Haines Watts focuses on efficiency and process improvement
The client
Haines Watts Newcastle is part of the Haines Watts firm of chartered accountants and business advisers. The North-East division of the firm has offices in Newcastle & Darlington with a total of 40 staff using the IT system. As a busy accountancy practice, serving a wide range of clients, Haines Watts Newcastle was becoming increasingly frustrated with the limitations of its ageing PCs and concluded in early 2018 that the firm needed to invest in a new cloud-based IT system.
The challenge
Haines Watts Newcastle were using ageing on-site servers that were becoming unreliable and nearing end of life. This was an opportunity to review the way Haines Watts Newcastle used its technology platform and to change the on-premises model to a cloud-based model. As the practice has expanded, it needed more flexible working practices so that fee earners can be more mobile, using a variety of devices and work at home when they need to. Haines Watts particularly focuses on owner-managed businesses, which very often require their advisers to visit their offices, so the facility to work off-site helps to foster closer client engagement.
The solution
On advice from Orca, Haines Watts has adopted a cloud-based hosted desktop IT strategy to provide a standardised system that can be applied across all firms within the Greater London group. Centralisation is another key focus, to enable the group to apply the same standards across the practice. Haines Watts’ aim is to create a centralised service portfolio for clients so that for example, audit services are consistent across the group and auditors can easily move to different sites as and when they are required. With a variety of firms spread across the group, it is also important to create consistent back office processes such as HR and payroll.
The firm uses standard office and accounting systems such as IRIS, Sage, MyWorkPapers, CCH and MS Office 365. Apart from IRIS, which is filed on dedicated local servers, the main applications are cloud-based, hosted in Orca’s secure data centre. All IT users access the system via Orca’s hosted desktop system, allowing them to work remotely, wherever they are needed. According to Mike Keanly, the hosted desktop platform provides much more flexibility, freeing the fee earners from being tied to a specific office.
Adding new users to the system is an integral part of the hosted desktop system, so computing capacity is not an issue for the firm and Mike Keanly doesn’t have to think about buying additional licenses.
Orca’s service is consistently outstanding. They manage our technology platform so we don’t have to worry about the IT systems. This is particularly important when we acquire a new firm, as Orca makes the integration much easier. Whenever we have done a new acquisition, we don’t have to be concerned about any IT challenges, as Orca takes care of all the technical issues and enables us to streamline all of our IT platforms so that we can achieve consistency throughout the practice. Working with Orca gives us a stable basis for us to drive greater efficiencies, enabling us to work smarter and provide better services for our clients.
Sectors
- IT Management
Solutions
- IT Strategy
Challenges
- Cloud Hosting
Results
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