Disaster

As evidenced by Hurricane Katrina, basic commercial property insurance is not enough. According to ABC News, Hurricane Katrina generated an insured loss of $40 billion. Business owners learned that additional insurance policies, such as comprehensive disaster and recovery plans, were essential. Contingency plans allow business owners to prepare for a multitude of disaster related loss possibilities. Additional fire, flood, and recovery based funds allow the business to continue operations and employee pay without significant loss. Owners can compare these plans through full service companies like Businessinsurance.org.

Disagreement

Disagreements often arise in business. These disagreements don’t have to be dangerous to your business (and are often healthy), but when you start arguing about issues of company policy, liability, and employee related injuries things can get more serious.

A public liability policy shields a business from public damage or loss claims. The employers liability insurance prevents an employee filed lawsuit. Professional indemnity insurance shields the company from negligent advice and products liability claims. Combined commercial insurance within itself covers a wealth of business related disagreements.

Divorce

In the event of a divorce, the only proven method of providing adequate protection of a business is collaborative law divorce. This divorce type prevents the seven business casualties of divorce. According to Tracy Stewart, these casualties include loss of control, liquidity, and productivity. Stewart explains that collaborative law divorce is the best option for couples who are joint business owners. This divorce method allows both spouses to retain their control of the business. The cost of divorce is significantly less than litigation based divorce and both parties retain their privacy and reputation.

Death and Disability

The death and disability of a key person within a business has the potential to tank the company. The best preparation option for these eventualities is planning ahead. Options available for this coverage include key person, life, and disability key person insurance. These options compensate the company should a key person within the company die or become disabled. This compensation covers replacement of the key person, business expenses, and provides capital used as collateral, if necessary to keep the company afloat. If a key person acquires a disability for a limited time, the policy provides coverage and compensation for that period.

Businesses escape the impact of these five unexpected eventualities with proper planning and adequate insurance coverage. Business owners prevent liability, loss and maintain their reputation based on the success of their business, by utilizing the best options for their company.

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The network engineer called an external consultant we had under contract for help. After looking at a few things the 2 made the decision that this was clearly a storage problem and request us to open a ticket with the storage vendor. Since there were no changes made to the storage system other than unplugging the cables from the Nexus 2000 switches and plugging them into the 5000’s this request seemed totally wrong (it was, trust me). My arguments that nothing had changed on the storage side were ignored. In the meantime the production environment that was sitting on the storage system was in limbo. We had failed over the storage system from one controller to the other one and all traffic was handled by one controller. Accordingly things were a little slower – actually slower than expected. While the storage vendor had sold us the system with the promise of being able to failover, it was clear that with the amount of storage and traffic the system had to handle, this was not a good solution and accordingly I was pushing to have this resolved as quickly as possible to reduce the negative impact on my production environment. I requested that the network engineer would open a ticket with Cisco, but that request was refused initially “because the external consultant was already on the phone”. It took me a little bit to get my point across, but finally a call to Cisco was made as well. We had also opened a ticket with the storage vendor (Netapp) and it was confirmed that nothing had changed on our end and that this was a network problem.

The situation above was very frustrating because we lost a lot of time during the troubleshooting process and our production systems were heavily affected because of this. What really stunned me was the lack of troubleshooting skills that the network engineer had. I honestly do expect more product knowledge and understanding of the technology for someone in that position. In addition I was really shocked that the external consultant (a so-called data center specialist) made such a move with quick finger-pointing at the storage system) – totally eroding any credibility in my opinion. Later on when a Cisco technical handled the case we came to a solution fairly quickly, but what was relayed to us did not make too much sense either and I honestly suspect some sort of cover-up by the network engineer. I would not be as upset and frustrated if the network engineer would clearly describe what went wrong and how Cisco fixed it, but the explanation that was provided was so vague – it clearly looks like a cover-up to me.

If you are a specialist in a certain field you need to have enough self-confidence to do the job right. When things go wrong you need to be able to do a certain level of troubleshooting yourself before falling back to someone else. If things go wrong and your first task is to ask for external help, then you are not a specialist – then you are clearly missing a certain level of knowledge and experience. I did not hire this engineer and I was not involved in assigning this project to this particular engineer. In this particular situation it became clear that the inexperienced engineer was clear not master of the environment and that the weakness in troubleshooting and the lack of knowledge clearly caused major issues.

If you hire people it is important to shoot for building a strong team of people with a certain skill set. I am not saying that you want a team of individual super heroes (that’s not a team), but you need a team where experience and troubleshooting skills are at a certain level to prevent bad situations from happening. The post mortem in my case would clearly include a discussion about what happened and if the right people were involved.

The take away from this article is the recommendation to really think about who you hire and where that person is on his or her career path. A junior level person should not be in charge of a situation that can damage your business. A senior level person should be involved in critical situations and eventually provide guidance for a junior person. It is important to hire the right people from the start – if you want to take a junior team and turn them into a group of highly-skilled specialists, then you will experience some setback. You will also need someone with experience who is able to guide the team and to lead it.

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QuickBooks is like the big brother of accounting. It has been there (as a desktop version) when I started my own business and has grown with me. The desktop version has been fairly complex to me – especially in the beginning and I dropped it in favor of a simple Excel spreadsheet. At a certain point Excel was holding me back and so I switched back to QuickBooks, but this time their QuickBooks Online service. I liked the fact that I could use it no matter where I was – it is completely web-based. It comes with approx. 80% of the features that the desktop version has to offer, but that was plenty for me. I did not like it too much when it came to tax season. While I was able to setup expense and income categories I think the product let you alone and when transferring the data into your schedule C I still had to do it all manually + my expense categories did not match anything the IRS was looking for. I spent hours in manually transferring my data … that kinda sucked. However, the reporting in QuickBooks Online was pretty good to give me business reports. I also did not like how QBOnline did not work well with PayPal which was a major drawback for me.

Now comes Outright which uses a completely different approach to business accounting. It is not as complex and versatile as QuickBooks Online, but that is actually a good thing. Outright does not want to be copy of QuickBooks online. It is less about syncing accounts, but more about categorizing income and expenses and to concentrate on the cash-flow items accordingly. The bank account setup and the PayPal import setup are easy and work very reliable. The interface is very different from QBO, but after playing with everything for about 30 minutes the tool really becomes intuitive and you can see yourself saving a lot of time already. Cumbersome was the import of old data – it had to be done via CSV file. I would love to see a straight copy from QuickBooks or QuickBooks Online actually. Overall getting my old data into Outright was not too complicated and then it was more to setup categories and to match accounting items accordingly.

Now, which online accounting version is better? If you run a more complex business QuickBooks Online might be the better choice. It provides more features and has a larger set of reports. Outright is lacking in reporting, but on the other side keeps things simple – very simple. What I love about Outright is the no-frills approach. It’s accounting, dummy. Outright can handle sales tax and other stuff, but is not good with inventory tracking or invoicing. That’s where QBO shines. QuickBooks also has the option to do Payroll and Contractor payments more easily. Outright has none of these. It keeps track of W-9 contractors, but not in a very intuitive way.

Outright is the cheaper solution that simply works. It is easy to use, and no big learning curve would be in your way. QuickBooks Online is more complex and can provide features that might be important to your personal situation. I will run the 2 in parallel for a little bit to see the differences in more detail.

Legal Disclosure: Please note that I am linking to 2 external websites here from this article. Please ready my disclosure policy regarding external links. You can find the link at the bottom of this page where you can also find the privacy policy.

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