Cloud Broker – Page 4 – Cooper Mann Consulting

May 8, 2013August 5, 2019

What Small Businesses Need To Know about QuickBooks and the Cloud

With all the talk of cloud computing and having remote access to business applications and data, many small business owners are finding themselves searching for the answer to cloud-ifying their tried-and-true QuickBooks desktop software. At first view, most business owners get the impression that their only viable choices are to either move up or down the product line – downgrading to QuickBooks Online Edition, which lacks the features and functionality they’ve come to expect from QuickBooks, or upgrading to QuickBooks Enterprise Edition, the only version Intuit visibly supports on terminal servers and which is far more expensive than the Pro or Premier editions.

It is surprising how many accounting or even IT professionals don’t understand the real options available to their small business customers wanting to move entirely to a cloud-based IT strategy, particularly when it comes to QuickBooks. This is no fault of the IT guy or accountant – unless they’re specializing with QuickBooks, there are some options they are simply not being made aware of because it isn’t where Intuit is focusing its marketing efforts. Intuit wants businesses to buy QuickBooks Online. The market, on the other hand, likes the QuickBooks desktop products and wants them in the cloud. The well-kept secret is that businesses can have their QuickBooks desktop editions in the cloud and it works the same way as it does on the desktop.

Hosted QuickBooks isn’t rocket science; it’s simply a method of installing QuickBooks desktop software on servers and making the solution available to users via the Internet. Many business offices are already doing this type of thing without really recognizing it – accessing the office PC via a Remote Desktop connection so they can work on their QuickBooks or other applications from home.

A QuickBooks hosting solution is essentially the same thing: QuickBooks software and the company data exist on a computer in a data center, and the user connects to that computing environment, application and data via a remote connection. Most providers use the same underlying technology (Remote Desktop) to deliver their hosting services that users deploy in their own offices – they just use “bigger” versions of it and sometimes a little extra technology with it to help out. The point is that Remote Desktops and hosted applications are not new or bleeding edge technologies; they are a proven means to effectively and efficiently deliver seamless remote access to computing resources (environment, apps, data, etc.).

Perhaps the weirdness surrounding the QuickBooks licensing is part of the problem; I’ve seen this confusion prevent businesses from running their QuickBooks on remote systems simply because they could not figure out the right way to do it and still conform to licensing rules. Consider that QuickBooks is essentially a single-user application, and it’s the database manager that really allows concurrent multi-user access to a data file. The program was not designed to have multiple users of the PROGRAM all running from one computer concurrently (which wasn’t a problem when only one person at a time used a computer).

But these days, with terminal servers and remote desktop capabilities, a single computer is essentially turned into a box containing a bunch of user environments (call them desktops, sessions… whatever). Each of these user environments (desktops/sessions) are running at the same time and on the same computer. So, when a user goes to launch QuickBooks and then open a QuickBooks company file, the database manager looks at the computer running the QuickBooks license and says “ok, you have a license to allow QB to access a data file with one user”. When the next user launches QuickBooks from that machine it will allow them to open the program, but if they try to connect to the same data file as the first user, guess what? QuickBooks database manager looks at the computer and license and sees the same single-user license number coming from the same computer.

A single-user license means only 1 user can access the company file concurrently (at the same time). So, if two or more people are on the same terminal server (remote desktop server), and are trying to access the same company data file concurrently, the QuickBooks license on their terminal server must be at a level that allows all of them to access the company file at the same time, e.g., a 2- or 3-user license. This is not intuitive.

Another issue relating to QuickBooks licensing on a terminal server or remote desktop setup is the fact that it’s a really awesome method of giving more users access to QuickBooks than you legally should. This is an unfortunate technical reality of the product, and is possibly an issue which influences Intuit’s lack of support of the product in this type of environment. While the licensing language and the operation of the database manager indicate that each user running QuickBooks should have a license, the technical reality is a bit different.

