Transitioning Your Clients to the Cloud from Initial Discussion to Implementation to Client

Transitioning Your Clients to the Cloud from Initial Discussion to Implementation to Client Usage (Nov. 9)

I am really excited to have Kacee Johnson on the call today. She’s going to be talking about transitioning your clients to the cloud all the way from the initial discussion, to implementation, to getting that client to use it and getting it to stick. I think this will be a great presentation for us.

I want to thank our Gold sponsors today Xero, Intuit, Avalara, ScanWriter, Cloud9 Real Time who you’re going to hear from today and Bill.com. And our media sponsor is Accounting Web.

To qualify for CPE you’re going to need to be fast about those polling questions. We’re going to have 3 during this call and you will need to be logged into the browser for 50 minutes or longer.

And we’re going to give away 3 copies of Robert Chandler’s book, Together in the Cloud – The Ease and Convenience of Cloud Computing and so I’m super excited that you guys have donated this and really thrilled about this.

We’re going to skip those introductions and I’ll switch slides. I’m showing them the good stuff already, sorry about that. So we’re going to hear from Kacee Johnson and I’m so thrilled to have her. I was so honored to meet her.

She’s the Executive Vice President of Cloud9 Real Time. She’s been with them for a couple of years and that business has grown so well. I believe and you can correct me Kacee but you have over 5,000 clients…

Kacee: Yeah we’re at almost 8,000 now.

Oh my goodness well I’m way behind the times then. So Kacee is a powerhouse. She has been named by the CPA Practice Advisor as one of the 40 Most Influential People in our Profession Under 40. So I’m so honored to introduce Kacee. Kacee you have control now.

Thank you so much Sandi and thank you everybody for joining us today. Hopefully, you can learn a little bit about how we can help you migrate to the cloud and what we recommend as kind of best practices in terms of getting those clients in the cloud, whether you’re doing QuickBooks hosting services or any other cloud services that you’re looking to do.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 1 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 To get started, I would like to go over a little bit about us. Cloud9 Real Time is a US based corporation headquartered in San Diego, California. We are licensed by both Intuit as well as Sage as commercial hosting providers in the US and Canada.

We are an accredited managed service provider by MSP Alliance and we deploy all our servers, which we own, we don’t outsource to anybody for any of it but we deploy them at SOC 2 SSAE 16 Data Centers.

We’ve gotten a few awards recently and I like to talk about why. It’s because we’ve changed the way hosting works in our environment a great deal in the last year. It’s not a traditional hosting environment where you have a connection manager like Citrix. We’ve gone away from that with the new technology to where if you’re on a PC there are no downloads and we’re actually streaming those applications directly to your PC’s.

Because of the new technology, we got voted 2012 Reader’s Choice Award for Top Host by CPA Practice Advisor magazine. We just got the 2013 Sleeter Awesome App Award for our virtual server solution and then K2 Enterprises also awarded us the Best Hosting Company for 2012.

We have been building custom cloud solutions for accounting professionals since 2000 and we have a free white paper on that but, like I said; the technology has changed a lot in the last year. So we offer a free trial and I recommend everybody check that out if you have time.

To get started about cloud computing, I think one of the biggest things in terms of transitioning your client is discussing with them what cloud computing is. They’re hearing in the media to get in the cloud and thinking that this is something new, when in reality cloud technology has been around for a very long time, it was just extremely expensive and so only large corporations like BMW or Amazon could afford to be in the cloud.

Now technology advancements have made it so that it’s actually more cost effective for small to medium sized business owners to be in the cloud. And because of that you’re hearing the big push about cloud computing. It makes people uneasy if they don’t know what it is.

I think when first transitioning your clients to the cloud, understanding yourself what cloud computing is and then being able to educate your clients is half the battle. Let’s talk about different types of clouds because your clients, as well as you, may be in the cloud now and you don’t even realize it.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 2 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 I think there are really 4 true types of cloud solutions out there. Hosting, which is what we do is by managed service providers that are building virtual servers and hosting all your applications, your data and your users in one central location and essentially replacing an in-house server.

Then you have online access which is services like online banking where you’re using a browser to log into a website that allows you to view data. That is still cloud computing which I’m sure all of us use online banking and so we’re already in the cloud to some degree.

Storage is another type of cloud computing and a lot of CPA’s have website portals on their sites so that their clients can go there and pull off their tax documents. This is another type of cloud computing that you would be providing for your clients.

SAAS, Software As A Service is very, very popular and a lot of the cloud computing companies that you’re seeing out there, this is probably what they’re deploying. This is where a manufacturer has developed a product themselves that’s an online deliverable meaning like QuickBooks, we host the full desktop version on our servers to give you access but they have a SAAS product which is QuickBooks Online. Another very popular example would be Sales Force and so these are SAAS products and not desktop applications.

