Quickbooks and cloud hosting (What would you do?)

[thecomputerguy]

I'm trying to heavily push clients whose servers are reaching EOL (2008R2) into Teams/SP + All hosted apps.

Three companies in particular have very similar setups and I've already moved two of them into Teams/SP w/ Workstation backup using OneDrive (Thanks @YeOldeStonecat ) and then moved their QB data over to Right Networks.

The first two clients were pretty straightforward ... smaller data files, only two users pricing is at about than $100 a month per user (or $1200 per year), and that seems pretty affordable to be completely hardware independent.

Base Right Networks package does not include Excel so reports have to be exported locally which is a pain, and does not include Outlook so emailing out of QB is a little lackluster as you can only use an SMTP server, you can't email out of Outlook so you don't get the email in your sent box, another bummer.

My last client has 7 users, and 5 of those will absolutely need Outlook on the Right Networks end. Right Networks is pricing them at $45 per user base, then $61 per user to include Office licensing. This brings us to $395 a month or a whopping $4740 per year or almost $25,000 over the course of 5 years (typical server lifetime).

I REALLY want them to go cloud with Teams/SP + Hosted QB. They have almost no need at all for a file server aside from it to host QB.

For almost $25,000 over 5 years it becomes crazy hard to justify.

Any thoughts here?

And by the way @Sky-Knight I don't know anything about Azure nor do I want to maintain something like that when I'm not familiar with it at all

 

[britechguy]

. . . I don't know anything about Azure nor do I want to maintain something like that when I'm not familiar with it at all

Please do not take the following as an attack, because it's not. In regard to Azure, I am precisely like you.

There is no way to maintain ignorance of the major cloud hosting options, including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, to name two, and to be able to be giving accurate information, including about pricing, to your client base.

You have to match the cloud tool to the task, and straight storage on Amazon, particularly if it's archival storage, is absolutely dirt cheap.

Nothing is so constant as change, and change is nowhere more constant than in IT. When it comes to cloud services, we're all constantly playing catch up in the current environment, as new stuff is being introduced almost constantly. Admittedly, no one of us will likely ever come close to "knowing it all," but we definitely will need to know several different options, and where and when each is best suited to the specific customer need(s). A single customer could end up in a "mixed cloud" environment quite easily.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Yep, if someone says they've mastered Azure...

Well that's very much like getting an affirmative answer to "Are you a good IT Guy?"

Anyone that's willing to positively affirm they're qualified to do this job, isn't generally qualified to do this job. The best we can manage is managed ignorance. And when you're dealing with O365 and the Azure fabric that supports and extends it, with new toys coming out WEEKLY... you can't "know" it.

But yet it's also not that hard...

Now, back to your problem. Why are you buying Outlook from Right Networks? You need ProPlus! So the cheapest you can get a terminal server compatible copy of Office is $12/month/user. Pair that up with a separate $5 / month Office 365 Business Essentials sub for the cloud features and you wind up with a $17 / month / user solution to that problem. Alternately you may as well just jump straight to the $20 / month Microsoft 365 Business plan, because it also has shared activation rights and is the same price as E3 with more stuff.

Unless you don't have admin rights to the RDP environment? In which case I'd be building my own VPS for quickbooks pretty much anywhere.

P.S. Trust me when I tell you, that you do NOT want your clients having more than one source for O365/Azure subscriptions. Doing that usually results in multiple tenants for the users to manage... and the sign on issues are ENDLESS. So not to put too fine a point on it, if you want to support O365, you must also support Azure... you have no choice.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I "think" the app cloud license is 20 bucks more..but you need to purchase an O365 E3 license.
If you already have your own E3 license...give them a call.
Or if they're on the O365 Biz Prem....consider the 8 bucks upgrade to E3...if they allow you to bring you own license and not have to pay 20 bucks more.

 

[timeshifter]

Might be way off base here, but why not convert to QuickBooks Online?

(Anecdote: moved a small user to that today. Had to install trial of QB 2020 to get converted. Her machine had a 4K display scaled down. Twice I was tripped up because some of the bitmaps in QB 2020 are too small or got positioned off-screen making it seem the program had frozen. I remember dealing with similar sloppy programming issues related to scaled displays six years ago. Bottom line, their desktop software still sucks and now I think they really don't give a crap as I think they think their future is online.)

 

[Sky-Knight]

Quickbooks online isn't very useful for accountants, and for the rest of us mere mortals there are two glaring issues...

1.) Sometimes you need your financials when the internet is down.
2.) QB Online is missing features compared to Pro Desktop.