FRIDAY THE 13TH

I wanted to write about Friday the 13th and how the Knights Templar, who are associate with setting up the Modern Day Banking System, were a part of the origins.

While doing a little research I found that the true origins are really not documented, only speculated, and there are quite a few.

This is an interesting article outlining where the superstition came from www.todayifoundout.com.  Hopefully if you have a fear of Friday the 13th, Triskaidekaphobia, this will quell your fears.

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DON’T GET TRAPPED INTO LONG TERM CLOUD HOSTING CONTRACTS – TANDEM HAS MONTHLY HOSTING SERVICES

Here is an interesting blog from blog.softwareinsider.org about cloud vendors starting to lock customers in to yearly and even up to seven year contracts. While its good to plan ahead, you never know what is going to happen seven years down the line.

If you’re on the fence about Virtual Desktop Hosting, why not stick your toes in the water with our month to month hosting plan rather than diving in over your head? There is always a full 30 day money back guarantee for those of you who prefer not to get near the pool at all.

For more information: Email support@cloudtopoffice.com or give us a call at (866)710-4228.

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SHOULD I PURCHASE A SERVER? – MAINTAINING A SERVER IS LIKE OWNING A POOL

Purchasing and maintaining your own sever is akin to owning and cleaning your own pool. Imagine you just bought a new house with a beautiful sparkling pool in the beginning of summer.  The weather is perfect, it’s fun learning about how to maintain the proper chemicals, and it just takes a little time each week.  After a few weeks algae starts to show up, and you look into what is causing the problem and buy some special product to nip it in the bud.  It looks better for a while, but your algae keeps creeping back up.  The weather gets hotter and a little more uncomfortable, and you neglect to do your regular chemical adjustment.  Before you know it, the algae is out of control and you have to bring in a professional to clean everything out.

You realize that since the newness has worn off, taking care of the pool isn’t really fun, it’s just another chore and you would rather not work on your weekend off, especially after you realize you don’t really know what you are doing. When you look at all of the expenses of purchasing cleaning tools, and all of the chemicals, plus emergency service, you aren’t really saving money. Not to mention, you’re not getting paid for this added labor and headache.  There are some people that maintain lovely pools by themselves, but they really know what they are doing, and they truly are engaged and enjoy working on their system.

The same thing goes for maintaining your own server, if you are not already computer savvy and have day dreams about owning your own server, this is not a safe bet for you.  Servers require regular maintenance, updates and backups, that if not done regularly can lead to serious problems, which costs an arm and a leg to get fixed in the long run.  There are also quite a few hidden fees, not just the price of the server.  Small to medium sized companies with their own servers, are the easiest to switch over to hosting, because they understand the hassle of a server, and hosting is actually cheap compared to what they have been paying.
Make the safe bet with virtually no startup costs and try out hosting today.  You can always cancel you service and get your money back if you are dissatisfied for any reason.  Email support@cloudtopoffice.com or give us a call at (866)710-4228.

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NEVER OUTSOURCING TO ROBOTS

Here is an interesting article I found about outsourced jobs moving from foreign countries to automated services from Motherboard.vice.com.

Have you ever really been helped by a robot when you need customer service?  I find them about as frustrating as self check out at the store.

Never fear, at Tandem CloudTop, you will always receive help from a real person from our company, and not by someone in another country or a robot, no matter how convincing they seem to get.

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN QUICKBOOKS ONLINE AND QUICKBOOKS CLOUD HOSTING

QuickBooks Online is similar to QuickBooks in a Cloud Hosted Environment because both are accessible anywhere, anytime and on almost any internet connected device. However, beyond these few similarities, they are quite distinct.
QuickBooks Online is for very basic entry-level businesses and individuals who want access to QuickBooks from their browser. There are limited capabilities within QuickBooks Online and add-ons to the program are not available. You are not currently able to import data from previous versions of QuickBooks, Excel, Quicken or MS Office into QB Online. You can only view a single window at a time and are not able to do side-by-side comparisons of reports as you can with the desktop version. The lack of features for QB Online leads to basic bookkeeping options, but if your company is just starting out and you are very price conscious, then this might be a perfect fit for your company.  One benefit of QB Online is that it is updated automatically, so that you no longer have to purchase a newer version.
If you are happy with your current version of QuickBooks, but are looking to have remote access, Cloud Hosting is a great option because you don’t have to learn new software, and all of your information can be easily transferred to your virtual desktop. Cloud Hosted QuickBooks, through a service provider, allows you to have the full desktop product, and you can utilize Microsoft Office on your virtual desktop, enabling your business to have information flow automatically between employees.  You will have the benefits of added security and remote servers so that none of your information will be lost in case of a disaster. Backups are performed nightly to ensure there is no loss of data.
For more information email support@cloudtopoffice.com or give us a call at (866)710-4228.

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