I think now would be a good time to get an idea of where our attendees are lying and have Sandi do a poll.

Sandi: So we want to ask are you currently in the cloud? So go ahead and get your answer for the poll and I’ll give you a few more seconds to vote. It looks like we’re pretty much all the way in and let’s share the results of that.

So we do have a pretty good number of people in the cloud but we have about a third of the people who aren’t at all and so that’s pretty interesting.

All right good, it’s always nice to see people who have some experience out there and ones that are just starting to learn about it.

A little more information about what the cloud is made of. First, it’s the physical hardware and so that would be your network appliances, the servers, of course firewalls and all the hardware you would purchase. Software, all the applications that you would normally have residing on your local desktop or server these are the applications and the storage of your data. So all that comprised is what the cloud is made of. It is an estimated infrastructure of about $452 billion and growing rapidly.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 3 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 Now as far as Cloud9 Real Time and the hosted cloud, if you’re looking to transition clients there it is probably due to QuickBooks hosting. That’s why most people go to it for or Sage 50 hosting. Now if you’re going to be transitioning to the cloud you can do it in phases and I think that’s a great idea actually.

Start with QuickBooks, Word, Excel and maybe a tax software but start with your own firm and getting your staff users used to it and then transitioning your clients into the cloud for QuickBooks hosting. Once you’re really comfortable there move up the rest of your server, maybe it’s ready to die or it’s not ready for tax season or maybe it’s just a good time because you don’t want to go and invest another $30,000 in a local infrastructure and then move your exchange up when that server is having problems.

The way it works is we put the full desktop version of QuickBooks in the cloud so that it’s in a multi-user environment that way everybody can be working in the same files at the same time. We also, of course, host lots of different applications which we’ll talk about but these are the most popular and it allows the employees, the business owners and the accountants to all be working at the same time in the same live data files. No more creating QuickBooks Accountant copies or even backups and sending files back and forth.

What is driving cloud computing? A few things, first is economics and the cost savings are huge. On the low end I would say 30% and on the high end which would normally be for a very large firm that has a full IT staff and lots of servers and exchange, etc. 70%.

Next it is fast and simple to use. The reason it is simple to use, at least in our environment on the hosted cloud, there are no learning curves because this is all the same desktop applications that you already use.

Data backup, network and server redundancies are definitely a reason people are moving to the cloud. Disaster recovery plan and, of course, everybody just saw the horrible things that went on the East Coast with Sandy and our phones went off the hook because people were so worried and a lot of people lost their entire businesses. So disaster recovery plan is definitely a reason that people are moving to the cloud.

Certified data centers, again what we’re providing in terms of security is not what a small to medium sized business owner would ever be able to replicate on their own without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 4 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 The convenience of being able to work anytime from anywhere is definitely pushing people to the cloud, as well as, there seems to be a real push now for remote workers. It’s lowering the overhead on the business owner or on the firm. We have at our Cloud Summit that I’m at right now, Jennifer Katrulya who is BMRG and her entire firm is now remote. She’s gotten rid of the brick and mortar building which is very impressive and so we’re seeing that more and more.

Eco-friendly, we have a lot of firms that are really wanting to go green and have a paperless office.

Now I know security is the biggest concern of what holds people back from moving to the cloud. I would like to spend a few slides to talk a little bit about that so that everybody understands what the cloud environment provides in terms of security.

The SOC 2 and hopefully everybody knows that SAAS 70 is the old and so out with the old and in with the new SOC Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3 certified but the one that really matters to our clients is the Type 2. You log in through 256 bit encryption and it’s on the front end as well as the back end, so when you first log into our server, as well as, when you go to log into each of those QuickBooks files. We have 24/7 365 a year of onsite security staff as well as redundancy of all the data in the data center systems.

A few pictures here to give you an idea of what it is we’re deploying in. These are just some pictures of our data center, our generators are fueled by 2 different diesel companies, so if there was a disaster then we can get fuel to those generators to keep us up at all times. We have 12 plus megawatts of power. It’s about an 80,000 square foot building and the network connectivity is phenomenal, we have 9 different providers of internet connection going into a blended network. So if one provider fell off or was having issues, let’s say its Verizon, it wouldn’t matter because there are 8 other providers going into that blended network, so the users wouldn’t even know.

The fire suppression and cooling room, this is to make sure all of our servers are kept at optimal temperatures. Then, of course, all the security hands on services. We have biometric hand scans and codes and badges, lots of different things deployed there to make sure that data is always safe.