The technical reality is that a single QuickBooks license installed on a terminal server could possibly be actively used by any number of people on that server – all at the same time – as long as those users don’t try to open the same company file at the same time. Of course, this is in direct violation of the license agreement and is essentially a situation where a single QuickBooks license is being unlawfully accessed by more users than it is licensed for. Intuit does not approve of this model as it falls into the category of software piracy, but I sure see a lot of accounting firms applying it for client QuickBooks access. (It’s often a statement about how, as a ProAdvisor, the accountant gets their license each year, installs it on the terminal server, and magically all clients now have access to the new edition!). **Note to self: if your service provider or accountant gives you “free and automatic” upgrades to QuickBooks each year, you may want to look a bit further into whether or not the licensing is actually legitimate; the risk to your business books isn’t worth avoiding a $249 investment**

Another thing that often prevents businesses and their IT people from moving QuickBooks to a hosted solution is the lack of available support. While Intuit says that they support QuickBooks Enterprise in a terminal server environment, there is no such offering for the Pro and Premier editions. In reality, this doesn’t mean that the solutions won’t work, because they will. It simply means that Intuit won’t support the installation directly. Perhaps this is the best and most evident reason to work with an authorized QuickBooks hosting provider. Particularly when it comes to your business accounting and financial data, it makes sense to make sure it is running in a supported environment. There are few things as frustrating and potentially damaging to business than losing customer, vendor and accounting information. Let us still be realistic about this, though. QuickBooks was not designed to run on a terminal server, and its behavior and performance may not be flawless. In most cases, however, any tradeoffs are easily weighted towards the benefits of mobility, security and IT management. You get glitches with QuickBooks even on a local PC, so occasionally experiencing them with QuickBooks in the cloud should be expected.

Small businesses need help with their information technology, particularly as even simple to use solutions like QuickBooks continue to get more technically complex (simple to use often means there’s a lot going on behind the scenes). And small businesses want worry-free IT, so they can focus on running the business and not on running computers. For these reasons and more, the small business owner and the IT person serving small business should take a close look at hosting their QuickBooks desktop software – along with their other business applications – with a trusted cloud hosting provider. Yes, you can have your QuickBooks in the cloud. Today.

Make sense?

February 15, 2013

Accounting Professionals Should Do This: Be Proactive and Regularly Communicate with Clients

I’m not sure where I heard it, I think it was a sky diver on TV, who said about the sport “you’re dead until you do something about it”. At the same time that I realized that I never wanted to sky dive, I also realized that this fairly desperate philosophy at some level applied to a lot of business situations. Weirdly enough, one of them was how this relates to public accountants and bookkeepers working with small business clients.

One of the things I’ve heard a lot throughout the years is that bookkeeping and doing other work for small business clients is tough, because they never bring you the information you need when you need it. With a philosophy of “help me help you”, accounting professionals are trying to find ways to make it easier for the client to deliver the work to them. The missing element, however, is a closer working relationship with the client, coupled with PROACTIVE and REGULAR (please note the big letters) reminders that getting the work to the professional is the only way to get it processed in time .

How many firms really communicate with clients only during tax season? Is the client organizer your main method of reminding them that you’ve got a relationship? It’s not even funny how many business owners couldn’t name the accountant who did their tax return last year, and who don’t seem to care to know. This is definitely not the way to build and retain client relationships, yet it is the approach many professionals take. And then they wonder why the client base isn’t growing, and why they are having a hard time “communicating their value” and they want to know how to get more of that profitable “higher level” work.

You’re dead until you do something about it.

Put into the context of the reactive accountant, it starts to make sense. Accounting professionals must be proactive – be doing something to build customer loyalty and retention, be actively and regularly communicating with clients so it’s not a mad rush during tax season, and be implementing tools and solutions to help them offer more meaningful services to their clients. This is how to make the firm grow and thrive. So, go do something about it.

Make Sense?

Being Proactive, Not Reactive – Accountants Need to Increase the Speed of Service Delivery from Intuit Accountants News Central

Getting out of IT Jail

I have a friend in the accounting/technology industry that spends way too much time on his business in-house IT. He’s always futzing around with servers and workstations, fixing corrupted data files or PCs that won’t launch applications, and setting up remote access so he can work at home (which he never actually does because he’s at the office fixing IT issues). More often than not, when I try to get time to chat with the guy, his response is “I’ll have to call you later; I’m in IT jail”. As a side note, my friend is Doug Sleeter, a recognized leader in the world of small business accounting and among QuickBooks accountants, consultants and advisors.

My friend works a lot with different solutions and technologies designed to make it easier and more effective to get accounting and business information collected, processed, stored, and reported. He reviews tons of different solutions each year, and looks for those he believes can truly make a positive impact in the life of a business owner. My friend also, as he puts it, “eats his own dog food”, meaning that he actually puts into place many of the solutions which he finds to be beneficial so that he can experience their benefit in his own business. His proven experiences then translate to support for the solution in the market. People need to know that a solution will actually do what it is supposed to do, and many wait for someone else (someone they trust) to go first so they can use the customer feedback to help them make a decision.

