Your year runs on immovable deadlines and other people’s money. We run IT that respects both — systems that stay up when filing peaks hit, and security that treats client financial data like the target it is.
An accountancy practice is a concentration of exactly what criminals want: bank details, payroll data, personal information and the standing authority to talk to HMRC on clients’ behalf — for every client on the books. That’s why phishing against practices is relentless and increasingly well-crafted: fake HMRC correspondence, spoofed client emails asking to change payment details, bogus e-signature requests timed for your busiest weeks. One compromised mailbox at a practice isn’t one victim; it’s a route into every client relationship it touches.
Then there’s the calendar. January self-assessment, VAT quarters, year-ends, payroll runs — the periods when your systems absolutely cannot fail are predictable to the day. IT support for a practice has to be planned around that rhythm: no risky changes in filing season, capacity ready for the peaks, and fast help when a partner is staring at a deadline.
Where accountancy and finance clients lean on us hardest.
Change freezes around filing peaks, monitoring tuned to your busiest periods, and a provider who knows January isn’t the month for “scheduled maintenance”.
Clients emailing spreadsheets of payroll data to the wrong address is a breach waiting to happen. Sensible, secure ways to move financial information — that clients will actually use.
Hardened mailboxes, verification culture for payment changes, and training built on the frauds actually aimed at practices — not generic awareness videos.
The books, the working papers, the practice software data — backed up, and proven restorable. Because “the backup ran” and “we got it back” are different claims.
Three principles that shape every practice we look after.
We plan around your filing rhythm: nothing risky lands in the run-up to a peak, monitoring is tightened when it matters, and support response reflects the fact that a problem on 25 January is not the same as a problem in May.
IRIS, Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, CCH and the rest — hosted or on-prem — supported at the infrastructure and access level, with vendor relationships managed so you’re not the go-between.
Client financial data concentrated in one place makes you disproportionately attractive. We secure the practice to a standard that reflects what you actually hold — and can evidence it to insurers, regulators and clients.
Yes. We support the environment your practice software depends on: the servers or hosted platforms it runs on, its integrations, performance, backups and access control — and we deal with the vendors directly when something needs escalating, rather than leaving you translating between two support desks. Product-specific accounting questions stay with the vendor; making sure the platform is fast, secure and recoverable is on us.
Not by unprotected email attachment, which remains one of the most common ways financial data leaks. The practical answer is a secure exchange route that’s easy enough for clients to actually use — typically built on the Microsoft 365 you already pay for, with sharing controls, expiry and audit trails, or integrated with your practice software’s own portal. We set it up, lock down the risky defaults, and help you move clients across gently.
It gets treated like what it is: an emergency measured in penalties and reputations, not a ticket in a queue. But the more honest answer is that peak-season failures are usually preventable — they come from changes made at the wrong time or warnings nobody was watching. Our model is to freeze risky change before your peaks, tighten monitoring during them, and have capacity ready — so the dramatic January phone call mostly never happens.
Really targeted. Practices concentrate financial data and payment authority for hundreds of businesses behind one, often modest, set of defences — a far better return for an attacker than going after those businesses one at a time. HMRC-themed phishing, spoofed client payment changes and fraudulent e-signature requests aimed at practices are constant, and they spike around filing deadlines when staff are rushed. The threat is unglamorous but very real — which is why the defences that matter are unglamorous too: MFA, mailbox controls, verification habits and tested backups.
A straight conversation about your practice’s IT — where the risks sit, what your busiest weeks depend on, and how we’d keep both quietly under control.