Now we talk a lot about when transitioning clients to the cloud it’s usually about either Word, Excel, QuickBooks or maybe Sage 50, but there are so many applications you can host in the cloud. We host right now over 300 applications. The list you see here is a very small example of

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 5 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 what we host. These are just the most common that we see but it’s by no means a limitation of what we can host.

We host over 300 applications and really as long as it is compatible with our environment, which means 2008 R2 terminal services and you have the proper licensing because obviously we can’t promote piracy, then you’ll be good to go in terms of what we can host. Of course, we host all the different versions and years of QuickBooks that Intuit currently supports and so 2010 and forward, whether that’s Premiere, Enterprise and industry specific editions.

The full Microsoft Office Suite as well as we deploy Microsoft Exchange services, the full Sage 50 Suite as well as Thompson Reuter’s, T-Value, Optimizer, Sierra, Bill.com and more. Again, by no means a limitation of the application we host but to give you an idea, food for thought, of what we can host.

Sandi, do you want to open it up to another poll we can see where the attendees are lying in terms of applications?

Sandi: Absolutely and Kacee there were a couple of questions specifically about Sage Time Slips and Sage Solutions. Does that mean all Sage products? I think you answered that.

Absolutely we host the full Sage Suites, so whether it is H50, 100, 500, ACT, Time Slips, Simply Accounting Now, Sage 50 Canada, all those we host.

Sandi: All right it looks like we should have made that one check all the boxes and we didn’t. Which application would you like to host most?

A lot of people are saying “all of the above” because I goofed up on the question. Go ahead and type in one answer so that you get your CPE, most of the above. Okay we have a cloud version on the line named, Ed, and yeah so he wants most of the above. I think everything is in and let me share the results.

We have a lot of QuickBooks people on the line.

It’s very popular. We started as a QuickBooks hosting company and obviously grew from there as technology advanced and came out and started really building custom virtual servers for accountants so that they could host everything instead of just QuickBooks.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 6 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 Sandi: Right and Excel really goes with QuickBooks. You almost can’t have…you have to have both of them if you’re going to do it.

Absolutely yes.

Sandi: All right that’s great.

So to show everybody what the cloud would look like and we get a lot of questions about user experience. Again, this is only for our hosted cloud. You can go out there and try out all the different SAAS products and almost every cloud provider has a free trial. I highly recommend to take advantage of those offers and see what’s a good fit for your firm as well as for your clients, whether that be a Bill.com or Spring Ahead or else you’re looking for a hosted solution and we, of course, offer a free trial as well.

Let me show you what the user experience would be so that you understand when transitioning to the cloud what it will look like for your clients.

We give you embedded code to put on your website and this way you’re driving more traffic to your site and creating more of a community and organically increasing your own SEO. We give you that code and your users then go there and just enter their user name and password right on your website and they open up to a privately labeled page that they see all the different applications you’ve provided for them.

Each user license is customized and they only see the applications and data that you give them access to and so if it is a client user they would probably only see in this screen QuickBooks, Word, Excel and their little cloud file thing so if you’re giving them access to different documents. If it was an admin or staff user in your firm, then yes they would see all the different applications that you’re hosting.

One thing that sets us apart from the other providers out there is we also have our own proprietary software; it’s called The E Dashboard. So it’s a portal that you can private label and you can either launch your applications direct from this screen you see here or you can utilize our E Dashboard which we give all of our users free of charge. Here is just a screen shot of this firm.

We have 6 different themes to choose from and so the firm chooses which theme looks best with their logo. We then private label it with their logo in the upper left hand corner and contact information is down at the bottom. Then you see we publish out the applications on the left hand

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 7 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 side. If you were to use the E Dashboard you wouldn’t launch the applications from the previous little cloud page, you would actually launch them here from the E Dashboard.

Now a few other features and functionality of the E Dashboard is that we have a single portal for all of your clients. There is a drop down menu and your staff users will see all clients in one single portal, they just select which client they want to work on. If it was your client users they only see the applications you’ve given them access to and usually it’s just QuickBooks, Word and Excel and they wouldn’t see all those other client names in the drop down portal, they would just see their own.

There is also an inbox where your clients as well as you can scan, save facts or email documents directly into the system because it does have a full document management and storage system built into it. The server drive allows you to right click and copy and paste documents directly into the system which is really nice. We deploy Windows Service 2008 R2 which allows it to map your local printer drivers as well as your local drives, which again gives you that right click copy and paste functionality.

The top where you see E-Box that’s the document management and storage system, it is a Windows based storage system and so it is pretty user friendly. We do have some work flow built into this which allows you to manage accounting tasks and assign work between bookkeepers. Then finally at the bottom there’s an easy search tool that allows you to find documents that are stored in the E Dashboard without having to go searching for what you need.

