McAllisters’ IT Management Solution

Early in 2010 UpSource created an IT Management contract for McAllisters Chartered Accountants. McAllisters are a City Centre based Accountancy practice that offers a wide range of services, including audits, cashflow, tax, and business development advice.

“We are very happy with the excellent service that UpSource provide us under our monthly contract agreement and would be happy to recommend them to anyone.”

Kenneth McAllister, Partner, McAllisters Chartered Accountants

Our first step was to meet Kenny and Fiona to discuss in detail all of the services McAllisters would need from their IT systems. In addition to the standard IT support and maintenance services that all businesses require, McAllisters would also require additional services such as regular updates to their accountancy software packages to keep up with constantly changing legislation, and data encryption and protection services to continue to meet the compliance levels of privacy and confidentiality required for their clients’ data.

Once we had established what they needed, our next step was to do a thorough network audit and healthcheck to see what equipment they had and how they were using it. McAllisters is a well established company, and it was no surprise to discover that they already had all of the software and security in place to enable their staff to do their jobs and ensure that their clients were protected.

We did identify improvements that we could make to the service they receiving from their previous supplier. These included putting in a better, more secure remote access feature to enable the partners to log in remotely and access files or emails. The remote system also enabled UpSource to run the frequent updates to their accountancy software at out-of-hours times whereas previously everyone had to log out of the system during the office hours update process. We were also able to put an improved spam-filtration system in place which not only blocked out spam messages, but created an accessible ‘spambox’ which could be accessed by staff if a legitimate message was wrongly identified as spam. Other similar improvements were also identified and put in place.

An important requirement for McAllisters was that there would be no hidden or extra labour charges for certain services, such as replacing faulty or worn out equipment with new, installing new or replacement software, updating or upgrading equipment, or removing malware or viruses that may get into the system. Many IT support companies make such charges even when they have a support contract in place. UpSource NEVER do this. EVER. In the time since we’ve worked with McAllisters, we’ve never invoiced a single penny on top of their monthly fee for any labour performed on their network. We’ve never invoiced any of our other contract clients for labour in the times we’ve been managing their networks either.