Followers of the Practitioner's Diary will have shared his anguish over the last few weeks as he tried, with varying degrees of success, to introduce new IT systems.
We asked our West Country practitioner to share some tips on how to survive IT in a busy accountancy practice, without losing either your clients or your sanity!
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1. Always remember that if anything can go wrong, it will - probably several times too.
2. However many days you are quoted for the job, expect it to take that many weeks before it's right!
3. Grow your own in-house IT expert. Buying in outside help is expensive, and frustrating when you need a quick fix. Appoint an IT manager - they will generate fees from added-value client services too, so this needn't just be an overhead. Then get them trained up on Novell, Windows NT, SQL or whatever you are buying.
4. Don't expect any bought-in expert to be able to understand your system very quickly - there are just too many permutations for anyone to have seen them all before!
5. At least 10% of new hardware will be dead on arrival or fail shortly afterwards. Let the stuff settle down before you commit anything important - such as your business - to it.
6. A "best of breed" solution, where you select your own mix of accounts preparation, tax and practice management, etc applications, is viable, but requires a lot of commitment and patience. As soon as one supplier finds a snag you can expect them to blame everyone else!
7. Security, particularly reliable backup and anti-virus software, is vital. Backup needs to be automated and tested weekly - restore a test directory. Many backups turn out to be useless just when they're needed because noone checked that the system was working! Anti-virus checking should be centrally managed and automated too so that nothing can slip through.
8. When seeking quotes for hardware and software, set out detailed, itemised requirements in writing and insist that suppliers respond in similar detail. Make sure you tell every supplier what all the others are supplying so that conflicts and compatability issues can be dealt with at the planning stage. If any spec changes, repeat the process - better to be safe than sorry.
9. Don't be a pioneer. An accountancy practice is not the place to test out the latest Microsoft operating system, so leave new releases of Windows and Office to techno-masochists and stick to products that have been available for a year or so. Once Service Release 2 arrives there is some chance of a Microsoft product is somewhere near being stable.
10. Unfortunately, in the end you just have to go for it. If you try to upgrade gradually, or upgrade hardware and software at different times you are likely to run into compatibility and obsolescence problems. Trying to run Office 2000 Professional on an old Pentium 100 is going to end in tears! Be thankful for the current 100% First Year Allowances on IT expenditure.
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We are sure this isn't an exhaustive list. Feel free to add your tips and suggestions below.