Now a few things that are new with cloud computing and especially in the hosting avenues is that you can lease QuickBooks, you don’t have to buy it anymore, which is really nice. It’s only from a licensed commercial host and you can see all the licensed commercial hosts on Intuit’s website. If you’re in the US you can only…right now they actually added POS so we now do host POS for clients. You can also lease Premiere or Premiere Accountants Edition. If you’re in Canada you can also lease Enterprise with payroll. I hear we’re going to be able to lease Enterprise by the end of the year but I haven’t gotten firm confirmation of that but my Intuit rep has told me yes it will be available. Of course, the POS is not yet available for Canada but it is in the US.

Now to recap a few things about cloud computing and why you should move there and this is for all different types of cloud, not just for the hosted cloud. This is for SAAS cloud, which is the most popular and any other type of cloud technology.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 8 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 First, it’s going to reduce your costs. It’s paid incrementally so it is saving the organization money. Think of it kind of like electricity grid and you have lots of power available to you but you’re only paying for what you need. The cloud is extremely scalable because it is state of the art infrastructure and it will allow you to grow as you need to grow instead of going and investing in some huge server that maybe you’ll need in tax season and maybe not.

Obviously, it has better security and gives you compliance with continuous monitoring and this is very important. It results in improved reliability, performance and productivity. Disaster recovery and I cannot say this enough because it gives you those automatic offsite backups and removes the liability from you, the firm, and it also protects your clients and ensures the backups are done with integrity as well as stored remotely.

There is no application learning curve which is really nice because you already know the applications. This is if it’s in a hosted environment. If you’re going to a SAAS product then there will be some type of a learning curve because it’s an online edition of the product.

It does allow you to shift the focus from IT back to your own business billable hours, which I’m sure that’s why everybody went to school is to get their CPA licenses for is to do accounting work and not IT work. So if you push your stuff to the cloud you have other people to manage all that you don’t have to do updates anymore.

Of course just the more mobility, 24/7 access from anywhere. Sandi if you would like to do the final poll?

Sandi: Sure thing Kacee and we have some questions coming in. Do you want to cover all your material and then take questions?

Yeah I’m almost done. I think I only have one or two more slides. If you want to do the poll then we can wrap it up with questions from the group.

Sandi: Okay what’s the biggest push for you to get in the cloud? We need to have you answer that polling question. There we go, the number jumped a lot but I guess people had to think about this one a little bit.

Someone added, I am working from home and so let me close it and share. The majority are interested in new services for clients. This is great. We can kind of see what the percentage is there. Security with disaster recovery has a pretty strong…get rid of the in-house server I know I have a couple of Accelerators who

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 9 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 have servers and then QuickBooks hosting is the second. Okay Kacee I’ll close the poll and turn it back to you.

Great thank you Sandi. One of the things I like to do because you are looking at transitioning to the cloud and wondering how to do it, you’re going to look at a lot of different products out there. I think you should have a checklist to know what questions to ask.

This is a thing that will give you an outline of every company so you know exactly what you’re getting into and again I can’t stress enough to try your products. They will all offer a free trial and there is no reason not to take advantage of that and make sure it is a good fit for your firm. There are so many solutions out there and making sure that it is good for your clients and you prior to purchasing and getting locked into any type of a contract is obviously very beneficial.

Data centers, again SAAS 70 was eliminated by the AICPA SOC 2 and making sure those are certified data centers. If you’re going to be with a hosted provider you need to make sure they’re an accredited managed service provider. If not, who will manage that server? Is it still going to be you? Are you just leasing empty space on a box? It’s kind of defeating half the purpose because you’re still managing it. Now you have the disaster recovery but you probably aren’t saving much time or money.

If you are going to do QuickBooks hosting for your clients it’s extremely important that you go with an authorized QuickBooks commercial host. I believe there are 15 or 16 now and so lots of options. But the reason for this is when you purchase QuickBooks you’re agreeing to their user agreement, which states that you will not host QuickBooks with an unauthorized host and you will not host it yourself without getting the self host accreditation. So make sure you don’t break your own user agreement with them and stay in compliance.

SLA is the Service Level Agreement and every cloud provider can give you a copy of theirs and you really want to see what it is they’re guaranteeing to you. This will tell you what the uptime is going to be, what their service level agreement is in terms of response time or getting things back to you is, backups, who owns the data is very important because I’ve had clients contact me or potential clients who are maybe using a backup service and they didn’t read the fine print and find out who owns the data, then they couldn’t get it back because they hadn’t paid their bills. So please make sure that you look at that Service Level Agreement and you know who owns the data.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 10 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 Hours of support, self service help desk this is obviously different time zones but also you may want to know if it’s offshore and there is going to be any type of cost for you support as well.

