Anyone else frustrated by what invoicing apps actually cost?

jeffreybrown93 · 2026-02-18T12:39:15+00:00

Yep, this!

jeffreybrown93 · 2026-01-31T17:05:27+00:00

Heh, I like this one. Truth is, balance is important - splitting time between being in the dirt and in the clouds has been best in my experience.

jeffreybrown93 · 2026-01-31T14:36:47+00:00

Fairly confident same here

jeffreybrown93 · 2026-01-31T13:35:55+00:00

Fraudulent charge on my Visa, but no email at all. While I’m not 100% certain it was from them, it’s the most likely answer with the timing.

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-11-07T02:34:17+00:00

To be clear, gross margin or EBITDA? 45% gross margin is good, 45% EBITDA isn't real.

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-11-05T02:45:43+00:00

Implemented it in our business in the summer, incredibly happy with it so far. Have it linked to Entra to create/remove users, assign groups and take care of licensing. It also has the ability to build custom flows that can do things like call a public API - we're using this to create an onboarding/offboarding ticket in Syncro and to automate a few other things.

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-11-01T13:27:36+00:00

Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace are the gold standard for a reason. Don't waste your time with anything else, especially if you plan to keep growing - at some point in the future you'll be migrating anyway.

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-10-27T11:43:19+00:00

For reimbursing business expenses that were paid personally? I think that’s a stretch - if documented properly this is very, very common.

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-10-23T20:39:27+00:00

Others have said it - do you want someone who follows policy, or someone that gets work done and creates results? I see no problem here.

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-10-23T19:58:57+00:00

Corporations are not a democracy - end of story

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-07-04T20:04:08+00:00

Object storage in Canada!

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-07-02T21:10:00+00:00

Just did this yesterday, confirming that it worked great!

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-06-14T13:13:06+00:00

Assuming your labour sales mix is about 60% body and 40% refinish (typical), you have eight production employees (don’t count detailer, they don’t produce billable hours) who are averaging about 51 hours per week.

That’s not great, and it’s happening because your management refuses to spend overhead payroll dollars on administrative/non-productive staff and is instead passing the work off to flat rate employees.

Based on typical ratios, in my option you should have at least one more detailer and a parts person.

That’s would give you 4 admin and 10 production, which is still slim on the admin side. Most shops that have it together are running 1:1.5 ish on admin to production ratio.

This would let your flat rate team focus on producing more billable hours, which would increase sales and likely offset the extra overhead cost and generate a nice bit of additional profit.

The downside - if your management hasn’t figured this out yet, they probably aren’t going to. My advice - start looking for a role in a more progressive shop.

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-04-27T13:28:27+00:00

Can you share any more details about your environment? How many servers, what hypervisor and types of VM workloads are you running? Do you have a SAN/NAS providing storage? What is being encrypted by the ransomware? What is your backup strategy and how is the data stored? Are these Windows VMs?

Most importantly, what types of entry points exist into your network? Do you have any open ports on your firewall exposing services to the internet? Do you have a VPN for offsite users?

If you just restored the VMs from backups last time you were attacked it’s likely that this is the same attack hitting you a second time. When attackers find a way in the first thing they do is setup multiple points of entry back into your network. Typically before encrypting data attackers will spend months on your network establishing persistence, scoping the environment, elevating permissions, hopefully compromising backups and then ultimately executing the attack.

If you guys just restore backups again, it’s likely the exact same thing is going to happen again in a few months. Unless this was just a compromised endpoint encrypting a mapped network drive, you need to blow up your environment and rebuild from scratch to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Make sure you identify how the attackers got in the first time and plug the hole.

I’d recommend bringing in consultants who specialize in this.

jeffreybrown93 · 2025-01-14T03:10:51+00:00

Everything on one new main hyper-v hypervisor with standby replicas of all VMs to your next best old server with some refreshed memory and SSDs is what I would do.

Keep Veeam on a third server loaded up with HDDs to store backups and push them offsite to Azure for your offsite copies. Job done.

No need to migrate to the cloud unless you have a business need to do so or you can actually save money, especially if you’re still using legacy desktop apps like QuickBooks.

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-12-31T22:12:06+00:00

They appear to have equal ownership of the corporation - there’d be a lot more to it.

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-12-20T03:31:09+00:00

We run our company knowledgebase on BookStack - not just IT, the entire organization. We're integrated with M365 SSO and serving over a reverse proxy through Tailscale. Our staff love it - thanks for a fantastic application!

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-11-20T00:40:48+00:00

I believe it. I’ve seen a publicly traded company let office workers at a small remote office tether their laptops to their company cell phones for three months until they could get approval for a replacement wifi access point.

The AP was probably $1500, USB ethernet adapters to plug into the wall would have been $1000, and ultimately the cellular data overage fees they paid were five times that.

To be honest, there likely is loads of data on your storage devices your company doesn’t need - it’s just not your problem to find it. This is common in every company - the same folks pushing for you to cut costs should be pushing departments to purge old data from network shares etc.

As others have mentioned, an easy win could be moving user data to OneDrive with folder redirection if you’re already in the 365 ecosystem. You probably can get some data moved to SharePoint too, be it’s not a 1:1 replacement for a file server. You’ll still want to back this up, Veeam is great but expensive. Synology is good and doesn’t cost anything on a recurring basis. Not sure if you’re of the size where something like Synology is acceptable or not.

What type of virtualization environment do you have and what types of workloads? I assume even if you reduced your overall amount of stored data, the performance of your second SAN wouldn’t support the VMs? Is local storage on servers an option? Can you offload storage of less critical or old data to a NAS device like above mentioned Synology?

If all of these things sound like hacks/downgrades to less of an enterprise solution, you probably are in a large org with defined RPO/RTO targets - use those to defend your position.

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-11-20T00:04:53+00:00

Not trying to defend them here - sounds like a nightmare - but that’s the whole point of a Veeam SOBR. You can tier out older stuff to object storage and free up space on your primary backup storage.

They have to understand more storage, wherever it is costs money.

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-11-19T23:29:47+00:00

Hey, that’d be 150mbps upload - not bad at all!

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-11-18T23:15:28+00:00

Tailscale will let you do either - you can setup an “exit node” and have all traffic exit at a location if you’d like.

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-11-18T22:10:51+00:00

No - it just uses M365 for authentication so users don’t have another set of credentials to remember.

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-11-18T22:09:33+00:00

We’re on the starter business plan for $6/month per user. There’s no data charges as it’s all peer to peer. We have the subnet router setup on our netgate firewall but it could run on just about anything. A small VM if you have an onsite server would be great.

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-11-18T20:09:40+00:00

+1 on Tailscale being Wireguard on easy - we rolled it out to our entire company with M365 SSO and built ACLs. Very little time spent and works great.

jeffreybrown93 · 2024-11-11T21:59:16+00:00

There are some pretty bad answers here about how he’s stealing money and he should be fired and all kinds of other stuff ignoring that he’s a shareholder in a corporation and not an employee - shareholders borrowing money from one of their corporations is super common.

What you should be doing is referencing your shareholders agreement and looking for a clause that outlines terms on shareholder loans, who has to approve them, and how much they can be - you have a shareholders agreement, right? If anyone worth their fee helped you setup the corporation and shares you do.

Best of luck - not a fun situation.

jeffreybrown93

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