Accounting Firms are Finding Their IT Overtaxed
With tax season quickly reaching its crescendo, accountants and CPAs face increased threats to their data security. Your clients’ financial information is too good for a cybercriminal to pass up. Now is the time to prepare yourself to fight a cyberattack. Learn how managed IT can support your business in a variety of ways.
Is Your Data Secure for Tax Season?
Cybercriminals are well aware of the stress most accountants and CPAs face during tax season. They also know that with stress comes mistakes and opportunities for them to attack. The reality is most businesses, regardless of size or industry, usually have cybersecurity protocols that are underpowered. Cybercriminals know this and wait for predictable moments of distraction to target a company. What’s more predictable than tax season, and what’s a better target than a CPA or accountant?
Why are Accountants and CPAs Targets?
The answer should be obvious: these industries are most likely to have access to the type of data cybercriminals are most interested in: financial. However, it is also important to remember that with the ascendance of ransomware, the cybercriminal’s MO has evolved. These days cybercriminals are more likely to hold your accounting firm’s data/computers hostage than to try and steal your client’s data to resell on the dark web.
As you can imagine, a cybercriminal would be able to exert considerable pressure on your business if they gained control and locked you out of your system around April 15th, rendering you unable to file your client’s tax returns electronically. How much damage would your business suffer, and how much would you be willing to pay to regain access to your data?
Finally, even if you’re a smaller business, chances are you are linked to larger organizations. This connection makes cybercriminals treat you as the weakest link and will use you as a way to gain access to the other businesses you are connected to. It should be apparent that losing control of your data could well cause enough damage that your business may not be able to recover.
How to Protects Your Data
The most effective way to protect the data your accounting firm is responsible for, is with a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan. A ransomware attack can only hold your data hostage if you cannot regain control of it. Your backup is going to be the solution to this problem. A data backup and recovery solution in the form of a business continuity strategy should be a prominent part of the foundation of any well-designed managed IT plan, regardless of your business or industry.
We also manage and maintain your network to prevent threats from coming in.
Why Managed IT for Accountants Is Essential For Business Growth
While it’s evident that managed IT can benefit your firm’s data protection, it can do so much more. Due to the wide range of solutions provided, managed IT should be considered an essential service for any business. Due to their services’ nature and the data they are responsible for, accountants and CPAs can benefit from the full suite of managed IT.
While during tax season, it makes sense for accountants and CPAs to request that their managed service providers (MSP) focus on cybersecurity (however, cybersecurity is a 24/7, 365 issue), the benefits of partnering with an MSP stretches beyond cybersecurity protection. Managed IT can provide your organization with increased protectivity, stability, collaboration, and communications, all of which can benefit your company’s bottom line.
Some benefits managed IT brings to your accounting firm include:
- 24/7 Monitoring – We watch your network to identify and prevent incoming threats.
- Patches and Security Updates – By having us keep your software updated, your team can work without interruption.
- Less Downtime – Solving problems preventatively will reduce the amount of time that users can’t get their work done.
Are You Ready to Embrace Managed IT?
Managed IT’s wide range of services allow your firm to leverage your technology into a resource and not a liability. Point North Networks, Inc., can help you accomplish this with the solutions that your firm needs to boost productivity while developing best IT practices to stop your technology from holding back your growth. A managed IT partner allows you to stop worrying about your technology.
Call 651-234-0895 today to schedule a free IT consultation, and learn how our personalized, proactive IT support for small and medium-sized businesses can be of service.
Tip of the Week: Three Questions to Help Arrange Your Priorities
The typical workday is filled with tasks—oftentimes, more than can be handled in the span of a day and all given the same priority level. As I’m sure you’ve realized at some point, this just isn’t a sustainable way to operate. To minimize this issue, we’re going over a few tips to help you prioritize the tasks that you’re given.
How to Assign Value to Your Tasks
If you want to make the most out of the time spent each day, one of the best ways to do so is taking some and determining which of your tasks should be given priority over the others. This can be accomplished through a simple evaluation of what you have on your plate, conducted through the framework of a few questions.