Private labeling will be important for most clients if you’re looking to host for your clients. Then you’re able to brand your own image and create more of a community and get your own firm name out there more.

Storage fees and this is a really big one. People see a low cost but then don’t associate it with okay as I grow how is that cost going to go up? Most cloud companies whether it is a SAAS or a hosted provider you’ll have a set amount given with that monthly fee. But how much is it after you grow past that? You don’t want a $200 a month bill turning into an $800 a month bill and you not budgeting for it.

Restriction of applications and this is extremely important because you don’t want to end up with multiple providers. Now you have the problem of not having a singular sign on. So if you go to one provider because they have a virtual office solution for their product, but then you have to go to another provider for your QuickBooks hosting and another provider for something else, well now you have a lot of different vendors out there.

Server administration there could be fees associated with this and how far they’re going to go. License fees, this could be for the server license but also for software. Seamless windows, most accountants I know work on at least 2 monitors and some 3, 4 and 5. You want to make sure that the program is going to work with seamless windows. Then we already talked about who owns the data.

This is just the things I recommend while you’re out there to ask all the vendors and again get on those free trials.

Sandi, do you want to open it up to questions and we’ll see if we can help?

Sandi: Okay we have a lot of Cloud9 specific questions. I would encourage some of or all of you with those to post in the Cloud9 Exhibit Hall. Michelle, please feel free to chime in.

We had some issues about licensing and pricing. I know that’s a little tricky but it is something around like a multi-user QuickBooks license and how does that compare with hosting and how do you transfer that? Do you want to get into that or would you rather get those individually in the Exhibit Hall?

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 11 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 Kacee: How about if I go over how licensing works a little bit with QuickBooks and hopefully that will answer the bulk of the questions? Then if they have specifics they can talk with any of our reps.

The way licensing works on our system is when we build a client a server, we buy the Windows Server license, the full office suite, PDF Reader/Writer Pro, the software that allows you to scan directly into the system and then they provide the license numbers for all other applications.

If it is QuickBooks because we’re licensed by Intuit every individual user on our system has to have their own user license. I’m not talking about the QuickBooks license; I’m talking about a license to get into our system. So every individual person has their own Cloud9 log in.

Then associated with that Cloud9 log in, if that person is accessing QuickBooks they have to have a QuickBooks license associated with their Cloud9 log in because we report to Intuit every month of who is accessing QuickBooks on our servers. That can be for that user any license number that is within the versions that Intuit currently supports – 2010 and forward. Each individual person will need to have a QuickBooks license number associated with their account and if they own QuickBooks they can provide the license number they already own and if they don’t own it then they can lease it from us for an additional fee and that ranges depending on which version they need to lease and if they’re in Canada or the US. But yes each individual person needs to.

Now when they provide the license numbers they already own it can be a multi- user. So if you have let’s say a 3 user license you can apply that same number to those 3 people. If it is a single user license it just assigns to that one person.

Because you’re giving us the QuickBooks license number it doesn’t mean you can’t use QuickBooks locally anymore you still have that to use. This is just letting Intuit know they are licensed and it isn’t piracy and they can use it on our system.

As far as the multi-user in our environment, we’re a multi-user environment and so what that means is if you’re working in a Pro, Premiere, Premiere Accountants edition file you will be able to have up to 5 people in the same file at the same

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 12 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 time. If it’s Enterprise up to 25 people in the same file at the same time. That is regardless of whether you’re providing us a single user license or not because we’re a multi-user environment.

Hopefully that helped answer some questions about how licensing works on the Cloud9 side but also for the QuickBooks.

Sandi: Great and I think that helped with a lot of the questions.

Michelle: Can I have a clarifying question too? Kacee a couple of questions I’ve seen in the chat room is how can I use QuickBooks Accountant? I want my Client Data Review and some of those features. And someone else just mentioned they’re using QuickBooks Bookkeeper. Can you talk about that? If you and the client are both using QuickBooks are you going to install the QuickBooks Accountant in that situation?

Kacee: In our environment we always install Premiere Accountants edition because it will open all the different versions. We also install Enterprise, of course. But Premiere Accountants edition and Enterprise work together on the same server very well but Pro and Premiere do not. So if you have a Pro file for the client as well as for you it’s always going to open in Premiere Accountants edition on our servers because we don’t install Pro. But if they ever pulled that file off it’s not going to upgrade it and so they can still work on a profile in their local system later on.

Sandi: Kacee, I want to have them think very big. As far as your fees go and I know they can reach out to you to clarify and get a quote on fees, but you do allow them to purchase all the cloud hosting accounts and then they can mark it up to their clients. Is that correct or they can charge them a technology fee?

Kacee: Yes absolutely.

Sandi: Do you have some good examples of success stories? I mean you have 8,000 clients so I’m sure you have a lot of great success stories.

