The five IT support challenges every UK accountancy practice is wrestling with

January and the run-up to year-end are not the moments to discover your backup hasn't worked or your portal can't cope with the load. They are also not moments to deploy anything new. For an IT team supporting a practice, the busy-season window is effectively a change freeze, and the months on either side need to absorb the work.

Practices that get through January without drama tend to do their backup restore testing in November, their identity review in October and their portal load-testing in September. None of this is exciting work, and that is precisely why it gets parked when there isn't a deadline. A good partner builds these into the year as a calendar, not a wish list.

Accountants hold an unusually rich mix of personal and financial data for a relatively small headcount. Personal data, financial data and director information sit alongside each other in the same OneDrive folders, the same mailboxes and the same practice management system. That makes a practice a high-value target and a high-stakes ICO subject if something goes wrong.

Phishing and impersonation attacks aimed at accountants are common and increasingly convincing. 'Please can you update my bank details for the next refund' is the classic, sent from a mailbox that looks almost right. The defences that move the needle are mundane: MFA on every account, conditional access in Entra ID, training that's regular rather than annual, and a documented response for the bank-details-changed scenario specifically.

IRIS, CCH and similar systems have specific hosting, performance and integration needs. Treat them as 'just another application' and you will regret it in March. They have opinions about how they should be deployed, where the database lives, how they integrate with Microsoft 365 and how they behave under busy-season load.

The partners who handle this well have done it before. They know that IRIS users will complain about latency that nobody else notices, that CCH integrations sometimes need a specific service account, and that a virtualisation choice made five years ago is probably the reason something feels slow today. The generic IT provider learns this on your time; the practice-aware one already knows.

Most client interaction in a practice still happens through email. Tightening it against spoofing and BEC has to happen without breaking how the team actually works. The first round of DMARC and impersonation policies, badly tuned, will quarantine a stack of legitimate client correspondence and the partners will, justifiably, lose patience.

Done well, this is a gradual programme. DMARC and DKIM enforced in stages, anti-impersonation policies for partners and senior staff first, training that focuses on the specific scams the sector sees, and a documented response when a client says their accountant has been hacked. None of this is dramatic. All of it is the difference between a near-miss and a notifiable breach.

Senior staff work from home most of the week, juniors are mostly in the office, and the practice management system is somewhere in the middle. The identity, conditional access and document handling all need to support both without leaking client data through OneDrive or via a personal device that nobody quite remembers issuing.

The firms that have settled into hybrid have usually done two things. They have decided where client documents actually live (the DMS or a governed SharePoint, not OneDrive) and they have managed the devices the team uses. The ones still struggling are usually the ones who let OneDrive become the default client store by accident and now find it hard to get back.

A practice-aware partner hardens email first, backs up Microsoft 365 properly, tidies up SharePoint and OneDrive, and knows how IRIS or CCH behaves under load. They are more present around busy season, not less. The quieter months are when AML evidence, ICO posture and Cyber Essentials renewal all get sorted, so by the time the 30th of January comes around none of that is a worry.

Tell us how many partners, which practice software and how you handle client documents. We will introduce you to a UK partner who already supports accountancy firms and won't need to learn the basics in December.