Some of you may be hearing about web based billing and practice management solutions a.k.a. cloud computing, software as a service, SAAS, etc. The link near the bottom of this post is an article relating to one of the main concerns law firms have about these solutions – reliability.
Intuit is a large, well respected, publically traded, technology company. They manage online versions of TurboTax, QuickBooks and Quicken. The fact that their cloud computing sites can go down for more than a day means that this could happen to anyone.
Below are a few quotes from the QuickBooks Online Blog to give you a sense of what their customers went through. This information should be helpful if you are working with clients who are considering a web based service. There is a link at the bottom of this post to a blog with additional quotes.
Ila Bennett Says:
June 18, 2010 at 7:58 am
We were unable to produce financial documents, and there may be possible monetary fines because of this.
I am looking to QuickBooks Online for reimbursement of these fines.
Cheryl Hudson Says:
June 17, 2010 at 10:14 pm
While we appreciate the apology, I am requesting a credit to both my accounts for the lost we incurred from not being able to finish financial reports that were due and the lost productivity for my staff person who was not able to perform her duties for two days.
Kathleen Says:
For those of us that rely heavily on our accounting functions, “inconvenience” seems a bit cavalier. We were literally held hostage by this “inconvenience”. I guess my concern is what prevents this from happening again and to Rob’s point why did the backup go down at the same time.
NEWS ARTICLE
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20007912-93.html
QUICKBOOKS BLOG
http://blog.quickbooksonline.com/2010/06/17/service-outage-summary