Office Happenings – Spring Edition
By Ronald W. Rogé, MS, CFP®
Welcome to the Spring edition of “Office Happenings”. We use this column to educate, introduce people, technology, and operating systems we use, or, plan to use to provide our clients with outstanding services. We also will keep you up-to-date and share with you the things we discover that we believe are useful, educational, funny and just enjoyable.
Quarterly Reports
We will be mailing the quarterly reports for the First Quarter of 2019. With all the technology changes we are making, we have eliminated our ShareFile portal, which was used to deliver our quarterly reports and sending encrypted email. The encrypted email was replaced by Microsoft 365’s Outlook encryption service. We have about 300 clients and only 35 to 40 clients open and look at their quarterly report on ShareFile.
We are looking at other secure ways of electronically delivering your quarterly reports. We will keep you advised. Until then, we will be mailing your reports.
Reminder
Please remember to send us a copy of your 2018 Federal and State Income Tax Returns after they have been completed. Tax returns are very useful to us when planning for your future and investing your money.
Technology
We recently completed uploading all our software and data to the Microsoft Cloud. The Microsoft cloud is called Azure. It is the way business is being done today. Many of our software programs were already in the cloud. Azure brings them all together on our desktop and eliminates the physical server hardware in our office. The cloud is more secure, and everything is backed up as it happens.
I want to thank Flexible Business Systems, our IT firm, for their excellent service in helping us make this happen. I also want to thank our entire team for being good sports during the transition. It was complicated for a few weeks and everything seemed to take longer. Bottom line is, everyone likes using the Azure product.
Office Capabilities
Congratulations to Michelle Herbst, our Director of First Impressions. She recently passed the New York State Notary Exam. We now have four Notaries (Michelle, Darlene and Rosanne in NY and Sue in MA) for your convenience.
Office Space
After 22 years in our current office space, which needs a refresh, new rugs, wallpaper and paint, we have decided to re-locate about 100 yards across the parking lot to One Corporate Drive. Same landlord, parking lot, to an identical building with larger conference rooms, more efficient use of space and slightly less square footage. Right now, we occupy 4,400 square feet and the new space will be approximately 3,800 square feet with a much more efficient layout and two large conference rooms. We anticipate the move will take place in July 2019.
Office Phone System Notice
When you call our office most of the time you will have someone answer the phone and handle your request. On rare occasions you will get our voice mail system, which is designed to automatically answer your calls when everyone is on another phone call. You will also get voice mail during out of office hours and when we turn on “direct to voice mail” feature every Tuesday, between 9:30 am and 10:30 am, when the entire Team is in our weekly staff meeting. Our weekly staff meetings are very important. It allows our staff to review the previous week and any client matters that need to be addressed, as well as getting ready for the next week of business.
Should you get the voice mail, please leave a message. It will not only appear on our phone, it will also send the person you a calling an email with your voice recording attached, so you won’t have to call back. We will return your call as soon as possible.
Lifestyle
Book Recommendation:
Rosanne recently read and highly recommends:
Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
Wine Recommendations:
Finding a delicious wine at a reasonable price is always satisfying. Whenever we serve these two wines to family and friends, we always are asked — what wine we are serving? Because they are so good. Both wines can be found for under $15.00. If you try them, let us know what you think?
Joel Gott – Chardonnay
Joel Gott – Cabernet Sauvignon
Other Resources
If you are not following us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, please do so. We are posting educational articles interesting facts on these sites.
I hope you find this issue of Office Happenings informative. If there is anything you would like us to cover about office operations, our team members, or how we do things in future issues, please send me an email at ron@rwroge.com.
© Copyright 2019 R. W. Rogé & Company, Inc. All Rights reserved.
CFP® is a registered trademark of the Certified Financial Board of Standards.
