Managed IT for UK accountancy practices where 'the system goes down for an hour' actually means '£4,000 of billable time gone'. ICAEW practice assurance and ACCA tech-standard alignment, with elevated cover through January and a Stockport practice that cut tickets by 73% in six months.
Inology IT supports UK accountancy practices across Greater Manchester with managed IT aligned to ICAEW Practice Assurance and ACCA tech-standard requirements. We support the stack practices actually run — Sage 50/200, Xero, IRIS Practice Suite, CCH Central, TaxCalc, BTC, Capium — with database back-ends, Companies House integration and MTD VAT submission paths kept stable. January-season elevated cover is part of the service: named senior engineer on standby, daily check-ins, change windows frozen, P1 SLA tightened to 15 minutes. Cyber Essentials Plus and cyber insurance questionnaires (Hiscox, Markel, CFC) are completed with technical evidence, not guesswork.
Tax-deadline season kills practices that haven't planned for it. Tickets triple, partners work weekends, and a half-hour outage on 30 January costs more than the entire year's IT budget. We pre-agree elevated cover from 1 January to 5 February — named engineer on standby, daily check-in calls, all change windows frozen unless emergency.
We deal with the licensing, the database back-end, the integration with Companies House, the version upgrades that always seem to land mid-tax-season. Not perfectly — nobody's perfect with IRIS — but with proper escalation paths and not learning your software for the first time on the day.
Most practices have backup running. Most have never tested restoring it. The first time you find out it's been failing for 8 months is when you actually need it. We restore something every quarter and give you a one-page report — auditor-ready, ICO-defensible.
Partners use personal MacBooks, junior staff use personal phones for client calls, the senior accountant prints to a home printer. ICAEW takes a dim view of any of this. We deploy proper device controls (Intune, conditional access, encryption) without making people hand in their iPhones.
Accountancy renewal questionnaires now include 28+ technical questions. Most practices guess. Wrong answers void coverage at claim time. We complete the questionnaire for you with evidence to back every yes/no.
We're not auditors and we don't pretend to be — but we know which IT-side evidence each of these standards expects, and we keep it ready.
Day-to-day helpdesk, device care, monthly reporting. The baseline.
M365 plus practice-management database backed up to immutable storage. Restore-tested quarterly.
Tenant configured properly. SharePoint with client-folder taxonomy. Sensitivity labels for confidential financial data.
Certification path. Sage and IRIS workstations brought up to scratch as part of remediation.
Inherited a tenant configured by three previous IT providers. Rebuilt baseline in 8 weeks, certified CE+, ran first January season under managed service with zero P1 incidents.
Read the case study →We support all the major accountancy stacks weekly: Sage 50/200, Xero, IRIS Practice Suite, CCH Central, TaxCalc, BTC Software, Capium. We're not the vendor's first-line support, but we know the database back-ends, the licensing models, the common integration pain (Companies House sync, MTD VAT submission failures, Sage payroll updates that break print drivers). We escalate to vendor support cleanly when we need to.
From 1 January to 5 February: named senior engineer on standby, daily check-in call with your practice manager, all change windows frozen unless emergency, response SLAs tightened (P1: 15 minutes; P2: 1 hour), and pre-positioned spares for any kit that might fail at the wrong moment. It's part of the managed service for accountancy clients, not an extra. We've never had a P1 incident go unresolved past 90 minutes during January.
Yes — and this is now the norm rather than the exception. We deploy properly configured remote access (Always-On VPN or cloud-native, depending on your stack), conditional access policies (no random coffee-shop wifi), encrypted devices, and a dependable Sage / IRIS experience over a residential broadband connection. We'll tell you which combinations work and which don't.
MTD compliance is mostly a software-vendor problem, but it sits on top of IT infrastructure. We make sure your VAT-submission software talks to HMRC reliably, the digital links between bookkeeping and submission tools are auditable, and the data trail from receipt to return is preserved (which matters more than people realise — HMRC are starting to ask).
ICAEW practice assurance requires demonstrable audit trail for client work. We configure SharePoint with versioning, retention labels (typically 7 years for accounting workpapers), and access logs that survive document deletion. Audit visits we've supported find the evidence quickly — which keeps the visit shorter.
That's the whole point. We complete cyber insurance questionnaires, prepare the technical evidence for ICAEW practice assurance visits, support DPA/DSAR requests, and run the breach playbook if it ever comes to that. You concentrate on the accounting; we handle the IT compliance overlay.
First 30 days: full audit, ticket triage, immediate stability fixes, baseline rolled out (MFA, EDR, baseline policies). Days 30–60: tenant remediation, M365 hygiene, first restore drill. Days 60–90: CE/CE+ if needed, optimisation, January-season prep if you're inside the run-up. Most practices feel the difference in week 2.
We won't onboard a new accountancy client between mid-November and early February — too much risk. We'll happily run discovery, sign paperwork, and plan migration during that window, with go-live in mid-February. Better for everyone. The exception: if your current MSP has actually walked away or gone bust, we'll do an emergency takeover. We've done it before.
Accountancy clients across Stockport, Manchester city centre, Trafford. If you're outside Greater Manchester, we still might be a fit — see the service area.
Talk to Brett or Simon. 30 minutes, on the phone or video. No deck, no decision pressure — we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.