Are You Fully Prepared for Tax Season?

It’s that time again! Your CPA firm is gearing up for tax season, but are you ready for the spike in business volume you’ll encounter in the coming months? Tax season brings with it IT stressors — more data, more users, and a larger processing load — as you staff up to handle increased client demand. When you’re battling the clock to file client taxes on schedule, there’s no room for performance lags, system outages, or remote access issues that drag down productivity. That’s why it’s so important to be proactive.

What should you be thinking about from an IT perspective as tax season approaches?

Availability: Nothing disrupts your tax prep operations like an unplanned system outage. If your onsite servers go down, your IT resource — whether it’s an in-house professional or a contract consultant — has to scramble to restore your applications and data as quickly as possible. If they discover the downtime is due to aging infrastructure that can’t scale under increasing load, you may be looking at some significant replacement costs. And if you use a subpar cloud provider and experience an outage, all you can do is hope they respond quickly and make your system recovery a top priority. Meanwhile, productivity comes to a standstill, frustrating clients and stressing out staff.

Security: Because you handle lots of sensitive client information, data protection and security must be a top priority. With new cyberthreats emerging every day, you need security at every level of your IT infrastructure — from servers to networks to endpoints — along with application-consistent backups for optimal data restoration. You might also want to consider security awareness training to ensure that your full-time and temporary employees are prepared to serve as an effective line of defense against the latest threats. After all, if your firm falls victim to an attack, you may be facing lengthy downtime, lost productivity, potential ransom costs, and serious damage to your reputation.

Scalability: You likely add new users and deal with huge amounts of documentation during tax season as your business volume spikes. Does your in-house infrastructure or MSP have the ability to scale quickly to handle peak loads? Are you able to onboard new users quickly and ensure their access to applications and files is reliable and secure? You need to be confident that your IT environment can easily scale up or down as your application, data, and user requirements change seasonally. Otherwise, you could be at risk for performance degradation, downtime, data loss, or even security breaches as your processing and storage capabilities become overwhelmed.

Remote access: As you bring on temporary staff to keep up with tax season demands, many of these people are going to want the flexibility to work from anywhere. Do you have the ability to set up new users quickly and give them secure remote access to your applications and data from any device? If you hope to recruit and retain top talent, you’re going to need to deliver a consistent, seamless user experience — with a single login — no matter where your staff chooses to work.

End-User Productivity: You’d be surprised by how much time and productivity you can lose to small IT issues such as network connectivity, printing problems, password resets, expired software licenses, and file recovery. If you rely on an IT consultant, do they address these issues in a timely manner or do you typically find yourself waiting too long for a resolution? If this is a chronic problem, you may want to consider an IT provider that provides 24×7 help desk support you can really count on.

If you feel you may not be as prepared as you could be for the upcoming tax season, Infinitely Virtual can help. We offer cloud application hosting with a 100% uptime guarantee; unlimited scalability; end-to-end security and absolute data protection; complete IT services,:and responsive, round-the-clock support from a dedicated team of IT experts. Even better, we deliver all this for a predictable, affordable monthly fee that could result in big savings over your current approach.

Contact us at 866-257-8455 or at www.infinitelyvirtual.com to learn more.