FEATURED News13 Nov 2026
Microsoft service outage – 13 November.
We’re currently affected by the Microsoft service outage, which is disrupting Outlook. This means emails to and from our team may be delayed or not received while the issue persists.
Case Studies
When offline systems fail, what will you do?

Our client returned to their office after the Christmas break to discover that their legacy offline computer system that they’d depended on for years had fallen and was damaged beyond repair. Fortunately, they had many pages of financial information printed out prior to the accident.
The client’s dedicated Alliotts partner immediately came up with a solution to the client’s problem and I was tasked with helping to make it happen.
Armed with those pages and pages of printed financial data and reports, along with the opening balance information from the most recent set of stature accounts, my colleagues and I were successfully able to import this information at the start of the new accounting period.
From this point we’ve implemented additional controls to make sure that this information is kept up to date. We have connected bank feeds to give us bank information on a daily basis, we use external API’s to enable rapid upload of purchase and sales invoices. By taking these measures we’ve been able to ensure that our client is now MTD (Making Tax Digital) compliant. In addition we’ve provided training sessions for our client and the team, so that they can begin to take on some of these tasks themselves.
The introduction of Xero cloud based accounting now provides our client with secure, and more importantly, backed up information. This information is now safe should such an accident ever happen again. The benefits of our solution doesn’t stop there, our client now has access to live reporting, allowing them to easily carry out their credit control procedures and carefully monitor cashflow; something that is currently extremely important to all businesses.
Please contact us if you would like to find out how cloud accounting could help your business.
THE AUTHOR
Partner
More & Other Musings
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