Prepared for Ryan · following our conversation, July 17, 2026
Your firm is growing — new hires to onboard, a thousand-plus returns a year, and threats that evolve faster than anyone with a day job can track. Right now, all of that lands on your desk. You said it yourself: you'd rather have professionals on it. Here's exactly what that looks like, and exactly what it costs.
Tampa ↔ Seminole — local engineers who actually show up on site
From our conversation
First, credit where it's due: you've kept a growing firm running on systems you built yourself while doing your actual job. TaxDome at the center, Xero and Gusto replacing the old desktop grind, Ignition automating proposals into portals — those are good moves, and we're not here to undo any of them.
You used the same three words more than once on our call: better, stronger, faster. Fair enough — here are the six things standing in the way right now:
Email issues, internet issues, the half-finished mesh network, the cable that still needs managing — it all waits for you, because the only other option is someone who comes when he can. Your time is worth more than that.
ProSeries, the mapped drives, a client's QuickBooks file, and your firm's most sensitive documents all live on a repurposed tower — with spare PCs beside it as the remote-access plan. It works, until the day it doesn't. That day shouldn't be during filing season.
Names, Social Security numbers, bank and routing numbers, login credentials — in a file on that tower and on paper in every client folder. You told us it's been uncomfortable for a while. It should be. It's also very fixable.
A client's email taken over, a convincing bank-change request, then a phone call from a "Megan" who doesn't exist. Your team's sharp ear caught it. Vigilance is excellent — but it shouldn't be the only layer between a fraudster and a payroll change.
People who left long ago may still be licensed — you're honestly not sure. You want the email address kept without paying for the seat. There's a clean, standard way to do that (we walked through it on the call), and it usually saves money the first month.
Your original website is controlled by someone who isn't you. RingCentral has rejected your texting campaign over and over — ten dollars per try — for reasons no one has chased to ground. Small things, but they're the pattern: started, stalled, still open. We chase things to done.
The handoff
A lot of how your systems work lives in two heads right now: yours, and the person who occasionally helps. Our first job isn't to change anything — it's to capture everything, so nothing depends on memory or on one person's availability ever again. Yours included.
Every credential, every vendor account, the website keys, the undocumented quirks — gathered into a proper encrypted vault that West Coast Accounting owns. Including a respectful working session with your current IT helper to collect what only he knows.
Every machine, the tower, ProSeries, the QuickBooks files, TaxDome, both office suites and the network between them — mapped and written down. Monitoring agents go on, so problems surface to us before they surface to you.
From day one, your team calls us — not you. Email won't send, printer won't print, "is this email real?" — all of it. You stay in the loop on strategy and decisions. You leave the tickets behind.
Quick wins, fast
Onboarding isn't paperwork season. These are the things we start fixing in week one — most of them things you told us about on Friday.
After the handoff
Beyond the day-to-day
None of these are required to start, and nothing here sneaks onto an invoice — each one is quoted in writing and approved by you first. The office rebuild comes out of the 30-day assessment with real numbers attached; the rest are ready whenever you are.
A real foundation under the firm: proper server hardware (or a hosted alternative — we'll price both), remote access that's secure and genuinely usable so working from home is finally on the table, the mesh network finished across both suites, and the cabling cleaned up. Scoped at day 30, priced in writing, your call.
The info sheets move into encrypted storage with per-person access and an audit trail — and the paper copies get a supervised shredding day. The "keys to the kingdom" stop sitting in a filing cabinet.
Your India team keeps working exactly as they do today — but through a managed, access-controlled share with retention rules and a record of who touched what. Client bank statements stop living in a personal-grade drive.
We recover the keys to the original site, and stand up wcafs.com — the domain you actually control — properly: hosted, monitored, backed up, and editable without anyone's permission. Ongoing care available at $150/mo if you want it watched.
You already proved the value yourself: 24 months of bank statements turned into importable financials in an afternoon. The gap between that and something your whole firm uses safely is exactly the kind of work we do — and because you handle client financial data, the how matters as much as the what.
AI in your inbox and documents — drafting replies, summarizing, finding things — running inside your Microsoft tenant, which is the clean, compliant path for a firm whose data includes client PII. Your Chase friend's setup, done right.
You've been generating SOPs faster than anyone can find them. We build the internal knowledge assistant that answers "how do we do payroll entries?" with your procedure — not a guess from the internet.
Bank feeds categorized with confidence levels, "Ask My Accountant" items queued for review, new vendors flagged for W-9 chase, loan payments flagged for docs. We scope it as a paid pilot on a handful of clients first — prove it, then scale it.
AI work is priced per project — we bring you options with numbers, you pick what's worth it. No AI subscription padding the monthly bill for tools nobody uses.
The numbers
Per person, per month. Not per incident, not per hour, not "we'll see." When you hire, the number grows with you; when someone leaves, it drops. Licenses are billed at what you actually use — that's the point of the audit.
Tax-season 24/7 coverage included — it's in the agreement, not an add-on · the shared remote-access machines ride along as managed devices at no per-user charge · + Microsoft licensing, consolidated onto the same invoice and right-sized by the audit · a lighter archive-only backup tier exists if full failover coverage isn't the right fit
Onboarding + capture & custody: credentials into your own vault, the working session with your current IT helper, the stale-account sweep, the license audit, agents on every machine, and complete environment documentation.
The office rebuild, client data off paper, the offshore pipeline, website custody, and every AI phase — scoped and quoted individually, most of it after the 30-day assessment, and approved by you before work begins. No project starts without a number you've seen.
Why us, and what happens next
We're a Tampa managed-IT firm, twenty-plus years in, and accounting firms are home turf for us — one of our longest-standing clients is a multi-branch accounting firm we've carried through more than a decade of tax seasons. We're big enough to staff a real helpdesk and a real security practice, and small enough that you're a name here, not an account number. When you call, a person you know answers. When we say a number, it's the number.
Read this with whoever needs to weigh in, then let's walk through it together — the plan, the numbers, and the hard questions. Then you decide. If the answer's no, you'll still leave with a clearer picture of your own systems than you had before.
— Josh Easters, Diversicom
