I have a prospective client where I am seriously considering entering data to her Sage program on her pc in her office from my office.
The person on Sage helpline was pretty useless and gave me a lot of platitudes so I am not sure how feasible this really is. My IT company suggested Gotomy PC is the answer. I met someone yesterday who does a very small amount of book-keeping via remote access and she seemed to think there weren't any problems. She wouldn't be the right person to talk technical with, unfortunately.
Have you got first-hand experience of this? Is access time reasonable? What are the pitfalls?
Replies (6)
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I would use the inbuilt facilities with Windows - Remote Desktop
I have been using Remote Desktop to connect between my office and home PC's and also in reverse since it was launched years ago.
I've found it to be quite quick, useful and secure provided you know how to do the setup.
It may also need a modification to her router and windows firewall to allow access on port 3389, which is the default remote desktop port.
THere are a range of products
Moonbeam the previous comment about RDP is spot on and I use it for some of my accountancy clients, but I am technical.
In the main, services like Goto are simpler for non technicals to setup and provide a range of facilities that are easier to use than their RDP equivalents (bear in mind this is only a subjective opinion).
A number of products are free for personal use. For exanple Teamviewer is very good and quite straight forward to setup. Another is ISLLight or LogMeIn. Mikogo is very popular, but I find it a little fiddly when passing control.
Most will offer a free trial and I suggest you try a couple out to see what you are comfortbale with. Each time you want to connect to your customer, you will probably have to talk them through the process, so find a product that you are happy to do this with. If you have a web site you can make this simpler by creating a download link to the product you are using and perhaps give some instructions.
With repsect to speed this will come down to the broad connection at either end, but I have customers working remotely using these tools.
One other thing to consider is printing. If you want to print reports locally, you might find that some software will not support this. I have also had some difficulty with inkjets, so it might be an idea to buy a cheap laser printer.
Hope that helps.
Paul
http://www.kellysolutions.co.uk
Logmein
I use Logmein to access my clients pc - and have used it to input into SAGE without any problems, however my client had to purchase a "pro" subscription to enable me to print from his to my printer in my office.
Logmein is very simple and easy to setup - I assume it is very similar to Gotomy PC.
log me in
I use log me in, it does run slower than if you were sat at the computer but not to point that you want to throw it out of the window..
I tend to email files or send the accountant link through if i want to print..or as suggested pay for the pro and you can remote print.
Online Collaboration with PaperLess for Sage
Hi Moonbeam
Your client could enable you to have access to post directly into Sage from the source documents that they manage on their site and you do the accounting details for.
You could use automatic invoice recognition on the documents they scan into PaperLess to reduce the amount of manual data entry, and you could also use the efficient approvals system to track who approved the invoices for payment.
All this is available using -- Accounting the PaperLess way™
Phil