We modernise accounting practice systems so you can manage clients, deadlines, and compliance in one place.
Every practice has its own stack, cobbled together over the years as the firm grew and HMRC kept changing the rules. These are the systems we see most often.
Bespoke Access or VB6 databases, heavily customised IRIS installs, aging CCH/Digita setups that no longer receive meaningful updates.
Client relationship databases and engagement letter management, often spread across multiple tools and shared drives.
Time recording, work-in-progress tracking, and billing systems — frequently disconnected from client records and fee estimates.
SA, CT, VAT, MTD compliance — often held together with Outlook reminders, shared spreadsheets, and a partner's memory.
Audit planning, scheduling, and audit file management tools that rarely talk to the rest of the practice systems.
Client correspondence, accounts, and tax computations — still sitting on a file server in many practices.
Branded client portals for secure document exchange — or, in many practices, the absence of one and a reliance on email attachments.
Client onboarding, AML/KYC checking, and compliance tools — usually a separate workflow rather than part of engagement.
Payroll bureau systems and integration layers between practice management, accounts production (Sage, Xero, QuickBooks), HMRC APIs, and Companies House.
These come up in most conversations with partners and finance leads. You will recognise at least a few.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Engagement letters in one system, time records in another, accounts in a third, tax computations on a shared drive. Every time a partner needs the full picture on a client, someone has to pull information from four different places. A task that should take thirty seconds takes ten minutes, and the answer is never quite complete.
SA filing deadlines, CT600 due dates, VAT returns, audit schedules, Companies House confirmations — tracked in a spreadsheet, in someone's Outlook calendar, or in their head. One person goes on holiday and a deadline gets missed. The penalty comes out of your fee.
Manual data entry between systems, re-keying client details that already exist somewhere else, chasing staff for timesheets on a Friday afternoon, generating fee notes by hand in Word. Billable hours are being consumed by administration that a connected system would handle automatically.
Off-the-shelf platforms work well for some firms. But if your practice has particular client onboarding steps, bespoke compliance checks, or billing structures that grew up with the firm, you end up paying a subscription and then running workarounds on top of it. Within six months, the spreadsheets are back.
Client records, engagement histories, fee analysis, compliance logs, partner notes — this is the institutional knowledge of your practice. It is not in anyone's head; it is in the system. Any modernisation has to bring it all across, intact, with nothing lost in translation.
Making Tax Digital, new HMRC APIs, updated AML regulations, iXBRL requirements. Every regulatory change means another bolt-on, another bridging tool, another manual step in a process that was supposed to be automatic. The cost of keeping up is growing every year.
This is a summary. The full process is described on our modernisation and how-we-work pages; here, we want to show you that the approach is designed around how accounting practices operate.
Before we write a line of code, we map your client records, engagement histories, fee structures, compliance logs, and correspondence. Where documentation does not exist, we reverse-engineer the data model from what is in the system. The goal is a complete inventory of what must be preserved, so there are no surprises during migration.
A connected foundation for client management, deadlines, billing, compliance, and secure document exchange.
Single view of every client: engagement status, deadlines, WIP, correspondence, compliance history, and fees. Onboarding with AML/KYC built into the workflow, and engagement letter generation tracked automatically.
All regulatory deadlines (SA, CT, VAT, Companies House, audit) tracked across the practice with a RAG-status dashboard for partners and managers. Alerts and escalation before anything is overdue, not after.
Time recording integrated with client records and fee estimates. Live WIP visibility for partners — know what is billable before month-end, not after. Fee notes and invoicing generated from system data, no re-keying.
Built-in HMRC API integration for Making Tax Digital (ITSA, VAT, CT). Architecture designed to absorb regulatory changes without bolt-on workarounds. iXBRL submission, Companies House API, and AML reporting built in.
Clients upload documents and approve accounts through a branded portal. No more email attachments with sensitive financial data. Full audit trail for every document exchange.
Every modernised system includes internationalisation (i18n), responsive design, CI/CD pipeline, authentication, test data framework, and a demo environment from day one.
Most accounting practice estates we assess have at least one ageing finance platform behind the visible practice-management layer. These are the named systems we cover most often.
Reporting, OLE/Excel workflows and data-extraction risk when moving off Exchequer.
SQL SE readiness, payroll calendar risk and bespoke reporting around Opera 3.
The wider hub of named ERP, finance and database systems we assess.
Click any tile to take a closer look at the sectors we modernise.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We will discuss your practice systems, your pain points, and what a realistic modernisation path looks like — whether that is incremental modernisation or a fresh build.
