Clients & Profits | Remote Access Newsletter

WORKING SMARTER EVERY DAY

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. That’s because these systems only allow one person to access Clients & Profits at a time, which won’t work at all in a multi-office environment. To support an office full of creatives, production staff, and accountants, you’ll need Clients & Profits SQL.

A question of scale. Unlike other versions of Clients & Profits, Clients & Profits SQL uses Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to process, store, and retrieve data. This makes it capable of handling the much larger databases created by companies with multiple offices. And because it is a client/server system, it is able to scale up to handle hundreds of simultaneous users from any location. Clients & Profits SQL offers speed, security, and accessibility that’s never been available from Clients & Profits before. However, this capability comes at a price -- client/server systems are much more expensive to use, requiring experienced database administrators to install, configure, and support.

What about My Clients & Profits? But couldn’t a company simply use My Clients & Profits! to connect the remote offices? While My Clients & Profits! provides web-based access to clients, jobs, traffic, and time cards, it does not offer access to billing, financial accounting, or management reporting. So while My C&P! might work for remote sales offices, it won’t work for full-service offices that need to bill clients, track payments, write checks, and print reports. For those people, the solution is Clients & Profits SQL.

By John Duffy

     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. This will determine whether remote access is worth the cost -- both in money, time,
and stress. Ask these questions:

     Can it work for us? Is your shop ready for a project this complicated, time-consuming, and potentially expensive. The answer involves looking at the sophistication of the people who’ll use it, as well as the capabilities of the technical people who will install and maintain it. If the end-users are impatient and inflexible, then they’re unlikely to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of remote access - and will make your life miserable when things don’t work. So if you don’t have the resources available to configure and manage the system, you’ll be forced to rely on expensive outside help when you have problems--or suffer downtime while you’re trying to figure things out.

     Are we overspending? It’s important to find the balance between the features and

functionality people want (and will use) and the total cost (both hardware and labor) to set up and manage the system. For good or bad, there are lots of choices out there -- and lots of vendors who will sell you what you really don’t need. There are also lots of vendors who will sell you things that don’t really work as advertised.

Is it worth the cost? You’ll need to compare the benefits to your remote users versus the cost of the system over several years. (Be sure to take into account all potential ISP charges, consultant fees, hardware repairs and replacements, and software upgrades.) If the numbers make sense, then remote access will pay off.

So what’s next? List your shop’s needs, then get information about remote access software, hardware, and service providers. Try to talk to people who’ve done this before (the C&P user group is a great place to look). All this will help you find the remote access system that’s right for you.

Considering remote access? Be sure to ask yourself these questions first.