SBLR - Cloud & IT Managed Services Case Study

The client

In August 2016, a small group of accountants from SBLR LLP – a Toronto-based CPA that had in 2013 become part of one of the largest independent accounting and consulting firms in Canada – decided to part ways with the larger group and re-establish the original company.

As part of the agreement, they took with them long-standing clients worth CAN$3.5m of annual fees, 18 employees, most of whom were fee-earners, and some laptops and computers borrowed from their previous employer.

They were ambitious and starting fresh. But the high pressure of tax season would start in five short months, and with no IT infrastructure and limited IT skills and resource, they had to extract all their clients’ data from the group’s systems and secure it in their own environment – and all the while, maintain excellent service and repay their clients’ trust in them during the move.

This new environment was to be built entirely from scratch. Though despite the time pressure and the size of the challenge, SBLR saw it as a rare opportunity. They could create a modern, “cloud first” infrastructure, unencumbered by legacy systems or hardware and that had agility, flexibility and cost-efficiency built into it from the very start.

Service 1: Managed Cloud Services

The first step was to set up the cloud environment. Calligo designed and created a multi-VM Virtual Datacentre in its Tier 3 Toronto facility, with private resource allocation running on the latest Microsoft virtualization technology.

The Toronto location of the Calligo datacentre was important due to the data residency requirements incumbent upon CPAs. The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) requires Canadian citizens to be able to provide a copy of their tax records for audit purposes, and if those records are kept on cloud infrastructure, then at least a copy must be physically stored in Canada so that the CRA does not have to contend with other jurisdictions’ privacy laws to audit its own citizens. There was also an additional policy requirement of SBLR’s own, in that they did not wish to expose their clients’ data to other countries’ data access laws by storing it or any copies of it outside Canada.

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Service 2: CPA application support

Off this cloud platform, Calligo delivers and maintains SBLR’s core systems, including CaseWare and CCH Taxprep. The CaseWare migration was a particularly complicated project. Naturally, CaseWare does not easily permit the transfer of client data from one account to another, and yet $CAN3.5m worth of client data needed to be quickly moved from the larger group’s system to SBLR’s. Neither company wanted the process to drag on, and nor did the clients, but moving the data required client-by-client authorisation, which alone took more than six weeks to receive back from all the clients.

In the meantime, SBLR had been creating new files in their own CaseWare system for some of those clients that needed immediate assistance. This created a potential duplication problem, as without careful management, the arrival of the historic files from the larger group could overwrite the newly-created records in the SBLR system. Calligo however worked with SBLR and CaseWare – who had to create a special program for this project, such was its complexity – to prevent any loss of data.

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Service 3: IT Managed Services

As part of its ongoing IT Managed Services, Calligo provides network monitoring, proactive support and patching and a helpdesk that tackles user issues ranging from technical queries to “how to” requests. The Calligo team also provides on call on-site support when needed, plus additional maintenance services, including new user set up and device optimization.

Calligo also set up and continues to manage Microsoft 365 for all of SBLR’s users. Microsoft 365 gives the teams access to the Office suite including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus Exchange and OneDrive, plus additional collaboration tools such as Teams and Skype. Not only do these tools have the advantage of being well-recognised and having common interfaces, but they are also made available on a subscription model, in line with SBLR’s preference to avoid CAPEX investment.

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