If you’re considering bringing QuickBooks Desktop and its supporting applications into the cloud, you’re likely already aware of the benefits of cloud hosting. Still, you need to know how to choose a QuickBooks hosting provider.
Storing data and running applications in the cloud:
- Is more secure and efficient than installing and maintaining software on your own.
- Enables you, your colleagues and your clients to access applications and data from anywhere and at any time, from any device connected to the internet.
If you’re already familiar with these benefits, you’ve probably started to evaluate QuickBooks hosting providers.
But before you sign on with a cloud partner, there are some key questions you should ask.
7 questions to ask before you choose a QuickBooks hosting provider
These are some essential details you need to know before you move to the cloud.
1. How well do you understand the accounting profession?
This is the most important question to ask because you want a cloud service provider that understands accounting.
To find out if a provider has experience with the profession, ask questions such as:
- How many accounting firms do you serve?
- Is there a particular vertical you specialize in?
- Do you host and support the applications and software I use?
- How many years have you been in business?
It’s vital that your provider understands and has extensive experience serving firms. Accounting professionals have schedules that differ from other professionals; providers should know better than to make busy seasons worse with system downtime. For example, your cloud partner should never schedule updates during tax season.
2. How do you support your customers or clients?
What if you or one of your clients runs into a challenge or has a question? You need to know how you can get in contact with your service provider and what the support team’s availability is. Ask:
- Do you offer 24/7/365 support?
- Where is your support based?
- What are your support channels—email, phone and chat?
After gathering this information from your potential hosting provider, verify the answers! Take a look at sources such as G2, a peer-to-peer review site for business software and services. Websites such as these offer agnostic, unbiased views of companies and will present the most accurate depiction of exactly what it’s like to deal with your vendor.
3. Where do you host your data?
All cloud providers have one thing in common: They store data on a dedicated server (or better yet, servers). There’s no need to ask for exactly where they host their data since a provider revealing the location of a data center could pose a security risk. Getting a few facts about the locations will suffice, including:
- Do you store hosted data in multiple locations?
- Are the multiple locations geographically diverse?
- Is data stored in a Tier I, II, III or IV data center? (Tiers III and IV are the highest tiers.)
Reliable hosting companies have more than one data center as well as redundancy in place so if one location goes offline, you never notice. The outage doesn’t affect the availability of your applications.
4. What is your availability and uptime?
Uptime is simply a word that means your data and applications are available. If a provider’s entire system is down, you won’t be able to access anything. So, uptime is important. Don’t skip this simple question:
- What is your uptime percentage?
Premier hosting providers have extremely high uptimes and little to no downtime. Think about what downtime could mean to your business in, say, late March or early April. An outage would have a negative impact on your ability to service your clients and run your business.
You’ll want to be sure that someone you trust to host your most critical applications has best-in-class reliability and at least 99.999% (or “five nines”) uptime. If your provider has five nines uptime, you’ll basically never experience an outage of any kind.
5. What is your data backup policy?
You need to know how your prospective cloud partner retains data. A cloud provider’s failure to have a disaster recovery plan in place could very well be the end of your firm.
Ask about backup retention with the following questions:
- Are data backups standard?
- How long are backups retained (30, 60, 90 days)?
- If the worst does happen and my firm needs data restored from a backup, what is the procedure?
Backups aren’t much use if it’s a struggle to re-deploy them to your system. You want a provider that can restore your data from backups almost immediately and retain that data for as long a period as possible.
6. Which applications do you support?
You probably have a lot of applications tied into QuickBooks. You need as many of them as possible to work together.
Whether you need applications to manage expenses, track employee time, pay bills, manage inventory or manage client relationships, chances are there’s an app to help—and you need to integrate it into your accounting platform.
Be sure that your QuickBooks hosting provider supports the applications you need in your accounting technology stack.
7. Are you an Intuit Authorized Hosting Provider?
If you use QuickBooks Desktop and need cloud hosting, partnering with an Intuit Authorized Hosting Provider is an absolute necessity.
This exclusive Intuit endorsement means that a cloud provider is uniquely qualified to host and sell Intuit products, such as QuickBooks licenses. Intuit authorized status is the best indicator that a cloud provider can give you the support you need.
The right QuickBooks hosting provider provides more than hosting
With the right line of questioning, it’s possible to confidently vet potential cloud providers to ensure that you’re putting your trust in the right partner.
After all, the right QuickBooks hosting provider doesn’t just give you a place to store your data. They act as a strategic partner for your firm to ensure that you have the groundwork in place to run your organization reliably.
Find out more about how Rightworks answers your questions about cloud providers. Investigate today.