My friend clearly recognized the growing value of cloud solutions and how implementing cloud-based services to solve specific business problems might be a more effective and affordable way to address growing business needs than with traditional ERP models or installed software approaches. Using different tools that work together (his term for this is “chunkify” 🙂 ), even very small businesses could now affordably address the various operational and financial information management needs which exist at some level in all businesses. Following along with his previous commitment to use and not just talk about these things, he began the process of selection and implementation of various cloud-based applications, tools and integrations for his desktop QuickBooks software.

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. thesis on Military Strategy, German Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke

It was going great. Application services subscribed to were working as expected, and all sorts of information was fairly seamlessly flowing to and from QuickBooks. And then, it happened – his bookkeeper moved away and wasn’t able to work in the office where the accounting software and data were housed. Take a deep breath. Okay, so back to the remote access thing, and more IT jail.

He worked diligently to create remote access for the now-remote bookkeeper, and remote desktop service worked OK, but it was “a pain to keep working, and it never could give the type of performance we were trying to give her”. Go figure, the one piece of the puzzle left in the office was the one making everything else more difficult and costly. He was in IT jail once again.

The final step was to get the QuickBooks software and company data out of the local network and in a safe and secure and fully-managed environment. Particularly since QuickBooks is (in this case) the centerpiece of the business accounting system, it became essential to place it in an environment where it would be maintained, monitored, and protected by people who specialize in that sort of thing. My friend, like most business owners, just didn’t have the time and resources to have the level of IT and management that an outsourced commercial service provider could offer.

See The Sleeter Group’s QuickBooks and Beyond article Still Addicted to Desktop Software? Get it Hosted in the Cloud

Intuit even recognized that businesses needed a better way to run and manage their QuickBooks desktop software, so they created an accredited hosting program to allow service providers to offer application hosting and license management services to QuickBooks users. My friend now uses one of these providers to host his QuickBooks and other desktop applications. He still has all the integrations and features he had before, but isn’t required to spend time and productivity fixing hardware issues or software installation problems. His software is installed, maintained, and actively supported by IT professionals who are focusing on nothing more than keeping his systems up and running.

In his own words, “the hosting move offloaded us from having to mess with providing access, and at the same time it improved performance and delegated the IT management”.

For a time my friend and his business went without a high level of IT management and support, but now he completely recognizes that he needs it and is finding it to be well worth the cost. Now he’s got his own “get out of jail” card.

Make sense?

In case you didn’t know it, both Intuit and Sage have programs for service providers, providing authorization to host and deliver small business financial software products to direct customers.

Get information on Intuit’s Authorized Commercial Hosts for QuickBooks here, Get information on Sage hosting partners here.

If you need assistance deciding how to get your applications and business online, or selecting and implementing with a service provider, we can help.

January 29, 2013October 28, 2015

An Educated Guess is Not a Crystal Ball – Forecasting the Future

If every business could peer into the future to see how they will perform, there wouldn’t be a need for historical data and performance benchmarking. Unfortunately, nobody has a crystal ball, so it becomes necessary for business owners to plan for the future. By making educated guesses with valuable information gleaned from the past, companies can establish the path they will take to growth and profitability.

Accounting professionals are great at producing accurate historical financial performance information. The value in this historical data is only partially found in the periodic reports and financial statements generated. The primary value, the insight delivered from this historical data, is the information it reveals about the business operation over time. It is from this historical data that certain trends are identified, providing a basis for making the educated guesses necessary to learn how the business will look in the future.

Forecasting is very important for businesses, as it provides the framework for laying out your expectations for the business. In essence, it is a way to (hopefully) predict what your business finances will look like in the future based on forecasted growth. And, armed with the forecast, you can now more confidently build a reasonable plan to reach your stated business goals. While there are myriad approaches to creating a business forecast, it makes sense to simplify the process and focus on the area you likely spend most of your time attending to: sales. Use your sales goals and projections as the basis for establishing a forecast, setting realistic goals for the current year and for a few years after that. Once you’ve forecast the new sales goals, you can more easily appreciate what it will take in personnel and other costs to support that growth.

Recognizing that the forecast is simply an educated guess, it is important to regularly compare actual performance to the forecast to see if the business is on the right path to reach the established goal. If sales are not growing as projected, then the business may need to make adjustments in terms of personnel hiring and other plans to ensure that costs don’t outpace sales. Without a path to follow, business owners will not necessarily know if the operation is “on track”, as there is no track to be on – there is nothing to measure success against. Certainly, profitability is the goal, but it is a matter of degrees of success, and the business will not know whether it is being as successful and profitable as it might be.

