A busy US accounting practice was doing serious volume on tools that never spoke to each other. They didn't want new software — they wanted what they already owned to finally work as one system. So that's what I built.
More than a thousand clients around the world, looked after by a team of twenty-five and more. By any measure, a successful firm. But underneath, it ran almost entirely on manual effort and the memory of the people doing the work.
The software was all in place — it just wasn't joined up. Between every pair of tools sat a person, copying, chasing, and remembering. The strain showed up most clearly in three places.
Every client took a different mix of services, each on its own compliance clock — payroll, bookkeeping, annual tax. Across a thousand clients, who-needed-what-and-when was tracked by hand, in spreadsheets and people's heads.
Client files and internal files both lived in OneDrive — but with no structure, metadata, or workflow. Finding the right document meant knowing where someone had happened to put it.
Sensitive client documents arrived, and were sent back, largely over email and WhatsApp. For an accounting firm trusted with exactly that kind of data, it was the single biggest risk in the operation — and it happened every day.
None of this was a failure of effort. The work got done, and done well — because good people held a complicated business together by hand. The problem was that the business depended on them doing exactly that, without pause. A single missed message or forgotten deadline was all it would take for something to slip.
The firm didn't arrive asking for custom software. They arrived with a better question:
“Can we build what we need on what we already have — and finally use what we're already paying for to its full potential?”
I thought that was exactly the right question, and it shaped everything that followed.
They were already committed to Microsoft 365 and to Zoho, and using only a fraction of what either could do. The easy path — and the wrong one — would have been to propose a large new platform, or a custom build from the ground up. Either would have meant significant cost, a long wait, and worst of all a second system to learn and maintain, just to reproduce capabilities they already owned.
So the principle for the whole engagement was settled at the start: build on what they have, connect rather than replace, and reach for something new only where there's a genuine gap the existing tools can't fill. Every choice afterwards was measured against that.
In my experience, that restraint is the difference between a system a firm can actually live with, and an expensive one that quietly falls out of use within a year.
The same pieces they already had — re-organised so they finally work as a single operation, with one workspace at the centre and everything connected around it.
Auto-generated tasks, a secure document system, and connected sales-to-filing — all on the platforms they already paid for.
A workspace that runs the practice, a secure channel to each client, and the integrations that hold the whole thing together — all on the stack they already owned.
A SharePoint workspace built around the firm's own shape — so the system does the tracking the team used to do by hand.
Each client gets a private, governed space — replacing files-over-chat with a real system.
Sales, proposals, accounts and filing, connected end to end — so the islands became one flow.
Protected throughout. Because this is an accounting firm holding deeply sensitive information, the applicable Microsoft 365 security and privacy controls were put in place across the system — so what we built is not only connected, but properly guarded. That mattered more than any single feature, because it answered the firm's largest exposure directly.
The tools they were already paying for now work as one connected operation — which is exactly what they asked for at the start.
If any of this felt familiar, that's the conversation worth having. Tell me what's scattered or manual — I'll tell you straight whether I can help.