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.