private accounts on the Microsoft Azure platform, our customers are able to take advantage of the current and emerging technologies while safely and affordably supporting their business requirements, which is something the shared platforms fail to offer.

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August 30, 2018September 5, 2018

Contrary to What You Learned in Grade School… Sharing is Bad, Okay?

There is a place and time for sharing. Share your color crayons, share your toys… share your feelings with those you love. But when it comes to business technology and infrastructure, sharing isn’t always the best approach. Some things you should just keep for yourself… like the servers you use for hosting business desktops, desktop applications and business data.

When we first began the journey of bringing small business desktops and applications like QuickBooks to the Internet, the “cloud” was not yet a thing. Hosting providers put up servers in racks in data centers, installed software and stored data on behalf of customers, and did their best to find ways of making the service affordable. Elastic resources, massive scalability and built-in redundancy (which are benefits of a real cloud fabric) were not generally available nor were they even remotely affordable. Because the hardware, networking and other resources that make up the hosting infrastructure is costly, it is important for the hosting service provider to be able to spread those costs across the entire customer base.

In most cases, this meant creating shared servers where many customers run their applications and store their data. Even when a provider suggests that a customer has a “private” server, there is still a good chance the server is using shared storage and/or networking resources made accessible in the environment.

Sharing can be a good thing or a bad thing, and it often depends on the behavior of those involved. In shared application hosting environments, particularly desktop hosting environments, there is a lot of potential for intentionally and unintentionally causing problems that can and will impact other users and customers on the platform.

A simple provisioning error might allow a user to see data belonging to another company or have access to applications or services they should not.

With shared resources, bad actors and intruders can often escape permission boundaries, attaching to network shares and other computers on the platform.

Malware accidentally introduced by an innocent user from one company could easily penetrate the entire system, following paths to data storage locations and other servers, spreading the problem to many customers and systems and even data centers.

If you are operating on the compromised system you are at risk, even if the compromise wasn’t initiated by one of your users or from within one of your applications.

In the realm of QuickBooks hosting providers, the issues around sharing infrastructure and resources have created some very difficult situations for hosts and for their customers alike – especially when it comes to dealing with computer viruses, malware and ransomware. A few high-profile events, as well as numerous incidents which have flown under the radar, have revealed just how damaging the shared approach can be.

With the IRS, AICPA and other agencies issuing increasingly strong guidance for tax and accounting professionals to protect client information, finance professionals should strongly consider the risk introduced through shared hosting service arrangements and evaluate if it is greater than the costs of having a more private system.

Cloud platforms available today are fully matured, delivering scalability and agility at price levels that are affordable even for very small businesses. No longer solely for enterprise enjoyment, real cloud solutions and delivery models can be used by small businesses for desktop and application hosting without compromise. Every business deserves their own cloud, and we know how to make that affordable.

Cooper Mann works with teams deploying on the Microsoft Azure platform, offering an agility in design not previously available with legacy computing approaches. Because every delivery is absolutely private to each customer, the solution can be scaled up (or down!) on demand to suit the specific needs of the individual business. More important is the fact that each customer operates separately, so any bad behavior the system may suffer from is their own.

jmbunnyfeet Make Sense?

January 2, 2018

The nasty surprises hackers have in store for us in 2018

“Hackers are constantly finding new targets and refining the tools they use to break through cyberdefenses. The following are some significant threats to look out for this year.

More huge data breaches

The cyberattack on the Equifax credit reporting agency in 2017, which led to the theft of Social Security numbers, birth dates, and other data on almost half the U.S. population, was a stark reminder that hackers are thinking big when it comes to targets. ..

Ransomware in the cloud

… The biggest cloud operators, like Google, Amazon, and IBM, have hired some of the brightest minds in digital security, so they won’t be easy to crack. But smaller companies are likely to be more vulnerable, and even a modest breach could lead to a big payday for the hackers involved.

