IT Support for Accounting Firms in Vancouver

Accounting has a shape no other business has. Nine months of steady work, then a stretch where downtime is not an inconvenience, it is lost filings and unhappy clients.

We plan around that. Changes happen in the quiet months, monitoring gets tighter in the busy ones, and support is a technician who answers rather than a queue.

What usually needs fixing

You hold the data criminals want most

SINs, banking details, and full financial histories for hundreds of clients sit on your systems. That makes the basics non-negotiable: MFA, managed endpoint protection, encrypted devices, and a secure way to exchange documents that is not an email attachment.

Tax season cannot be the season things break

We do patching, migrations, and hardware refreshes in your off-months, and we watch systems more closely through the crunch. Backups are tested, not assumed.

A lot of your work repeats

Engagement letters, document requests, reminders, invoicing, and status updates all follow the same pattern every year. That is exactly the sort of thing worth automating, and it usually gives a small firm back several hours a week.

The practice still runs on desktop software

CaseWare, TaxCycle, Profile and their equivalents are Windows desktop applications, and no amount of cloud enthusiasm changes that. They need somewhere reliable to run, year rollovers that do not break, and access to prior-year files long after the year closes. We host them properly, whether that means a server in your office or a hosted desktop your staff reach from anywhere, and we handle the annual version cycle before it collides with filing season.

Clients will email you their entire financial life

They will attach a T4, a void cheque and a mortgage statement to one unencrypted message, because it is easy. A portal only helps if using it is easier than not using it. We set up secure exchange that clients will adopt, wire it into the request and reminder process so it becomes the default path, and stop sensitive material accumulating in mailboxes where it does not belong.

Records outlive the software that made them

The Canada Revenue Agency generally expects business records to be kept for six years from the end of the last tax year they relate to, and your professional body or your engagement letters may ask for longer. That is a retention problem and an access problem. We keep archives restorable and readable, so a file from seven years ago is something you can produce rather than something you hope is still on a machine in a cupboard.

What you get

• Managed devices and help desk. Laptops, desktops, and phones set up, patched, and supported.
• Email and identity. Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, administered and secured with MFA.
• Backups that get tested. Not just configured and forgotten.
• Cyber-insurance readiness. The controls insurers ask about, in place and documented.
• Automation. The repeating parts of your workflow, handled quietly in the background.
• Data and reporting. The numbers you need to run the place, in a dashboard rather than a spreadsheet.

Tools we work with

QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, CaseWare, TaxCycle, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and secure client portals.

What the first month looks like

Week one, we document the practice as it stands. Devices, accounts, who holds administrator access, and where client data actually lives, which is usually more places than anyone expects.

Week two, multi-factor goes on everywhere, managed endpoint protection is deployed, and backups start running and get restore-tested rather than assumed.

Week three, we look hard at the desktop stack. Where CaseWare, TaxCycle or Profile run, whether that survives the next version, and whether remote access to it is both secure and quick enough to work in.

Week four, secure client document exchange goes live and the whole environment gets written down. Nothing disruptive is scheduled inside filing season, so onboarding in February means the heavier work waits for the summer.

Questions from CPA firms and bookkeepers

Do you support CaseWare, TaxCycle and Profile?

Yes, including the annual version cycle and prior-year access. We treat the rollover as a scheduled project in your quiet months rather than something discovered in February. Licensing stays yours and in your name.

Can staff work remotely and still run desktop tax software?

Yes, through a hosted desktop or a properly configured remote session into your own server. Both work. Which one suits you depends on how many people need it and whether you want to keep hardware in the office. We will tell you which we would choose and why, including the cost difference.

What is the right way to get documents from clients?

A portal, wired into whatever you already use to request and chase documents, so it becomes the path of least resistance rather than an extra step. Email attachments win by default because they are easy. The fix is making the secure route easier, not sending a reminder about policy.

What happens if something breaks in March?

Response times are written into the agreement rather than implied, and if you are down the target is thirty minutes on the Complete plan. We also do the opposite of what many providers do: no patching, migrations or hardware changes during filing season. Disruptive work happens in your quiet months by default.

How long do we have to keep client records?

The Canada Revenue Agency generally expects six years from the end of the last tax year the records relate to, and your professional body or your own engagement letters may require longer. We are not your compliance advisor, but we build the retention and the restore path so meeting the obligation is straightforward and provable.

We are a four-person firm. Too small to bother?

No, and four people holding several hundred clients' financial records is precisely the profile cyber insurers now underwrite carefully. There is no minimum team size here and no long contract.

Other teams we work with

• Law firmsManaged IT for small firms and sole practitioners who cannot afford a confidentiality problem.
• Health & dental clinicsManaged IT for clinics, where an hour of downtime is a waiting room full of rescheduled patients.
• Engineering & architectureManaged IT for studios where the files are enormous and the project record has to survive for years.
• Construction & tradesManaged IT for companies whose office is a truck, a trailer, and sometimes an actual office.
• StartupsOutsourced IT for funded teams that are growing faster than their processes.