A small-to-midsize business owner often has the following questions:
- How can we get our own domain name for email addresses?
- How can we get our own website up and running?
- If I will need to add online sales to my store, should I go for Shoptify, eBay, Amazon, or maybe my own platform?
- How do we get Cloud-synced file services with access control between different employees?
- What Distribution/Logistics/Inventory management system should I pick?
- We need to get 20 laptops, how can we deploy Windows 10 with all the necessary applications in one shot?
- What brand do we need if purchasing 20 hand-held barcode scanner? What about the server’s side?
- We’ve been using Bell’s business landline and it’s expensive while lacking those fancy VOIP features, how to change?
- We need fax services periodically, how to get it?
- We need to set up an expense reimbursement sub-system for our employees, how to proceed?
- We need to set up a simple HR platform to manage tasks such as vacation approval, overtime, performance review, how to get it?
And there always is an even more important question follows: How much to get it?
We are a tiny accounting firm, granted, but just like those big names, we also provide IT architect and consulting services. We’d like to provide solutions to the above topics and most of the time our answers to our clients make them happy. Here are some examples:
- Own domain for email addresses, one-day effort, server rental cost $100/year.
- A customized business website, one-week effort, server rental cost $100/year. If you need e-commerce on your website and you need your clients to make credit cards and Paypal payments in real-time transactions, it’s a two-week effort.
- Porting to VOIP phone line with fancy features such as online management, call forwarding, voicemail to email, one-week effort, $100 one-time fee, no monthly cost afterward.
- A fax line, one-week effort, $100 one-time fee, no monthly cost afterward.
- For clients’ data storage and sync between different employees, we recommend the business owner set up their own cloud-sync servers, one-time cost $1,000.
- A business’ own accounting and/or HR platform, two-week effort, server rental $100/year. This one sounds too good to be true but it is true as we’ve done numerous of them for our small business clients, the following video is a demo to show how we use ERP module to build an expense reimbursement system based on WordPress environment:
All aforementioned “estimates” are only for the hardware of the products, and not including the fees of our IT services.