Article based on Cetrom/DP&C case study published on Aug. 30, 2017.
Firms that transition to cloud hosting can alter the structure of their practice. It can help a firm go paperless, which saves time and money, and it can enable a firm to operate with more agility, expanding service offerings. Here is DP&C's cloud-hosting experience with Cetrom.
A SEISMIC SHIFT
Product: Cetrom
Firm: DP&C
On record: Administrator Karen Teles
Start date: November 2015
Users: 28
Price: Fluctuates based on a number of factors. Contact Cetrom for custom pricing; sales@cetrom.net or (866) 364-1098.
Objective: DP&C staff were having difficulty accessing their audit and tax platform, CCH ProSystem fx Engagement, while working remotely on client engagements. Employees couldn’t check in and out easily, which meant that other users couldn’t connect in real-time to collaborate or share documents. The firm needed a secure solution to address ease of working in the field.
Implementation: “I was really impressed,” said Karen Teles, the administrator at the firm. “We’re accountants, not tech wizards. We had a weekly meeting with one of Cetrom’s senior engineers, and she was exceptional. She answered every question we had, such as how the design of the system was going to work.”
Consultations with the engineer occurred six to eight weeks before the migration to Cetrom, and then the migration took place over one weekend. Afterward, Cetrom representatives stayed at DP&C for two days to help with any issues.
Advantages: Teles said that the firm is very impressed with the security of Cetrom’s servers, both virtual and physical. Physical security is very important to CP&C — more so than for most firms — because it is located in Tacoma, Wash., on a geological fault line prone to earthquake and volcano activity. In the event of a natural disaster, the firm feels safe in the knowledge that all its information — and sensitive client data — is safe off-site on servers in Virginia and Colorado.
“We also now have laptops that employees take into the field that have no information stored locally,” Teles added. “All the information is on the cloud. If a laptop is stolen, there’s no information on it, so we feel a lot better about that.”
Teles also noted that whenever the firm investigates new software and applications, they now turn to Cetrom as a resource “because they work with so many CPA firms like ours.”