Rena Dempsey knew something was amiss with her books, but she didn't know how much of a hole she'd gotten into.

What she did know is that she was spending too much time chasing paper invoices and bills while the bookkeeper she'd inherited from her father's business only seemed to make things worse with a stubborn insistence on sticking with an Excel spreadsheet-based accounting system.

"My stress level was way high and after four years I knew I had to do something," said Dempsey, vice-president of family business Pharmacross Inc. a Scarborough, Ont., wholesaler of health foods, supplements and vitamins. "I wasn't able to grow my business."

Her sister, who runs another business under the family umbrella, suggested a bookkeeping and technology consultant.

Ian Harvey, Business Edge
Computer Remedies owner Ross Mann says entrepreneurs often have a hard time letting go of control.

"There was so much to do I had to sub-contract it," said Lawrence Fox of Accounting-Wizard, who got the call from a flummoxed Dempsey. "About two years of data had to be manually input."

He recommended QuickBooks as a bookkeeping package that is user-friendly and flexible enough to be adapted to any business.

Like other industry accounting packages, including its major rival Simply Accounting, it automatically spits out invoices and cuts cheques at the click of a mouse.

"It all depends on their accountant because some have their preferences, but about 85 per cent of the time I recommend QuickBooks because it really is user-friendly," said Fox. "It makes everything from invoicing to cheques easier.

"I had one client whose cheque-writing process took 20 minutes each because they did it manually, then took a copy of the cheque and stapled it to the invoice. I got it down to 20 seconds. That's a real benefit to a small business with few resources."

"It's been wonderful," said Dempsey. "My stress level is down and I am so much happier," she says. But, as Fox points out, it's when things get to crisis that small-business clients end up on his doorstep.

Entrepreneurs by nature, he says, take on challenge and risk and, in the initial phase of their venture, they fulfil multiple roles, from chief sales officer to IT manager and accountant.

However, the realization sets in that they can't do everything themselves and must learn to delegate - often a hard decision for business people who believe inherently that if they want something done right, they must do it themselves, says Fox.

"They often start off running things on a spreadsheet and it just stays there," says Fox. "Then it comes time to move on. That's where I come in."

Still, most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) don't have all the expertise in-house to make the decisions about support and service for their IT systems and applications.

"You do find a lot of entrepreneurs find it hard to let go control," says Ross Mann, owner of Computer Remedies in Toronto, who has been providing contract IT services to clients for 20 years.

"Usually, we'll go in there on an emergency basis to fix something they've been struggling with for days and then they'll say: 'Oh, that's great. How about you take over from here.' Or we get a crisis call, like the client whose IT was being administered by a guy who worked part-time in a pet store."

Mann's clients average about 20 employees, but some are much smaller and some have up to 75 staff. They all have something in common, however, and that's a dependency on IT.

Tom May, of SGH Design Partners in Toronto, which designs corporate interiors, is typical of Mann's clientele.

"Our in-house IT guy left," laughs May. "He was a designer, but he was good with computers so he sort of got stuck with the job."

Since the 25-person firm runs both PCs and Macs, it needed someone who understood how to keep both systems running in harmony.

And, because they deal with large corporations, they have a responsibility to ensure any documents sent to them remain secure.

"They place the security burden on us and so network security is our top priority and Ross keeps us up to date," he says.

That market opportunity is also drawing attention from the big PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Dell, which are increasingly focusing their attentions and resources to service the segment, either through channel partners such as CDW Canada, a technology reseller, or in the case of Dell, directly.

Advising SMBs, in fact, is a fast-growing segment and Dell is busy adding resources to better position it as a prime supplier of technology and advice, says Don Kerr, director of service sales for Dell Canada.

While every business is different, most entrepreneurs hit the wall when they find themselves spending more time patching and running maintenance on their PCs than growing the business.

"Setting up a wireless LAN sounds simple, but setting up a wireless LAN for 15 people is another dimension," said Kerr. "I'd say there are four factors for SMBs. One, the size of their business; two, the complexity of their business and IT needs; third, how reliant they are on the web; and fourth, their growth rate - obviously if they've just acquired a company it's going to be exponential."

The array of choice in hardware for business owners is confusing: Laptop or desktop? Servers? Storage?

Software is even more daunting: QuickBooks or Simply Accounting? Microsoft Office or Open Office?

Setting up a system is more than just assembling the hardware. Aside from servers, routers and switching, there are security considerations and policies to put in place. How often should data be backed up? Onsite or offsite?

It's that opportunity that affords not just the chance to sell some hardware, but to develop long-term relationships.

Dell's response this year was the launch of Vostro, a line of PCs designed for small business and delivered without the usual basket of "trial ware," that annoying slate of "register now for your free 30-day trial" software that pops up at startup and slows down the boot process.

For larger PC makers, reaching small business often comes down to their resellers - or value-added resellers as they prefer to be known. More than just a retail channel, they're often the first line of support for SMBs whether it's pre-sales or post-sales.

Mary Ann Yule, director of marketing and procurement at CDW Canada, says being a vendor for 500 brands gives clients large and small not just selection, but informed selection, since their account manager becomes their frontline support.

If the answer isn't immediately known, then the account manager can access the depth of knowledge inside CDW Canada, says Yule.

Then there's the clout of size that can be a lifeline for small business.

"In small offices, sometimes things are done last minute," she says. "We had a client who got the call Friday that they had three new employees starting on Monday who needed laptops ready to go by 9 a.m.

"With the weekend upon them they were stuck, but they called us and we were able to ship what they needed over the weekend."

Even managing the company website can be a source of pain. Like many IT tasks, the job is often contracted out to a friend of a friend, but as the business grows, so too can their dependency on updating their site daily.

Outsourcing the job becomes a bottleneck, since content must be prepared, approved and then sent to the web developer, who may not immediately get to the upload.

"We were paying up to $3,000 a month," recalls Kirk Layton, president and founder of Eservus (eservus.com), an online corporate concierge service that provides a variety of discounted tickets and value-added services exclusively to tenants in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver office buildings. "And we paid more if we needed updates."

With the content on the site requiring constant updates, Layton realized he needed to take control of the website, since it represented about 75 per cent of the company's revenue.

"What I wanted was just a shell that we could add our content to," said Layton, who found SnapTech (snaptech. com), a small company based in Burnaby, B.C., that provides web hosting and content management systems (CMS) for small to mid-sized businesses on a software-as-service basis. Customers pay a set-up fee and then about $250 a month.

Software-as-service is fast gaining traction in the SMB space because it takes the headache out of upgrades and includes support. Essentially businesses "lease" the software licence for a year. It frees up cash, since there's no initial huge capital outlay.

SnapTech, like other companies in the space, provides hosting, domain, training, support and all software upgrades. The system also has plug-in modules to track essential web metrics such as referring links and search engines as well as an integrated e-mail marketing package.

For entrepreneurs such as Layton, it's a simple solution that allows him to get on with managing and growing his business - as it should be.

(Ian Harvey can be reached at harvey@businessedge.ca)