What Will Be the Result of Finishing a Task?
Or in other words, which task will net the most benefits once completed? Will one bring you closer to your goals, or enable you to make the most of your time? Which task will wind up serving the biggest benefit to the rest of your team? Once you’ve identified which will provide you and the business with the most good, you’ve identified which should likely come first.
How Long Have You Been Considering a Task?
Whether you’ve been actively planning or postponing a task for whatever reason, try prioritizing it instead. Regardless of what challenges the task itself will present, finishing it will certainly pay off with greater rewards than what are to be enjoyed with it hanging over your head.
Even If a Task Isn’t Pressing, Will It Enable Progress in Something That Is?
You may have some of those odd tasks clogging up your itinerary that may not be quite as important as some of the others. However, some of these tasks may assist you in completing these others. In these cases, prioritizing such tasks can make it simpler to work through your schedule effectively. The others may be able to be delegated to someone else, assuming you have the authority to assign tasks in this way.
How Have You Kept Your Tasks Organized?
Don’t be afraid to share your methods in the comments! For more help with your IT and how to use it to your advantage, feel free to lean on Point North Networks, Inc. at any time. Give us a call at 651-234-0895 to find out more.
Tip of the Week: Highlighting Messages in Outlook
Like any email platform, Microsoft Outlook can easily become overwhelmed with messages and conversations—effectively making it counterproductive rather than an asset to you and your team. Let’s take a few moments to go over a simple way that you can use Outlook’s internal tools to make your messages easier to deal with.
Examining the Email Issue
We’ve all been there: staring down an inbox filled to bursting with messages. Mixed with the important ones are promotional messages, internal messages that you don’t need to know about right now, and all the ones that you’ve kept for future reference. This can make it very difficult to keep track of where to find these messages and the like.
Fortunately, Outlook has a feature that enables a user to automatically highlight certain messages based on certain conditions. That way, when scanning your inbox messages, they’ll stand out and be easier to find.
How to Highlight Messages
So, you have a message that you need to pay attention to. For the sake of our example, we’ll say it’s from your direct manager, the person you regularly report to.
- In Outlook, locate the View menu at the top of the window. Doing so will give you access to your View Settings. Click into them.
- From there, click into the Conditional Formatting You’ll see a list of preloaded options included with Outlook, along with buttons that say Add, Delete…, Move Up, and Move Down. Click Add.
- You’ll see a new rule added to the list of options called Untitled. Rename it to whatever works for your purposes.
For this example, we’ll call it Manager.
- Click the button that says Condition… to establish when this rule comes into play. This can be based on a variety of options: whether a word or phrase is included in specific parts of the message, who it is from, the time it was sent, and even whether the message was directed to you specifically or to a larger group of recipients. Some of these can be disabled by unchecking the appropriate box or leaving the field blank.
Let’s stick to simply specifying that these messages are ones sent directly to you, from your manager.
- You’ll be brought back to your list of rules in Conditional Formatting. With your Manager rule still selected, click the Font
- There, you can adjust the way messages that meet your conditions will appear in your inbox. You can change the font, the font style, its size, add strikeout or underline effects, and even change its color. In this example, we’ll simply say that the messages should be highlighted in red.
- Click OK once you’re satisfied, continuing to do so until all the dialogue boxes are resolved.
You should then see your changes reflected in your inbox. In our case, any messages coming from your manager should appear red in your inbox list, making them much easier to see. Rinse and repeat for any other messages you want to be able to pick out quickly from the group, and your emails should be far more manageable.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog for a reminder whenever we’ve posted something new, and for any more assistance with your business’ IT, reach out to Point North Networks, Inc. at 651-234-0895!
The Power Button is Capable of More Than On/Off
If you’ve ever used technology, the power button has had a pretty consistent appearance and even more consistent use. However, there’s a reason that the power symbol we’re so familiar with looks the way it does. Furthermore, there’s more than the power button or the toggle switch can ultimately do.
