2020 Review of Abacus Private Cloud

From the 2020 reviews of hosting systems for accounting firms.

AbacusNext has moved from the legal vertical and into the accounting vertical to offering a number of hosting options for small and medium size accounting firms. AbacusNext has expanded its market considerably in recent years with the acquisition of several applications including Office Tools, Results CRM and Cloudnine Realtime, seeking to provide a full depth of solutions to accounting firms using this solution.

Firms who are already using another AbacusNext program within their practice will want to consider AbacusNext as they will know their own application better than any other provider in the market place.

Real World Use

AbacusNext has two main offering depending on how fully you are looking to migrate into the cloud.

Abacus Core Cloud, with this offering, you are able to run certain apps from their dynamic web browsers environments.  You are not able to put 100% of your IT environment in the cloud and not all applications can run this way.  This is a solid option if you want to move a few key critical applications into the cloud as you are not yet ready to make the full leap.  With this option, you end up being part in and part out of the cloud, which can often lead to user confusion on where programs are and where data is stored. 

Abacus Private Cloud allows for full 100% virtual desktop and server hosting for your full IT environment moving you fully into the cloud.  By moving fully into the cloud, everything your teams needs to operate is securely run through one central location, ensuring you can work anytime, anywhere.

Given their new arrival in the accounting vertical for the full virtual desktop hosted space, their support does not have the years of in-depth knowledge on how to trouble shoot your tax applications common technical problems. 

Offering

OfficeTools Cloud is offered with simple per user pricing on the AbacusNext website, currently $49/user per month. The OfficeTools WorkSpace pricing may involve your choice of various integrations to Office 365 and accounting software, so they ask you to contact them for pricing.

OfficeTools WorkSpace also provides integrations or plug-ins for a range of other common apps and office hardware above and beyond QuickBooks, Lacerte and the Abacus Payment Exchange (APX) e-payment systems. There are the Canon Scanner, a document file center, and Crexendo—possibly more, so be sure to ask questions about what may be important to your practice.

Because OfficeTools Cloud is presumably more of an all-in-one system—and cloud-based with more plug-in openness—one may expect you can output to printers, scanners and so forth to your heart’s content.

You can confirm all that with their sales desk if you are predisposed. But the whole point of going to cloud-based systems is their openness and freedom. Untethering from the toils and troubles of local software-hardware compatibilities is one good reason to move onto the cloud. Working on the web won’t change how your physical laptops, desktops, printers, and other networked equipment communicate.

2020 Overall Rating: 4.75