IT support for Dallas accounting and CPA firms

Who does IT for CPA firms in Dallas?

I do. Cross River Tech is a small, owner-led managed IT company based in Dallas, working with professional practices across the metroplex, and an accounting firm is a good fit for how I work. You deal with me directly, and I know which tax package you use, which scanner is on which desk, and what happened the last time the portal went slow. My team handles the routine monitoring and updates behind me while I stay your point of contact, so there is no ticket queue and no explaining the setup to a different technician each time.

What that covers for an accounting practice:

• Workstations and laptops for preparers, reviewers and admin staff, kept updated and monitored.
• The network, meaning internet, firewall, switching and Wi-Fi, which is what everything else depends on during the season.
• Hosted and local tax software, from the support side: performance, sessions, printing, connectivity and the workstation requirements the vendor publishes.
• Scanners, copiers and document workflow, including scan-to-folder and scan-to-email that actually works.
• Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, secure email, shared files and calendars.
• Security and backup, including multi-factor authentication, endpoint protection, email filtering and tested restores.
• Onsite visits by appointment across Dallas and the metroplex when something needs hands on it.

One thing I am not: a tax or legal adviser. Where this article touches on client data obligations, it describes what firms are generally expected to have and what I can build technically. Your own professional and legal advisers decide what applies to your practice, and I work to whatever they tell you.

What does an accounting firm need from IT that other offices do not?

Three things: a hard seasonal peak, a heavy document pipeline, and client data that other people care about. Plenty of Dallas offices have one of those. An accounting practice has all three at once, and they interact.

The seasonal staff row deserves attention because it is where practices most often leak access. A preparer who worked one season and still has an account and a portal login the following autumn is a real risk with an easy fix: the same written onboarding and offboarding checklist you use for permanent hires, applied every time. I lay that process out in the IT onboarding checklist for your first employees.

How do you keep an accounting firm running through filing season?

By doing the work before it starts and then leaving things alone. The single most useful policy an accounting practice can adopt is a change freeze: no upgrades, no migrations, no new hardware rollouts and no optional changes during the peak weeks. Everything that needs doing gets done in the quiet part of the year, tested, and then left in place.

Here is the pre-season checklist I run with a Dallas firm, ideally finished well before the rush:

1. Workstation health. Anything slow, short on memory or short on disk gets fixed or replaced now, not in the third week of the season.
2. Operating system and application updates applied, then a freeze on non-critical changes.
3. Tax software readiness. The current version installed and tested on a real workstation, printing checked, and the vendor's stated requirements compared against the machines you actually have.
4. Internet checked and, if needed, upgraded. This has a lead time and cannot be arranged in a hurry.
5. Backups tested by restoring something. A file, a mailbox and, if you have a server, a full system test.
6. Battery backup tested on the network equipment and any server, because North Texas storms do not consult your calendar.
7. Scanners serviced and settings confirmed, including the destinations that always break when a password changes.
8. Seasonal staff accounts created in advance with the right access, so nobody starts by borrowing a colleague's login.
9. A written what-if list. What happens if the internet fails, if a workstation dies, if the office cannot open. Who calls whom, in what order.

Then during the season, support shifts to keeping things running rather than improving them. Remote support is available around the clock including holidays, with after-hours rates outside Monday to Friday 8 AM to 5 PM Central, which matters for a practice whose staff are working late in the weeks that count.

Why is our hosted tax software slow, and what actually fixes it?

Almost never the reason people assume. When a hosted tax platform feels sluggish, the instinct is to blame the vendor, and occasionally that is right. Far more often the problem is on your side of the connection and is fixable. The diagnosis is a process of elimination, and it is worth doing properly rather than guessing.

• Upload speed, not download. Remote sessions and portal uploads depend on upload, and many small offices are on plans that are fast in one direction only. This is the most common cause I find.
• Connection quality rather than raw speed. Latency, jitter and packet loss make a remote session feel terrible even on a fast circuit.
• Wi-Fi where a cable belongs. Preparers doing heavy sessions should be on wired connections. Wi-Fi is for laptops and meetings.
• An underpowered workstation. Remote sessions still need local memory and a decent processor, especially with several monitors and a browser full of tabs.
• Multiple monitors configured badly. Session settings for multi-monitor use make a visible difference.
• Local printing through the session, which is a classic cause of freezes and delays.
• Everyone at once. A circuit that is fine in November is saturated when the whole office is uploading in March.
• The vendor's own platform. Sometimes it genuinely is them, and the useful thing is being able to show that with evidence rather than argue about it.

The right approach is to measure, not to speculate: check the connection at the times it is slow, look at the workstation while a session is running, and eliminate causes in order. Once the real cause is identified, the fix is usually inexpensive. Upgrading a circuit, adding memory to four machines or moving three desks to wired connections costs far less than a season of everyone working slowly.

What does a good scanning and document workflow look like?

Boring and consistent. Paper comes in, gets scanned once, lands where it belongs with a name someone else can understand, and is never scanned again. Most practices already have the scanner. What breaks is everything around it.

Two details are worth insisting on. First, the scan destination must be a location that is backed up, which means a shared drive or cloud folder rather than a desktop. Second, whatever your document management or portal system is, the scan should land in it directly rather than passing through three manual copies. Every manual step is a step somebody skips at eleven at night in the middle of the season.

How should a CPA firm protect client data?

With the same short list every small business needs, applied more strictly because of what you hold. An accounting practice keeps names, addresses, social security numbers, bank details and income information for hundreds or thousands of people. That is exactly the data criminals want, and it makes the basics non-negotiable rather than optional.

