Haines Watt Case Study

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.

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.

On advice from FluidOne Chorley, 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 FluidOne Chorley’s secure data centre. All IT users access the system via FluidOne Chorley’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.

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