Case Study:
MacGillivray

MacGillivray is a public accounting firm providing expert accounting, assurance, auditing and business advisory services in the Greater Toronto Area.

Dave Straughan, a Tax Partner and MacGillivray’s IT lead, is a well-known evangelist in how CPAs can become more productive and profitable through the wider use of technology. As far back as 2006, MacGillivray was the first CPA firm in Canada to deploy Wolters Kluwer’s CCH Scan. The productivity gains seen from this led the company to investigate Wolters Kluwer’s wider portfolio and become an early adopter of many of Wolters Kluwer’s new releases over the years.

Straughan’s wider vision for the firm however was to take full advantage of cloud technology. This would make it easier to scale by giving all staff the ability to work securely from anywhere.

Previously, the firm was reluctantly reliant on three on-premise servers. As the firm grew, it did not take much for the servers to be overloaded, even when being accessed on-site, while the VPN was notoriously and consistently unreliable when working on clients’ sites. Scalability was a tangible problem.

After moving to new premises with improved connectivity, MacGillivray sought out a suitable partner. Calligo was chosen for its extensive experience in the CPA industry, plus its track record in minimal-downtime cloud migrations.  

Calligo designed and built a multi-VM Virtual Datacentre for MacGillivray, operating out of its Tier 3 facility in Barrie, Ontario, with private resource allocation running on the latest Microsoft virtualization technology. Because of Calligo’s strategic approach and the prior planning undertaken in partnership with MacGillivray, the migration went smoothly, with only the barest minimum impact on operations. Calligo also delivered MacGillivray’s core, business-critical applications, including CaseWare, Taxprep, CCH iFirm and CCH Document Management, hosted off the new cloud platform.

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In early 2018, MacGillivray decided to further improve its productivity. Over the intervening time, it had deployed a variety of communication and collaboration tools. But because many of them overlapped, or were used by some team members and not others, the collection of tools had become fragmented and cumbersome. At various times, MacGillivray used Instant Messenger, Spark, Skype and Slack and others besides, alongside SharePoint and the standard suite of Microsoft Office products.

There was therefore a clear opportunity to consolidate the fragmented environment of non-CPA-specific tools and adopt Microsoft Office 365 instead. Not only would this replace many of the collaboration tools onto a single, recognised platform, but it would also avoid the need to renew software licences or risk file incompatibility within the business or with clients.

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