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Reviews For Your Firm HOSTING PROVIDERS Right Networks Read the full review and see expanded ratings for this product online at: www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com/10986960 tives. Right Networks' hosting serBEST FIT Any company looking to leverage the vices can also be purchased directly through Thomson Reuters Virtual efciencies of the cloud to successfully Ofce ofering. grow their business. Also, frms who are looking to expand their practice and • Applications are automatically provisioned and are available from two high provide higher value to clients by ofering them a mobile, collaborative, fully availability data centers located in managed environment to access their diferent geographic parts of the US. • Right Networks' HyperRight Techdesktop accounting applications. nology allows all applications hosted by Right Networks to be accessible on STRENGTHS a fully clustered fully redundant • Te company is an authorized host for QuickBooks, Sage 50 US (Peachtree), infrastructure. a n d S a g e 5 0 C a n a d a (S i m p l y • Right Networks is the only service Accounting). Right Networks powers provider reviewed with true data and application mirroring in real time Intuit's Quick Book s Enter prise between two geographically dispersed Host i ng Solut ion wh ich is sold data centers. directly through Intuit representa- • Live telephone technical support is SUMMARY & PRICING available 24 hours a day, 365 days a Right Networks Advantage hosting year for all types of support requests. service is priced at $50 per user, per month, plus a $5 per user, per month POTENTIAL LIMITATIONS hosting fee for all users who access • R ight Net works does not create QuickBooks. Subscribers are required to custom servers for clients, nor do they provide or lease their QuickBooks host many common tax applications, license. Leased licenses are priced at including CCH ProSystem fx Tax, $7.50 or $12 per mo, per user for D r a k e Ta x , T hom s o n R e u t e r s QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks PreUltraTax CS and many other common mier, respectively. Subscribers are a p p l i c a t i o n s u s e d b y t a x a n d charged $5-$20 per month, per user for accounting professionals. each additional application. • Each additional application added to 888-417-4448 a user's profle has a per user monthly www.RightNetworks.com fee of $5-20, which could result in a very expensive hosting bill if a user needs a complete desktop hosted. FIR ST -HA ND SPONSORED CONTENT Building a New Kind of Practice In the middle of his career as a CPA, during which he'd worked and been a partner in other firms and served as the CFO at a business, Kirby Burnett decided it was time for a change. He was going to create a new accounting firm – one that would work entirely in the cloud. "After doing things the traditional way for many years, I wanted my new firm to be focused on doing more for fewer clients and helping them better run their businesses," he said. "To realize this, I knew that web-based tools that helped me and my clients better collaborate would be absolutely necessary, but I also wanted to work from a home office. After all, if you're going to work 80 hours a week, you might as well be comfortable." In his quest, he turned to a variety of information sources for advice and then attended a Rootworks event that showed him how to build "a firm for the future," and for Kirby, that meant taking not only his firm to the cloud, but also moving his clients READ THE 2013 REVIEW OF RIGHT NETWORKS to a cloud-based, hosted version of QuickBooks. To do this, he relied on Right Networks, a company that offers hosted versions of dozens of the programs that accountants and their clients rely on every day. To Kirby, the benefits of using Right Networks for client work have been tremendous. With his firm and his clients all on the same version of QuickBooks and since he can access their live data online at any time, the days of data transfers, accounting firm copies and outdated system versions are gone. His clients love it, too, he said. "Within a few months, we were able to get all of our clients who use QuickBooks to start using the hosted version," Kirby said. "I told them what I tell new client prospects, that I'm not interested in just doing their tax returns, but that I want help them grow their business. For me to do this, I need to have online access to their online accounting system. Since each client is different and some want Kirby and his staff to manage more or less of the day-to-day bookkeeping functions, Kirby can easily control client access settings. After they've been set up, all they have to access QuickBooks is to go to his firm's website, www.burnettcpaconsulting. com, and log in, whether they have one business or several different entities. The system has also helped him grow the firm, with new clients from around his Greenville, South Carolina, community, as well as from other cities and states, because physical location doesn't really matter to a virtual accounting practice. To keep up with this growth, Kirby said he has hired new staff to do the production work so that he can focus more on continuing to build his practice. Among his goals is to help train clients to better manage their own businesses, to help them truly understand the financials he produces for them so they can see the benefits of the results of changes they make. "Moving to Right Networks has been a great success," according to Kirby. "The programs are secure and completely reliable, it always works perfectly every day. And the customer support at Right Networks has been excellent." 11