More from the ESC you already own

It looks like ESC is installed on your computer

This is real ESC running on a real server, and it appears on your machine as an icon you double-click. It isn’t a web version or a stripped-down copy. Your staff won’t notice a difference, except that it’s faster and it works from home.

• It’s set up once per computer. After that, ESC sits in the Start menu and on the taskbar like any other program.
• It works on Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone and Android, anywhere in the world with a connection.
• Your bookkeeper can work from the kitchen table, your owner can check a job from a hotel, and your second location no longer needs a slow VPN.
• QuickBooks runs right beside it on the same server, so ESC and your books talk to each other exactly as they do today. We already do this for contractors.
• Printing just works. Invoices come out of the printer next to your desk rather than one in a data center, and TSPrint is included, which also makes PDFs.

Printing is what sinks most hosted setups. If your bookkeeper can’t print an invoice, nobody will use the hosted system, so we include the tool that solves it from day one.

What stops being your problem

• Owning, patching and replacing server hardware.
• Being able to run ESC only from one office computer.
• Staff who can’t work from home, or a second branch that needs its own everything.
• Waiting on a vendor when something breaks at 3am.
• Losing access to your dispatches because a storm took out your office.

That last one is a real risk on the Gulf Coast. If your server is in the data center and your people have phones, you can keep dispatching on a day your building has no power.

Available everywhere, and safer than a VPN

The usual workaround for a remote worker is a VPN, which puts someone’s home laptop onto your office network. That’s the setup attackers exploit, and many contractors are running it right now.

• Nothing is stored on the device. ESC runs in the data center and only the screen image travels, so a laptop left at a truck stop has no customer data on it.
• There’s no tunnel into your office. With nothing to VPN into, your network stops being the thing that has to be defended.
• Access comes down to one switch. When someone leaves, you turn off one account and they’re locked out of every device they ever used.
• Your data sits where the cameras, the access controls and the backups are, instead of on a machine under a desk at a branch office.

Being reachable everywhere and being secure usually pull against each other. Remote desktop is the rare case where the thing that makes ESC reachable from anywhere also keeps the data from going anywhere.

What’s actually behind it

This is the part most “cloud hosting” offers won’t put in writing.

• A Tier 3-qualified, SOC 2 Type II audited data center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, audited every year by an outside firm.
• Multiple 10-gigabit fiber paths with diverse routing across multiple carriers.
• On-site generators and a PPL priority restoration feed, with redundant A/B power to every rack and N+1 Liebert glycol cooling.
• A fully redundant 10-gigabit core, redundant storage arrays, and environmental and humidity monitoring throughout.
• A secured building with dual-entry access, cloud-based access control and IP video surveillance covering the floor.
• Backups you can actually restore from, down to a single file, with an off-site copy for disaster recovery.
• Nearly half its power comes from solar.

The facility is Alerify in Harrisburg. The rack is ours, and so are the machines in it. We own the hardware, we run ESC on it, and we’re who you call when something needs doing. Cimbrian has rented that rack for more than ten years and has been running hosted servers since 1997, back when the business was called PPTNet. We put the first contractor’s ESC on those servers in 2017.

And we know ESC itself

Plenty of IT companies will host a server for you, but very few of them know what ESC is, which is how you end up explaining your own business software to the person who’s supporting it.

• We’ve worked on ESC with more than 100 HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors since 2017.
• We’ve handled ESC databases over 100 GB. If yours has gotten so slow that people have stopped running reports, that’s a size problem with a known fix, and we’ve tuned it before.
• We do the SQL work ourselves. Database optimization, index and query tuning, SQL Server upgrades and recovering failed instances are what decide whether ESC feels quick or sluggish.
• Integrations, ESC Sheets and custom reporting get ESC data to wherever the rest of your business needs it, on a schedule, without anyone retyping it.
• dESCO’s own support team has referred customers to us for ESC emergencies.
• We handle migration in, and we handle migration out. If you leave for another system entirely, we’ll help you go.
• It’s month to month. There’s no term and you can cancel any time, the same as everything else we sell.

Who this is for

If any of these sound like your shop, it’s worth a conversation:

• Your ESC “server” is under a desk, and everyone knows it.
• Nobody is completely sure when the last good backup was.
• Office staff can’t work from home, or they do it badly through a remote tool someone set up years ago.
• You have more than one location, or you want one.
• Your SQL Server or Windows version is old enough that you’ve stopped asking about it.
• You’re facing a hardware quote that made you wince.

Pay Your Bill, on your own website

• A Pay Your Bill page sits on your site, in your branding.
• The customer enters their invoice number and their account number. Both are required on purpose, so one number alone can’t be used to look up somebody else’s balance.
• They see the real invoice, with every line, the quantities, the tax and the amount due, in the same detail ESC printed.
• If more than one invoice is open, they pick which one they’re paying.
• Partial payments work properly. The balance is recalculated and the invoice stays open for the rest.
• They can keep a card on file for next time if they want to.

The fee, handled legally

Card processing costs about three percent. Most shops absorb it, which means the more your customers pay by card, the less you make. Passing the fee through is legal in most states, but only when it’s done the way the card networks and that state require, which is why a software company shouldn’t be improvising it.

• eBizCharge applies the surcharge, not us. They add it at the point of payment according to the laws of the customer’s state. Keeping that decision inside the payment processor is the whole point.
• Where the state doesn’t allow it, it isn’t charged, and the 3% comes out of your side instead. That’s the trade-off, and you should know which side of it you’re on before you sign up.
• Debit cards are never surcharged. That’s a card-network rule, and the form follows it.
• ACH and e-check payments are available, enabled by eBizCharge, with no fee to the customer.
• So your customer always has a free way to pay, by debit or ACH, and the form explains which is which in plain words before they choose, so there’s no surprise on the receipt.

We’re not lawyers, and this isn’t legal advice. Surcharging rules differ by state and they change. eBizCharge maintains those rules as part of its compliance program, and your merchant agreement governs. What we can tell you plainly is that doing this badly is worse than not doing it at all, which is exactly why we let the processor handle it.

Payments post back into ESC automatically

• Nobody retypes a payment. The money moves and ESC updates, including partial payments and the remaining balance.
• Card numbers never touch your systems or ours. The payment form is hosted by the processor, and what comes back is the last four digits, the card type and an authorization code. That’s a much smaller compliance burden for a plumbing company to carry.
• There’s no hole in your firewall. As with the field app, the connection is made outward from inside your network, so nothing inbound is opened on the server that runs your business.
• Missed notifications are caught automatically. Every fifteen minutes, a background check looks for payments that didn’t post and posts them, and a payment that’s already recorded can’t be recorded twice.
• Customers who aren’t set up with the processor yet are created automatically from their ESC record, so your office doesn’t maintain a second customer list.

It’s a certified integration with eBizCharge, and it’s processing real customer payments today.