1. Multi-factor authentication on everything. Email, the tax platform, the portal, the accounting software, remote access and banking. Email first, because it resets everything else.
2. One named account per person. No shared logins, not even for seasonal staff, and especially not for anything a client's data passes through.
3. Encrypted drives on every computer, so a stolen laptop is a hardware loss rather than a disclosure.
4. Secure delivery instead of email attachments. Client portals or encrypted links for anything with identifying information, and a firm rule that returns are never sent as plain attachments.
5. Access limited by need. Not every preparer needs every client folder, and admin rights should not sit on everyday accounts.
6. Endpoint protection and email filtering that report somewhere a person actually looks.
7. Same-day offboarding. Season ends, access ends, including the portal and the tax platform.
8. A verification rule for money. Any change to bank details, from a client or a supplier, confirmed by voice on a known number. Payment redirection fraud targets accounting practices specifically.

None of this is exotic and most of it is included in subscriptions you already pay for. The general version of the same list is in cybersecurity basics for a Dallas small business, and the technical work sits under cybersecurity, backup and disaster recovery. The professional-practice version of these questions comes up the same way for the law firms I support, where client confidentiality drives the same controls from a different direction.

What is the written information security plan expectation, in general terms?

Tax professionals in the United States are generally expected to maintain a written plan describing how they protect client information. The federal agencies involved with tax practice have said clearly that this is an expectation for firms handling taxpayer data, and it is increasingly asked about by insurance carriers and larger clients too. I am describing this in general terms only. What applies to your practice is a question for your professional body and your own advisers, not for your IT person.

What I can tell you is what such a plan usually needs from IT, and what I can supply as evidence:

• An inventory. Which computers, servers, devices and cloud services exist, and who uses them.
• Where client data lives. Which systems hold it, and which of them are hosted by a vendor rather than by you.
• Who has access to what, written down and reviewable rather than remembered.
• The safeguards actually in place. Multi-factor authentication, encryption, endpoint protection, email filtering, patching, backup.
• How data is transmitted to clients, and the rule that says attachments are not the method.
• Backup and recovery arrangements, including how they are tested and when they were last tested.
• An incident response outline. Who is called, in what order, and what gets preserved rather than deleted.
• Retention and disposal, including secure wiping of retired computers and drives.

My part is to make the technical statements in that document true, and to give you a current written record you can point at instead of writing one from memory once a year. The plan itself, and any professional obligation attached to it, belongs to the firm and its advisers.

What should be backed up, and when should it be tested?

Everything that would hurt to lose, and tested before the season rather than during it. The important word is tested. A backup job with green ticks that has never been restored from is an assumption, and the worst moment to discover it was wrong is the week of a deadline.

• Any server or local data store, including the machine that quietly hosts the practice application.
• Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. The provider keeps the service running; the provider does not promise to bring back the folder somebody deleted three months ago. Mailboxes and shared files need their own backup.
• Scanned document storage, wherever the scan destination points.
• Locally installed tax software data, if any of it lives on a workstation rather than a hosted platform.
• Configuration, meaning the firewall, the switch and the settings that would otherwise be rebuilt from memory.
• At least one copy off the office network, so ransomware cannot reach the backup along with everything else.
• Retention that spans a full cycle. A mistake found at the end of the season may have started months earlier.

Test restores before the season, and again at the halfway point if your year is long. Write down how long the restore took, because that number is your real recovery time and it is the figure your what-if plan depends on. The same principle applied to another document-heavy professional practice is in better backups for insurance agencies, and the parallels with an insurance agency setup are close enough to be useful.

How does support work for a Dallas accounting practice, and what does it cost?

Remote first, onsite by appointment, and I stay your point of contact throughout. You call or message me, I connect to the machine and fix it while you watch, and if it needs hands on hardware I schedule a visit across Dallas and the metroplex. My team handles the routine monitoring and updates behind me, but because you always deal with me, I already know your tax platform, your scanner destinations and what changed last month, which matters most in the weeks when there is no time to explain anything.

• Managed IT is quoted per user or per device after a short conversation, month-to-month with no lock-in. It includes updates for computers and servers, unlimited remote support, onsite visits at no extra charge when remote cannot fix it, antivirus and email security, managed backup, and management of your internet, firewall, switches, access points and printers.
• Hourly support with no contract is $100 per hour remote and $150 per hour onsite during business hours, Monday to Friday 8 AM to 5 PM Central, with a one-hour minimum. After hours, weekends and holidays are $150 remote and $225 onsite.
• Project work, such as a pre-season readiness pass, a scanner and document workflow rebuild, or a move to a new office, is quoted per project.
• Hardware is quoted at cost, and I will tell you when the machine you have is fine for another year.

The most useful time to start is the quiet part of your year, because that is when the fixes are cheap and the change freeze has not begun. If your practice is heading into a season with anything on the list above unresolved, tell me how many people you have and what you run and I will go through the readiness checklist with you. I work onsite by appointment across Dallas and the metroplex, and remotely anywhere in Texas for firms with staff outside the area.

Questions people ask

Written and reviewed by

Anthony Omini, founder of Cross River Tech

Over 15 years in IT across many industries, now running Cross River Tech, a small owner-led managed IT company in Dallas. Every article is written from his own client work and checked by him before it is published.

Heading into another season with the same problems? Tell me how many people you have and what tax platform you run. I will go through the pre-season readiness list with you and fix what is worth fixing.

Ask Anthony(214) 612-7080About Anthony