Industries
IT Support for Accounting and CPA Firms
We get accounting firms. Very few businesses lean on their technology as hard as a CPA firm does, and even fewer IT firms understand that.
The problem
In a CPA firm, few things cost more than a system that isn’t working. Ask what it costs when people cannot bill for an afternoon. At a $200 hourly rate, a short outage is expensive at any time of year, and during busy season the time doesn’t come back. It gets added to an evening that was already going to run late.
Your profession is known for being reliable. The question is whether your network is.
It is not only your own exposure, either. You hold some of the most sensitive data in the business world, and it belongs to other people. A breach at an accounting firm brings state and federal penalties, legal claims, reputational damage and system recovery costs at the same time. Smaller firms are breached more often than larger ones.
Five demands your firm puts on IT
- 1
Deadlines do not move.
Most businesses can absorb a bad afternoon. A firm three days from a filing deadline cannot. That changes what maintenance windows are acceptable, how quickly a failure has to be escalated, and whether "we will look at it tomorrow" is ever an acceptable answer. We patch overnight rather than during your working day, we resolve most faults before they reach you, and we plan the disruptive work around your calendar, which means we know when busy season is without having to ask.
- 2
Demanding applications.
Tax, audit, family office and bookkeeping platforms are heavy, update constantly, and are unforgiving about the environment they run in. They need to be tested before a rollout rather than after, and they need someone who has seen them break before. We support these applications across multiple firms, so a problem in yours is usually one we have already solved somewhere else.
- 3
Other people's data.
You are not only protecting your own information. Every client record in your system is somebody else's financial life, and your obligation to it is contractual as well as ethical. That raises the bar on access control, encryption, email security and staff training well above what a general small business needs.
- 4
Real liability.
A breach at your firm is not one problem. It is regulatory exposure, client claims, professional reputation and the cost of recovery, arriving together and usually during the worst possible month. Reducing that risk means knowing where your data actually sits, who can reach it, and what the response plan is before anything happens.
- 5
Recovery that fits the calendar.
Generic disaster recovery planning assumes you can be down for a day while things are rebuilt. Your firm cannot, and a storm does not care what week of the season it is. We have been building those plans for South Florida firms since 1994.
Software we already support
- 1099
- Act!
- ADP
- ATB
- BNA
- Clinasyst
- Crystal Reports
- CS Trial Balance
- FileCabinet CS
- FPC
- GoSystems
- Great Plains
- Lacerte Tax
- MAS90
- Morningstar
- Number Cruncher
- Peachtree
- ProFx Engagement
- ProSystem fx Fixed Assets
- ProSystem fx Practice
- QuickBooks
- Quicken
- Real World
- SATAX
- Solomon
- Syspro
- Tax Interest
- The Number
- Timberline
- Thomson Reuters
- TValue
- UltraTax
Why InfoStream
We have supported accounting practices in Palm Beach County since 1994, and a number of our CPA clients have been with us for more than twenty years. That is not a loyalty program. It is what happens when the work is done properly and the same people keep showing up. Our team holds senior engineering certifications, and we are regularly the firm other IT firms call when they are stuck.
We work under one all-inclusive agreement with a flat monthly price, so busy season never comes with a surprise bill.
Over fifteen years, and never once in that time have they disappointed us.
They are very professional, super-efficient, extremely knowledgeable and ALWAYS go above and beyond. They have assisted us with emergency situations during the night and on weekends so it did not disrupt our office during busy tax seasons.
I am completely impressed and happy.
Want to talk before busy season, not during it?
Fifteen minutes now is worth a great deal more than an emergency call in March.