Accounting professionals should help their clients create realistic forecasts, along with organizing the information and formulating a plan for the business owner to follow. On an ongoing basis, the accounting professional’s involvement delivers continued value by helping the business owner recognize and respond to changes in the business, adjusting plans as necessary to keep the business on the right path. And, no crystal ball is required.

Make Sense?

Remote access to client bookkeeping comes in many forms because clients come in many forms

There are a lot of conversations in LinkedIn and other groups, where bookkeepers and accountants are discussing their various methods of accessing client QuickBooks data and applications remotely. While these conversations are quite helpful for some folks, there are others out there that simply get confused due to all of the possibilities. There are many ways to work remotely with QuickBooks clients, and there are a lot of different situations where one approach may work better than others.

The key to remember here is that REMOTE ACCESS MATTERS. Time and distance is the enemy when it comes to outsourced bookkeeping, and whether you like visiting your clients or not, having remote access to their data can be the key element in providing the highest level of service and value possible. Remember when PCanywhere became available, and we were all excited because now we could use a modem to dial directly in to the client PC? OK, maybe I’m talking to a crowd that’s too new to remember that excitement, but believe me, remote access is something all outsourced accountants and bookkeepers have been looking for. Now that really good options are available (a lot of options), it makes sense to get a better understanding of what you can and can’t do with various remote access approaches.

First, when you’re looking at any true SaaS solution (true being a relative term, but here we mean an app service that was built for the web and is offered as a subscription model), consider that the solution exists only on the web, and that when a business subscribes they are generally subscribing to a single company data set. Unlike QuickBooks desktop, for example, where you can have numerous company data files, QuickBooks Online and other SaaS solutions generally build a single company data file associated with the subscription. When you want to access different companies, you may have to log in as a user of the company you’re accessing.

If you’re an accounting professional, there may be an edition or approach that allows you to connect to multiple client accounts, but then again, there may not be. So be prepared to have to log in as each individual client to access their data. When this becomes the situation, what’s the difference between one client having QB Online and one using Xero, Wave, FreshBooks or Kashoo? None, really, other than the fact that you need to get to know all of the solutions a bit. As a bookkeeper or accounting professional, this shouldn’t be so much of an issue, as debits and credits and basic accounting theory doesn’t change with the accounting software (basic “accounting theory” isn’t really available for redefinition).

The other thing to recognize about these solutions is that the data belongs on the web with the app, so it’s not like you’ll be copying the data file to your PC to work on. You might export the data to another solution, but you won’t be using the SaaS solution offline.

If the client isn’t using a SaaS solution, then it is likely a desktop solution, where the application is installed on their local PC. This type of solution – QuickBooks desktop editions being the most popular and easiest example to work with – gets installed and runs from the PC. Data may be stored on the PC or on a network hard drive, but the program is running locally on the user’s computer, and is using resources on the local computer (memory, processor, etc.). There are only a few ways to make this type of application into something you can access remotely, and one of them is by using a remote control approach.

Remote control is where one computer connects to and controls certain aspects of another. This is like the old dial-up approach, using PCanywhere-type applications to control one computer from another. These days, the Internet rather than a dial-up phone connection is the preferred method, and there are web service providers which “broker” the connection and communication between computers, providing added features and layers of security. Using a remote control solution (examples are LogMeIn or GoToMyPC) simply allows the user on one computer to control the keyboard and mouse, and view the display, of a remote computer. It doesn’t matter what is running on the remote, so a bookkeeper could use this approach to access a client PC and QuickBooks desktop applications and data, or even to connect with the client so they can log in to QuickBooks Online or Xero together.

Some bookkeepers work with their clients, showing them how to do things and connecting to client resources in order to get work accomplished. Others connect using their own resources or accounts, and work concurrently with the client. Still others may export data from the client solution into their product of choice, not even working within the client application at all except to make adjustments and data exports. It all depends on the collaboration model you and the client have going, and it is unlikely that any single model or approach will work for the entire client base.

QuickBooks hosting introduces a bit of a wrinkle in the concept, but not much of one. Really, hosted QuickBooks desktop editions should be viewed to be not less and not significantly more than a QuickBooks Online or other SaaS approach. If the client would benefit from working online (most client would), then having them host their QuickBooks desktop applications and data with a hosting provider makes sense. However, just because the client is hosting their QuickBooks doesn’t mean that you should immediately assume that you’ll have access to their applications or data. Like with a SaaS solution, you’ll likely have to have an account to log in with, and that account could be a separate login allowing you to work at the same time as the client, or the account could be one that is shared with the client and where only one of you can log in at the same time.

