My business is at a complete stand still
A few days ago, QuickBooks Online suffered a short term outage.
Man oh MAN, you would have thought that the world was coming to an end, reading some of the comments online about this! I’ll admit: I had a minor panic attack, because I was scheduled to present a four hour QuickBooks Online certification prep webinar to a few hundred people. A webinar that pretty much requires me to to be in QBO the entire time.
You read that right. FOUR HOUR WEBINAR. Most of it in the product, showing fellow accounting professionals how it worked. Hard to do when I can’t login to the product, you know?
So yeah, I had a moment of panic and thought: “I need to email someone to get this rescheduled, stat!”
Then I thought, “Well, shit happens”, and realized that I couldn’t rely on my west coast Intuit people to get the email about the outage in time, and had to figure out alternatives, if QBO didn’t come back online.
I came up with 2 options:
- Have my host of TheQBShow.com and good friend, Woody Adams, handle all of the in product demo, if he was able to login (the outage was spotty – and not everyone had issues)
- Do the webinar entirely from a slide deck, with screen shots.
We decided on the first option, even though by the time the webinar started, QBO was pretty much 100% back online. The best part? It turned out really well, both for Woody and I, but also for the attendees. So yay!
The one thing that compelled me to write this blog, was one of the comments that I read online about the outage:
“My business is at a complete stand still.”
Really? I mean, REALLY?? You’re entire business is unable to function because your accounting system is offline?
I want to tell this person: “Shit happens.” It’s called every day life. Unexpected stuff comes up – stuff that you have no control over – that may prevent or delay you from reaching whatever goal you’re attempting reach, big or small. In those situations, you have to do what I did: come up with backup plan. And probably a backup for the backup.
I’ll be the first to admit that this doesn’t always work out as well as it did for that webinar. I’m not always as on top of this sort of stuff as I was that morning. To be honest, if I hadn’t already had slides with screen shots, I don’t know that the second option would have been doable.
I’ll also tell you this – I absolutely have a backup plan for running my business; for times when I can’t access my documents or accounting software, for whatever the reason. We keep the documents and templates that Kildal Services uses on Google drive, and we use QBO for accounting.
If for some reason I don’t have internet access, or I can’t login to QBO and/or Google Drive, I keep a few templates on my local drive – so that my business never comes to a complete standstill. These are MSWord docs (yes, word!). I have templates for an invoice, sales receipt, engagement letter and credit card authorization form. This way – I can always prepare them outside of the systems I can’t get to, then print them on actual paper, send them via email and then upload or enter them when I do have access.
Think again about this comment:
“My business is at a complete stand still.”
What if they were using QuickBooks desktop, and their hard drive failed? What if they had a power outage? What if a disgruntled employee changed all of the passwords to their systems? What if someone accidentally deleted their QBW file? What if their internet provider was having issues and they couldn’t get online?
My point is this: if a few hours of not being able to use a particular application in your business brought the entire operation to a complete stand still, your business has much bigger problems than not being able to use that application.
Shit happens, man. You need a backup plan.
