How should an accounting firm prepare its IT for the busy season?

Do the work in the quiet months. Check the internet connection has headroom and a failover path, replace the machines that are merely tolerable, confirm licensing and access for seasonal staff, and test a restore. Nothing on that list can be done cheaply or calmly in the busiest fortnight of the year.

The reason this deserves its own discipline is that accounting practices experience a demand curve most businesses do not. For much of the year the IT is adequate because the load is moderate; during the peak the same setup is asked to carry more people working longer hours on more data simultaneously, and the weaknesses that were invisible become obstructive. Firms then conclude their IT is bad, when in fact it was untested rather than inadequate.

Connectivity is the first thing to check and the one that hurts most. Once ledger platforms, document storage and email are hosted, every one of those depends on your connection, and a link that copes comfortably in June can saturate when everyone is working at once. Measure actual usage at the current peak, confirm there is genuine headroom, and add a failover path such as 4G or 5G if there is not. An outage in the last fortnight of October is not a normal outage, and this is the cheapest insurance available against it.

Devices are second and are the most reliable source of quiet frustration. A laptop that is a little slow in a normal week becomes genuinely obstructive when someone is working through a backlog at nine in the evening, and the cost compounds across everyone. Identify the machines coming up to their refresh, and replace them before the season rather than during it, both because ordering has a lead time and because nobody wants a new machine to configure in the busiest week.

Third is the seasonal staffing question, which is an IT question as much as an HR one. Temporary staff need accounts, licences, access to the right clients, a machine and somewhere to sit, and every one of those has a lead time. Agreeing the arrangement in advance, including exactly which access they get and how it is removed when they finish, prevents both the first-week delay and the accounts that persist for years afterwards because nobody remembered.

Fourth, test a restore before the peak rather than after an incident. This is the item most easily deferred and the one whose absence is most costly, because ransomware does not observe your calendar and a firm without a proven restore during the busy season is in an extremely difficult position. Confirm that backups cover the platforms you actually use now, including hosted ones, and that somebody has restored something recently and logged it.

Fifth, agree the support arrangement for the season explicitly. Response expectations that are comfortable in a quiet month may not suit a fortnight where an hour of downtime costs real money, and it is far better to discuss that in advance than to discover a mismatch mid-crisis. Ask your provider what changes during your peak, and if the answer is nothing, ask how they handle several urgent issues arriving at once.

There is a quieter piece of preparation worth doing at the same time: tidy the things that will otherwise generate support calls. Old printers nobody has configured properly, the shared mailbox with unclear permissions, the folder structure everyone complains about, the client portal password nobody can find. None of these is urgent in June and each of them becomes an interruption in October, when interruptions are expensive.

The pattern that works is a pre-season check treated as a fixed annual event rather than an intention: a defined list, done in a quiet month, with the results written down. Firms that do this consistently report that the season is uneventful from an IT perspective, which is exactly the objective. Firms that do not tend to spend the peak fixing things while under the most pressure they will face all year.

The honest caveat is that preparation cannot prevent everything, and a genuine hardware failure or a provider outage can still land at the worst moment. What it does is remove the failures that were predictable, which is most of them, and it means the ones that remain arrive at a firm that has tested its backups and knows who to call. If you want a pre-season check run against your practice, call 1800 456 567.