Since a hosted solution is accessed online just like a SaaS solution is, you don’t have to have the software installed on your own PC, and you only need an Internet connection to access the application and data at any time. A major difference of working with a hosted solution is that you could possibly have the application installed on your PC, and could copy the data from the host and work on it offline.

With all of the options available, accountants and bookkeepers have realized that the selection of client collaboration approaches depends on a number of factors, and that professionals may end up applying an unlikely combination of solutions in order to address meeting various client preferences as well as their accounting needs.

Make sense?

Read more about hosted QuickBooks desktop editions

Read about the race to find the secret sauce of hosted application services for small businesses

January 23, 2013

Licensing and Virtualization: Changes to SPLA May Impact Provider Cost Models

In many application hosting environments, machine and operating system virtualization provide the only realistic means for delivering services for applications which were never designed for high-volume multitenant implementation. In these environments, providers rely upon technologies from Microsoft, VMWare, Citrix and Parallels to provide containment of application environments, creating frameworks where single-tenant applications and hosted infrastructure may be affordably offered to subscribing business customers. Because many of the applications being hosted today do not conform to the various standards which exist for high-volume and multitenant delivery, providers have taken what we’ll call “creative” approaches to virtualized application and environment implementations. Under certain licensing models, these approaches may be sustainable for a period of time. However, recent adjustments to core licensing components and pricing from key providers, Microsoft in particular, may significantly impact the cost of service delivery for providers with less than optimized infrastructure.

One of the notable changes in the Microsoft SPLA (Service Provider License Agreement) is the treatment of Windows and RDS users in the “desktop as a service” model. In previous editions of the SPLA, as was offered with 2008/R2 licensing and prior, providers could select from two different models when implementing service: the SAL-only (server access license) model, which applies on a per concurrent user basis to the infrastructure, or the PL (processor license) model, which applied to the processors installed in systems with Windows operating system and SQL server instances.

For high-density and multitenant environments, the per-processor approach is far more cost efficient to implement, as it allows the provider to create a scale economy with the infrastructure, leveraging hardware and resources across many subscribing tenants. Reducing the cost model to a base infrastructure rate also introduced predictability and stability in recurring costs for the provider, even as subscriber numbers and subscription revenues increase.

The problem reveals itself with the providers deploying “not optimal” infrastructure, whether by design or due to legacy application requirements. These providers rely upon the per-user pricing models to support access and usage to the infrastructure, largely due to the fact that the infrastructure has grown “out” and not “up”. Deploying more servers and more VM instances allowed these providers to present legacy applications as part of a managed application service model. While the management of the infrastructure is greatly complicated with this approach, it is often the only means to addressing the needs of popular “noncompliant” applications (such as Intuit QuickBooks and Sage 50). With the SPLA changes introduced for Windows 2012, these service providers may be in a bit of a tough spot. You see, the per-user option for licensing Windows server access is gone, and only the per-processor licensing model remains.

Microsoft is wisely addressing the needs of the market which is demanding more capability and affordability in terms of cloud-based access to applications. These pricing adjustments are necessary to support the needs of service providers who are increasingly stretching their infrastructure investments to deliver higher user density at a lower per-user cost. Further, application developers seeking new markets and delivery models are taking advantage of these virtualization approaches, creating hybrid and hosted solution models around their legacy application products. The licensing approaches which support these higher density application deliveries introduce options for developers to optimize their applications for the hosted model rather than dealing with immediate comprehensive re-development (which isn’t an option for many ISVs – independent software vendors).

The IT world is forging ahead with cloud computing, high-capacity infrastructure, and heavily virtualized environments supporting larger numbers of users. Software developers must take heed, and embrace these deployment models (or at least adjust to the point of supporting them) in order to have a chance at keeping pace in the anytime, anywhere world of today’s business technology. This means working collaboratively with hosting service and infrastructure providers, crafting services which have the required scalability and incorporating a deployment model agile enough to take advantage of infrastructure licensing benefits as they are introduced.

What was a serviceable pricing structure yesterday may be an anchor holding your profitability down tomorrow. Service providers – make sure you’re keeping a close eye on licensing requirements and delivery cost models, and consider that building up your infrastructure capability is often more cost efficient than building out.

Make sense?

BuildingUP.biz | CooperMann.com

Licensing for Hosted Application Services: Why it costs what it costs

read more about the confusion over hosted licensing on The Progressive Accountant http://www.theprogressiveaccountant.com/tech-tips/confusion-over-hosted-licensing.html