Kacee: Yeah and so we have 2 different kinds of clients that come to us. We have the CPA firm that is sick of all their servers and they say we don’t want to have servers. Then we have the other types of clients who say we’re coming to you for

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 13 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 QuickBooks hosting because we want to offer new services to our clients and want to add revenue to our bottom dollar and so let’s think about this.

Now as far as QuickBooks hosting goes, we do not publish our pricing. So we private label everything and your clients log in at your website and then they are going through these privately labeled portals so they see everything of yours.

Now you can charge your clients whatever you like. If you are on our shared environment which is basically just QuickBooks hosting, Word, Excel, Bill.com, Peachtree, Quicken, Sage 50, Spring Ahead and Big Time that’s all that’s on there and if you’re on our shared environment it is just a per user fee. We either charge $439 per year per user or $49.99 per month per user. Now that’s what we charge you because you’re our client and your clients remain your clients. So you can turn around and charge your clients whatever you like.

If you’re on a virtual server it’s a little different in terms of pricing because we’re building you a custom server and so all that pricing is much different. You would need to work with a rep on that..

Sandi: Kacee I think we might have lost you.

Michelle: Yeah I think we did. I’ll clarify a couple of things while we’re waiting and hopefully getting Kacee back. Someone is saying well that means they don’t host QuickBooks Pro. You can toggle into QuickBooks Pro from QuickBooks Accountant edition.

As for the question of whether they would have access to the accountant functions that I’m not sure of but it sounds like yes the client might be able to do that. But maybe when the client opens QuickBooks it opens QuickBooks Pro via the QuickBooks Accountant edition, so they may not have access to that. I’d like to ask her, if we can get her back and if not it’s a great question to post on their page in the Exhibit Hall.

Kacee: Can everybody hear me?

Sandi: Oh perfect.

Michelle: We have you back.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 14 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 Kacee: I’m sorry I don’t know what happened.

Michelle: Can I ask you a quick question Kacee?

Kacee: Yes.

Michelle: You mentioned that you install QuickBooks Accountant edition and then they can toggle into Pro. So if my client and I are both using a hosted QuickBooks with Cloud9 so then when the client logs in do they see QuickBooks Pro via QuickBooks Accountant, so they don’t have access to Client Data Review or the accountant’s features?

Kacee: No on our shared environment we do install the industry specific editions like manufacturers and non-profits and things like that and they can toggle to those. But we don’t install Pro on our shared environment at all. If they logged into a Pro file on our shared environment it’s going to open in Premiere Accountant’s edition for the client as well as for the accountant.

Michelle: Okay so they would have access to those CDR and accountant features?

Kacee: Yes they would.

Michelle: Okay.

Sandi: Kacee, if you’re done with that can you spend a little bit of time on the private label concept? I think that’s really new for a lot of people like showing them what they can customize within their portal.

Kacee: Yes. Do you want me to actually show or talk about it?

Sandi: You have a slide that you can go back to.

Kacee: Yeah.

Sandi: We have time, we have like 10 or 12 minutes so if you would like to show it that would be great too.

Kacee: Yeah I tend to be a little fast and apologize if I didn’t stretch it long enough. Let me go back here to this is where the private labeling starts. We give embedded code to you if you work with CPA Site Solutions which is obviously pretty

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 15 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 popular for accountants. Then we will give them the code and they will put it up for you. If you don’t work with them we would give it to you and you would give it to your webmaster. They put it on your site and this way you’re just telling clients whenever they need to get to their QuickBooks file they go to your website and enter in their user name and password and then they go to their private label portal.

The most of the private labeling is here within the E Dashboard. We have 6 different themes and so again you choose the theme you like that works the best with your look. We put your logo and contact information up so it looks as though it’s a portal that you’re delivering for them. This way they kind of only know about Cloud9 Real Time if you are telling them, which some people choose not to because they want to have all contact with their client; whereas, some say if they have a technical issue I don’t want anything to do with that so I’m going to let them know this is who I use as my hosting provider and they can call you direct.

You can see up here at the top it says provided by HDA Accounting and then the dash and it would say your name or whatever the user name is. So this is where a lot of the private labeling comes into play.

The reason we did this is because we recognized that a lot of the smaller firms didn’t have a huge marketing budget or a way to really brand their image for their clients and create a sense of community. So we just wanted to give them extra features and benefits to really give it a full virtual accounting system.

Sandi: That sounds great. We had a couple of questions on payroll, whether you host payroll. I believe that that goes with the…at least for me the way it works in my QuickBooks that goes with the version of QuickBooks that you’re using. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? They’re wondering about how do you host payroll?

