The four failures we see in this sector.
Not hypotheticals. These are the findings that come up again and again on first documentation.
From late February to the end of April there is no window for an unplanned outage. Patching, migrations, and hardware swaps get scheduled around your season, not ours.
QuickBooks, Sage, TaxCycle, CaseWare, and Xero each have their own licensing, hosting, and update quirks. Generic IT support learns these on your time.
A bookkeeper leaves and takes the only login to a client portal. This is the single most common thing we find on first documentation.
Accounting practices are targeted for payment redirection, not ransomware. The control that matters is multi-factor authentication and a verification habit, not a bigger firewall.
What we put in place
Six things, in orderNothing non-urgent changes during your peak season. Agreed in advance, in writing, with a named engineer who knows the date.
Licence register, version control across workstations, and hosting that is documented — including who to phone at the vendor.
Monthly restore of a sample client file and a sample mailbox, with the result recorded. A backup nobody restores is a rumour.
Every client-facing portal, its owner, and its recovery path, in your firm's name — so a departure is an inconvenience rather than an emergency.
Multi-factor everywhere, plus a written call-back rule for banking changes. This is the control that stops the fraud that actually hits practices.
Archive and retention settings configured to your professional record-keeping requirements, documented so you can show your work.
Accounting & bookkeeping questions
Can you work around tax season?
Yes, and we will insist on it. We agree a freeze window with you in writing, and only security-critical changes happen inside it.
Do you know QuickBooks, Sage, CaseWare, and TaxCycle?
We support them as hosted or local applications — licensing, updates, and access. We are not your practice-software trainers, and we will tell you when the vendor is the right call.
Our bookkeeper left with portal logins. What now?
That is a documentation and access-recovery job, and it is usually the first thing we fix. The Handover Pack covers it as a fixed fee.
Is our data staying in Canada?
Microsoft 365 tenants can be provisioned with Canadian data residency, and we will configure backups to Canadian regions. We will tell you plainly where each system stores data.