The weaponization of AI

This year will see the emergence of an AI-driven arms race. Security firms and researchers have been using machine-learning models, neural networks, and other AI technologies for a while to better anticipate attacks, and to spot ones already under way. It’s highly likely that hackers are adopting the same technology to strike back…”

Source: The nasty surprises hackers have in store for us in 2018

December 7, 2017

‘Tis the (Filing) Season – Time for W2s and 1099 Reporting

Every year-end brings with it not just the holiday spirit, but also the underlying dread felt by small business owners – a creepy and back-of-your-neck hair-raising feeling associated with annual business tax reporting and filing. That old saying about “death and taxes” has a lot of validity to it; sometimes they feel like the same thing to a small business owner. And this is the filing season. Ho ho ho.

The reporting requirements for small businesses seem to be growing at a rapid pace, and business owners are struggling to find the information and tools that ease the adjustment to increasingly burdensome reporting and compliance. The IRS has implemented a number of measures to increase tax revenues and enforce compliance, including stricter 1099 reporting requirements. With information provided at both ends of the “transaction” it is easier to identify those discrepancies which trigger audits. With this type of business intelligence, the IRS has developed a fairly strong weapon to combat non-compliance, so small business owners need to really pay attention (the IRS is). If the feds are tooling up, then business owners should, too.

Just to add to the seasonal festivities, make sure you upgrade your accounting software in time to benefit from the right rules and forms. If you run a small business and keep most of your information on spreadsheets (still? really?), that’s OK because there are solutions available which draw the information from spreadsheets, eliminating the need to re-enter data. Seriously, though, you should consider using actual bookkeeping or accounting software.

It is also important to remember that payroll tax filing dates for W-2s and 1099 forms were changed for 2016 taxes, and these changes continue for 2017. The filing deadline for 2017 W-2s and 1099 forms (including Form 1099-MISC) is January 31, 2018, which is a month earlier than the pre-2017 filing date. Thankfully, the deadline for providing W-2 forms to employees and 1099-MISC forms to other workers for 2017 has not changed. This deadline is still January 31, 2018.

Using a cloud-based service to file 1099s online should be something your business considers doing if it isn’t already. Because most services include form and feature updates, users don’t have to go looking for the right documents or worry that they are using an outdated form. In an online or hosted solution, users benefit from updates without downloads and get stricter security around their data than would likely be present on their own PC. As it relates to your accounting software, make sure it has the capabilities you need in this area and don’t settle for limited functionality.

Here are some features you’ll want to look for in your e-filing solution this year:

The ability to print and/or mail forms to recipients as well as e-filing forms directly with the IRS or SSA
Have Form 1096 or W-3 automatically calculated and transmitted electronically with the detail forms
Upload volumes of data with Excel templates or import from your accounting software (saves time and reduces input errors)
Store data securely and provide full access to filed forms for multiple years
Maintain payer and recipient records securely for use year after year.
Encrypt data upon submission and keep it encrypted throughout the entire process
Supports 1099 Corrections (should allow filing of corrected forms regardless of how the original form was filed)
Accountants, Bookkeepers and Tax Preparers should be able to set up multiple payers and file on behalf of many clients from a single account, even filing for all clients at once or via batch submission

Year-end tax filing, especially dealing with 1099s and W2s, is an arduous task for most small businesses and their professional service providers, yet it is one of those things that simply can’t be put off. Where there is a single income tax return there could be literally hundreds of associated 1099s or W2s to file. 1099 filing in particular has become more of a focus as authorities crack down on contractor versus employer classifications and seek to develop easier identification of audit candidates (something every business owner wants to avoid).

The point of the discussion is that there are cloud-based tools which are highly useful, feature rich, and very affordable… and business owners and their accountants or bookkeepers would be wise to take a look rather than assuming that the general accounting software will do the trick this year and the next. Remember that tax filing season is an annual event, and being able to rely on a consistently useful solution can make the season a bit merrier (or at least a little less stressful) for all.

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