Kacee: Yeah so if they’re using QuickBooks payroll then it will work on either of our systems – the shared or virtual server. They would set it up the same way they do locally if they already have an account. They will just go into the payroll services and run their payroll but it’s already set up on all the servers to run.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 16 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 So it’s not included, payroll is not included in the lease fee of ours but if you subscribe to or wanted to subscribe to it you would do it just the way you would on your local desktop.

Sandi: Michelle do you have any questions you would like to pick out of this?

Michelle: Yes. There are a whole lot of questions about the pricing and I know that that’s very difficult. But one of them specifically was if I’m a sole practitioner with just a few clients is this feasible for me or is it going to be too expensive for me? Let’s say we just needed to use QuickBooks and there is a lot of concern as to the pricing per user and things like that.

Kacee: We have firms as small as one solo practitioner firms. Understand that we don’t charge per company file. We only charge per user getting in the system. So if you, as the accountant, it’s just 1 or 2 people in the firm and then you have maybe 5 different clients you think this might be a good fit for because I doubt out there that every single one of your clients is going to need to get into this, maybe you don’t work in their QuickBooks file all the time and you don’t send it back and forth all the time.

But the ones it would be of benefit to, each of those individual clients that need access you would just give them a user license. The important part in terms of pricing is to understand you’re not giving it to them and saying okay you’re going to give me $50 a month so we don’t have to send QuickBooks files back and forth. You’re giving them so much more than that and it’s about making them realize that.

You’re saying to them you no longer have to have QuickBooks locally, you don’t have to do the updates, you don’t have to spend the time of creating these files and sending them back and forth, you now have a disaster recovery plan, plus a full document management and storage system. So instead of going out and spending all this money on a separate DMS you have it already included in this, which a DMS would probably cost I don’t know $20 or $30 a month per person just for the DMS depending on how robust of a system you want and that’s just for a DMS with no applications.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 17 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 This way you all have one spot to pull all your documents from and then again all those backups. Now the letting the client know you don’t ever have to create a backup on this anymore because it’s already done for you.

Michelle: Let’s say I’m using this with 3 clients and each client has like 1 user, what would my monthly fee be and what would the fee be for my client for QuickBooks only? Let’s not talk about any other products that might be hosted, let’s just say QuickBooks. Can you give us a ballpark of what that would be?

Kacee: Sure if you’re going to do our monthly plan then it would be $50 per user per month. So if it’s you and then you have 3 clients you need 4 user licenses if each of those clients only has 1 person that needs to get in. So you’re looking for 4 people at $200 a month.

All of our user licenses cost exactly the same. We used to do where an Admin license was one rate and then client licenses were another and we changed it to make it simple and say all users are one flat rate.

Sandi: Kacee that includes the whole private labeling and there’s no extra charge for that? Is that correct?

Kacee: That’s correct. You get our E Dashboard, all the private labeling, QuickBooks hosting, we buy for you the Word and Excel licenses and those are already included as well as the PDF Reader/Writer Pro, the DMS and of course all the IT maintenance, support and backups and updates on the software.

Sandi: Right so when you’re selling this to your client, you guys, you want to make that Our Value To You list like I was talking about this morning in the first call and list all these extras in terms of the things that are beneficial for the client like this whole slide that you’re showing now Kacee and all the things they get, including how secure the data center is, the audit they’ve been through.

Kacee why don’t you talk to that? How can they begin to talk a client into this?

Kacee: We have a lot of marketing materials for the accountants to give to their clients that aren’t Cloud9 and they will be privately labeled for the accountant. But basically just show to a small to medium sized business owner what is important to them.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 18 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 Most of them, of course, are going to look at cost but they need to understand what they’re paying locally to whether it’s an in-house bookkeeper or to an IT guy to come out and have to manage QuickBooks. If you’re going to lease it now then that’s a value savings right there and helps offset the hosting fees because leasing it for $12 a month is much cheaper, it’s about half the cost of buying a Premiere license. So showing them all these different things and also just talking to them again about disaster recovery.

If you show your client and let’s say you have a doctor who is a client and their QuickBooks file has all their financial information of how many years, if something happened to their area and they went down or their local server went down all that financial information is lost unless they had an offsite backup. So showing them look I’m also giving you a disaster recovery plan in all this, I’m your accountant, your trusted advisor and this is what I recommend to protect you.

Sandi: Great and how can they contact you and what would be the next step? Definitely they can find you in the Exhibit Hall. How would they contact you if they wanted a private quote or had some questions or wanted a demo, Kacee?

Kacee: I’ll skip back through all these that we already reviewed but our website that they can go to is www.Cloud9RealTime.com and I know that we have a few different reps that are in the Exhibit Hall and ready to answer questions. You can also email us at [email protected] to get a representative to get back to you or you can just give us a call at 888-869-0076 and you can speak with any of our reps there and they can answer any of the questions and get you over a proposal or get you one of those free trials we talked about so you can actually play with the system and get a feel for what the user experience is like.

