How
to work from home on Clients & Profits
Only a few years ago, working on Clients & Profits from home involved
spending thousands in expensive hardware. Today, new technology has
made high-speed internet connections affordable and widely available.
REMOTE
ACCESS Q&A
How much slower will Clients & Profits be when I work remotely?
Get answers to this and other important questions, along with some
guaranteed
great ideas.
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Remote
Access (937k)
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By Mark Robillard
There was a time not so long ago that connecting staff members from
home, a client’s office, or a hotel room wasn’t only impractical,
it was virtually impossible. But then came the internet.
Before the internet, the only option
was modem-to-modem. A staff member with a modem-equipped laptop could
connect to a modem-equipped computer inside the office. But the connection
speeds were torturously slow, and connections were frequently dropped
without warning or reason. Now, while not a perfect solution, remote
access can be useful and productive.
It’s important to understand what
remote access actually means. In terms of Clients & Profits, remote
access can allow people who work outside the office to work as if
they’re physically in the office, within limits.
There are several approaches to take
to provide remote access to Clients & Profits. The one that’s
right for you depends on who needs remote access and what things they
need to do outside the office. The first step is to identify who needs
remote access.
Need to know
There’s always been an obvious
need for account service, production, and creative staffers to trade
information about clients, jobs, costs, and billings wherever they
are. These people are frequently out of the office, but are often
the first to know about new jobs, schedule revisions, change orders,
and more. But without any way to notify the office, the office-bound
staff members aren’t made aware until well after the fact—when
the staff members finally return to the office and the data is entered
into Clients & Profits.
Information becomes available to everyone
Remote access gives these staffers a
chance to open new jobs, enter estimates, revise schedules, and more
from any internet connection—from a client’s conference
room, from a hotel room, from a photo shoot, or from home. The information
gets into the shop’s Clients & Profits database virtually
as it happens (or at least much quicker than before), and becomes
available to everyone else who needs it.
So if the business case for remote access can be made, how can it
be done? The approaches to remote access are readily available and
inexpensive. But the
Continued on the next page
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CONNECTING
REMOTE USERS
While the idea of remote access may seem easy, it's more complicated
than it looks. So before starting a remote access project, consider
the risks as well as the benefits...
How to link different offices
While remote access solutions
like Timbuktu and PC Anywhere do a great job of connecting stay-at-home
bookkeepers and outside accountants to your shop’s Clients &
Profits database, they don’t offer much for connecting different
offices. more
Who
needs remote access?
There are four likely types of
staffers who need to work remotely...
Timbuktu is the leading remote
connectivity solution for Mac and Windows. It allows remote users
to access a company computer from home using an internet connection.
With Timbuktu, you can work on Clients & Profits from home just
as if you were sitting inside the office. Timbuktu?
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