Managed IT for Parksville and Qualicum Beach.
Oceanside businesses aren't the same size in February as they are in July, and their IT should flex with them. We count what you pay for each season, run the projects in the quiet months, and do it remote first from Port Alberni, at the other end of Highway 4.
Parksville · Qualicum Beach · Coombs · Errington · Nanoose Bay · Bowser
- Sign-in blocked, all sessions revoked9:14 am
- Mailbox converted to shared, office manager given access9:16 am
- Licence removed, back in the pool9:21 am
Front desk printer says offline again. Nobody touched it.
It picked up a new address after the power blip. Fixed it remotely and pinned it so it stays put. Try printing now.
Printing. Thank you!
- Licences counted against payroll
- Seasonal accounts opened and closed on a date
- Projects booked for the shoulder season
- Your Microsoft 365 tenant stays yours
You're not one size all year. Your IT bill usually is.
Oceanside runs on summer. Resorts, restaurants, attractions, the trades behind them and the shops living off the traffic all staff up in spring and back down in fall. Almost every per-user IT cost bills monthly whether that person worked or not. Nobody means to pay for a July crew in January. It happens because releasing a licence is a job with no owner, so we make it ours.
Licences against actual headcount
Count the seats you pay for, count the accounts that signed in this month, subtract. In a business that swings between a winter core and a summer crew the gap is rarely small, and it's usually been open longer than one season. It's the least exciting work on this page and often the first saving you see.
Checked each season, not each year.
Accounts closed on the way out
A seasonal departure isn't an event the way a resignation is. The last shift happens and the account stays. Each one keeps a mailbox live, a seat billing and a door open into the business. So offboarding runs as a list, on a date, twice a year.
A list with a date on it.
Devices that come back, and devices that do not
A laptop, a counter tablet, a phone with the booking app. With real turnover, hardware goes home in September and stays there unless someone's counting. A managed inventory means you know in October, not in May when you need the thing.
Counted, not remembered.
Most of it is at a counter. Not at a desk.
A resort, a restaurant, a clinic and a shop share one shape: a machine at the front that several people use, a card terminal beside it, a booking system behind it and a network the public is sitting on. Most managed IT is written for an office where everyone has their own laptop. We build for the counter.
The shared login is the hard part, so we do it properly
Multi-factor and a per-user audit trail assume one named person behind each account. A front desk covered by six people across three shifts doesn't work that way, and telling staff to stop sharing a login without giving them something workable just means they keep sharing it quietly. What holds up: individual sign-in on the device, the shared app session kept separate, screens that lock on their own, and a set answer for when someone's locked out mid-shift. It takes more to build than a shared password, and it still works in August.
Guest wifi that is genuinely separate
Visitors on the same network as the till, the booking machine and the office is common, and it's the cheapest fix on this list: its own network, its own credentials, no route to anything that matters, and enough bandwidth that the business side doesn't crawl when the parking lot fills.
Payments stay with the payment people
Card terminals and their compliance belong to the payment provider and the card brands, and we don't quietly take that on. What we do cover is the network segment the terminal sits on, kept away from everything else. That's usually the part nobody has done.
July is not the month. October is.
Every migration, hardware swap, tenant change or network rebuild has a day where something is briefly worse than the day before. In a business with a peak season there's a right time of year for that, and we plan the whole calendar around it.
The year, written down once
- Late fall and winter: the projects. Migrations, replacements, tenant changes, anything with a rough day in it
- Spring: onboarding as a repeatable list. Accounts, licences, devices and access set up the same way every year, not improvised under pressure
- Peak: nothing changes that doesn't have to. Patching, monitoring, backup and support carry on; projects wait
- Fall: the closing list. Accounts closed, licences released, devices collected, and your bill brought back down to the winter number
Writing the year down once means the expensive decisions stop landing in your busiest month.
The visitors leave in September. The population does not.
Parksville and Qualicum Beach have one of the oldest median ages of any community their size in Canada, and that's the other business here: dental and optometry practices, hearing and physio clinics, notaries, law offices, financial advisers, home care and the trades that keep houses standing. Small premises, few staff, and records they're required to keep, protect and produce.
Records you have to keep
- Personal information held by a private business in British Columbia is governed by the Personal Information Protection Act, and professional bodies set retention requirements on top of that
- A backup answers what a file looked like last week. Retention answers whether a record from ten years ago still exists and whether anything can still open it
- Clinical and practice software belongs to its vendor. We cover the machine, the account, the network and the backup around it
The obligation is the practice's. Making it possible to meet is our half.
Small premises, no IT department
- Between two and fifteen staff, one or two rooms, and a practice manager who already has a full job
- The network was usually set up by whoever sold the practice software and hasn't been looked at since
- One failure stops the whole day: the machine at reception, the one server under the desk, or the internet
- Support has to work without a site visit, so we fix it remotely, the same business day
That's why remote capability matters more here than a van, and why we start with the inventory.
Customers who phone
- An older client base means the phone, the printed letter and the front counter are current channels, not legacy ones
- Online booking that half works is worse than none: it's a phone call you now take twice
- Readable text, strong contrast and forms you can finish without a fight are a business requirement
That's a design constraint with a census behind it. It's also why we test a front end against the people who'll actually use it.
The quiet season is when you see the whole fleet.
Shared machines and staff devices still need an owner when the summer crew leaves. This illustrative device view makes patching, health and follow-up visible across the business.
Parksville and Qualicum, one highway from home.
Port Alberni sits at the other end of Highway 4, so Oceanside is our nearest market after our own. We cover Parksville, Qualicum Beach, Coombs, Errington, Whiskey Creek, Nanoose Bay, Bowser and Deep Bay. Most of an agreement runs remote, and physical work is scheduled.
Before we start
We run nine people in February and twenty-four in July. How is that handled?
We count twice a year instead of once. Per-seat costs bill monthly whether someone's working or not, so a licence left open after September costs you every month until someone notices. We review the seat count at the start and end of each season, release licences as soon as they're idle, and run a written opening and closing list on a date.
Can our seasonal staff share one login at the front desk?
They can. It's the most common setup in hospitality, and it's exactly why nobody can say afterwards who did what. The version that survives a busy Saturday is individual sign-in on the device, the shared app session handled separately, screens that lock themselves, and an agreed answer for a mid-shift lockout. A control that gets ignored at 2 pm on a long weekend isn't a control.
When would the disruptive work actually get done?
Out of season, on purpose. Migrations, tenant changes, hardware swaps and network rebuilds all have a rough day in them, so the quiet months get the projects and the busy months get patching, monitoring, backup and support only. If something really can't wait until October, we'll tell you straight.
Our booking system is run by the software company. What's left for you?
Everything it sits on: the machine, the account that signs in, the network it needs, the device at the counter, a backup of whatever can be exported, and the call to the vendor when it stops, so it isn't left to whoever's free. The agreement names which applications get that treatment.
Do you come out to Parksville?
For physical work, yes, booked. Everything that doesn't need hands (a licence, a mailbox, a permission, a patch, a password reset, most software breakage) we fix remotely, which is faster than any drive. If you need someone on site regularly, we write it into the agreement.
Tell us what your July looks like.
How many people, how many logins, and how many seats you're still paying for from last summer. We'll tell you what the gap is worth and what closing it takes.
Book a call