Sandi: Great and we had a couple of more questions and we do have probably about 3 or 4 more minutes that we need to do. Michelle, do you have any? I have one.

Michelle: No go ahead.

Sandi: It’s a question about can you access your Cloud9 without the RDP? Can you use a browser or do you have to go through the RDP? Can you explain what an RDP is?

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 19 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 Kacee: Yes RDP is Remote Desktop Protocol and there is also RDC, Remote Desktop Connection and you can actually only do RDP if you’re on your own virtual server in our environment. We don’t necessarily push the RDP because new technology has a better experience for the user, so you can use a browser and log in from your own website and it will actually stream those applications direct to your PCs. Or we have what we call an MSI, we send that over to you and you would only download it on a private computer but what it does is it puts desktop icons for each of your applications, your cloud files or for the E Dashboard that then you would launch your applications from. That is a really nice user experience and is actually the preferred way. The browser would be the second option as well.

RDP is really not the best because in our environment we’re compatible with up to 16 monitors and it gives you seamless windows. If you go into an RDP session while you can still use 16 monitors it’s going to span across all of them instead of giving you true seamless windows. I’m not a big fan of the RDP but it is available if you’re on a virtual server and some people like to work on a windows desktop.

Sandi: Okay and there was a little bit of conversation about QuickBooks Accountants when you were talking about the user having access to Accountant version but you can shut that down through password access and user control, correct?

Kacee: That’s correct. When you create your user IDs within the QuickBooks file that is where you would limit those things that you didn’t want your client users to be able to access.

Sandi: Great. Michelle anything else? Oh Kacee any tips on how to get it to stick with the client? Like making sure, I guess if you had a chance to choose what client you wanted to put this on or some tips about helping the client get used to the couple of new differences that occur within this different environment.

Kacee: I think number one any time you’re going to have a new user, whether it is a client or staff user, check in and make sure they meet minimum system requirements. Everybody always asks about internet connection and it’s really not as bulky as people think but you do want to make sure that, especially if they’re in a dial up area or DSL is probably more popular but they have minimum system

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 20 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 requirements met. Those are published on our website but they can also just do a free trial to test it out and see what their user experience is going to be like.

If they’re on PC’s it’s a much more seamless environment because we are a Windows environment. But the other thing I would say for getting a client ready and tips to get them into the cloud would be okay first I’m going to identify here are my minimum system requirements and here is what my internet is and all these look good and we’re ready to move in. It is just setting up that user experience of okay this is how we’re going to use it and these are the best practices that are recommended by the provider and deliver those out whether it’s a guide or having them attend a free webinar training and orientation session or any of those things.

There are so many resources out there that education is just half the battle for both us as well as the accountant.

Sandi: Right. Do you have a particular browser that works better than others? I think they’re going from their Ning experience. We learned that Chrome is much better than IE for our little community we have here at the vCon. Are there any browser preferences?

Kacee: Definitely in our environment it is Internet Explorer.

Sandi: Great and it’s interesting how everything is specific to browsers and there are a lot of differences. All right anything else you would like to add Kacee?

Kacee: No just thank you Michelle and Sandi for having me and putting all this together. It’s been great and I hope the attendees learned something about cloud computing. Hopefully, they will be pushing any type of cloud services out to their clients.

Sandi: Very good and you’re getting some good comments and some of them really love the private label idea and others are saying I’m already a client and so you’re getting some great feedback during this presentation.

Michelle, anything to add?

Michelle: I’d just like to say thank you Kacee I’m really glad that Cloud9 went ahead and helped be a sponsor and came today because I know you’re doing your own cloud

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 21 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012 summit. We really appreciate you taking the time to help us and our attendees learn more about Cloud9 and hosting and all that. So I really appreciate you being here.

Kacee: Oh thank you and yes I’m going to get back there because I have a presentation in about an hour.

Sandi: All right and that’s a really good point, give Cloud9 a little time to respond to your stuff because they’re doing double time today. Give them some slack if you will please but go ahead and post in the forum. We’re going to keep the forum up for several weeks so they’ll have a chance to get to your answers as soon as they can.

Thank you so much Kacee I appreciate it. Our next session will be our very last one. We’re wrapping it up. What we’re going to do is we’re going to definitely close this all up with a great bow and give you some tips as far as how you can wrap it up and get a whole bunch of stuff implemented. So join us in about 10 minutes for that.

Thanks everybody.

Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. http://accountingvcon.com/ Page 22 [email protected] Copyright Sandra L. Leyva, Inc. 2012