Case Studies

Grosvenor House
1 New Road
Brixham
Devon
TQ5 8LZ
www.iawaccountancy.co.uk

I.A.W Accountancy Services were established in 1980. As a modern, progressive practice, they deliver a personalised service to their clients.

IAW provide a high-level strategic business advice, helping clients to achieve ambitions and realise potential.

The client’s brief

Like most accountants, IAW keep a huge amount of data on the system with multiple companies’ running in Sage.  This data was kept on a single workstation which was struggling to service the network requests.   Email was running on a simple POP3 system which meant they were not being backed up.

This setup was fine to begin with but because the business had progressively grown over time they reach a point whereby these problems started to occur.  Therefore the directors decided to invest in a system that will support the growth and have the ability to coup with expansion for the foreseeable future.

Our solution

The problem with a workgroup setup as describe above, is that you can only have a maximum of 10 workstations connecting to a single workstation.  IAW needed to add more workstations.  Therefore we installed a single Windows Small Business Server to support over 10 workstation with the ability to add a further 10-20 workstations in the future.

We removed the POP3 system in favour of the Exchange Server which comes with MS SBS thus giving them their own email server which will managed, store, share and backup there Outlook mailboxes.

Nightly backups are now preformed to tape as well as our remote backup service which automatically backs up their data to our storage server based at our offices.

Benefits to the client

Huge benefits have resulted in this new system.  As the system was being implemented, one of the key personnel for medical reasons was struggling to come to the office every day.  That member of staff can now work remotely from home and have access to Sage and other related applications.  This was a major benefit to the new system.

Running Sage reports was now considerably quicker, whereas before staff had to wait a long time for these to complete before they could continue with their work.

The email system has encourage them to email more often as opposed to mail which has lowered costs and has provider their clients with a better service.