What the “Power” Symbol Means
The symbol that appears on the power button looks somewhat unique. In most modern-day electronic devices, the power off symbol and the power on symbol are one and the same. Known to be one is the most common symbol used globally, the power button symbol is depicted by a broken circle with a line partially placed between the two broken ends. This was earlier used as the ‘standby symbol’ as an indication that the power supply isn’t completely broken off.
However, this makes more sense when you consider that it’s just what you get when you smoosh the “|” for on and the toggle switch opposite “O” for off.
How the Power Button Can Be Used
Hopefully, you’ve already learned that your power button should really only be used to power up your system, or—if no other options are available—to power off the device after all your work is saved and your programs are all closed out (again, only as a last resort). Whenever you can, it is better to use the shutdown option nestled into the operating system instead of choosing to fully disconnect power. Hence, the power button symbols on your device are best left untouched, unless absolutely necessary!
We take this so seriously because abusing the power buttons is just a convenient means to abuse the device powers. Improperly powering down your system in this way can cause an unwanted hard reset, lead to file corruption and potentially give the device a hard time when you start it back up.
Of course, with help from a technician, it is possible to remap your power button to do something different when it is pressed if you so choose.
Remapping Your Power Button
You have the capability to change your power button’s functionality for your electronic device, allowing you to set it to do something other than turn off your system when it is pressed—or, if you’re working with your laptop, your lid is closed when it’s plugged in or running on stored battery power. In your Control Panel, under Hardware and Sound, find your Power Options and Choose what the power button does.
Your options as to its function include:
- Do nothing (standby state)
- Sleep or Low Power State
- Hibernate
- Shut Down (when pressing the power button on a laptop)
- Turn off the display (when pressing the power button on a laptop)
Make sure you Save changes so that your settings are properly applied.
Interested in finding out more about your technology and how it can most benefit your business? Give Point North Networks, Inc., a call at 651-234-0895 to find out more.
Frequently Asked Questions About Power Button
Is it okay to turn off my desktop or laptop using the power button?
While it is not recommended to do it regularly, you can use the power button to forcibly shut down your device once in a while. It would not do any harm to the hardware, or your device in general. However, whenever possible it is best to switch off your device using the shutdown option nestled into the operating system.
Is it okay if I never shut down my computer?
It may seem convenient to have your laptop or desktop on standby mode, as it saves you the time taken during the power-up process, however, it would also mean that your processor, graphics card, and RAM are running constantly without a break. This can lead to additional stress on individual components of the computer, thereby shortening their lifespan.
Three IT Practices that Can Drive Your Business’ Success
When looking to improve your business via the use of technology, it helps to keep a few basic tenets in mind. Let’s review some strategies to help reinforce their importance.
Consistently Utilize Uniform Tools and Processes
Picture it this way—while it is perfectly possible to transfer data from Microsoft’s solution suite to Google Workplace (and vice versa), it just isn’t nearly as convenient for your employees to do so… and since this transfer is entirely in their hands, there is a high potential for user error and other issues to slip by.
The same goes for how your internal data is handled. Without established storage conventions or an established storage space shared amongst your team, things are bound to go missing or be inaccessible to others who need it. By establishing and enforcing standard operating processes, you better enable your team members to stay on the same page and working cohesively.
Prioritize Security
Your team members all need to have a well-developed appreciation for the importance of data security, particularly when using the tools discussed above. From password requirements to multi-factor authentication to phishing awareness and more, you need to make a concerted effort to keep focus on the consequences a data breach could have and how the security safeguards you have in place can help protect the business and its data.
Numerous other tools and solutions exist that allow you to lock down your business more effectively. However, your team members also need to buy into these ideas. Encourage these practices and policies by performing regular evaluations of your team and giving them feedback based on their responses.
Promote Mobile Solutions
Finally, mobility is an important part of a business’ processes, so the capability to bring your work around with you needs to be promoted throughout your operations. This will help your business to be more flexible, responsive, and productive wherever and whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Point North Networks, Inc. can provide the tools needed to enable all of these practices. To find out more about what we can do for you, reach out to us at 651-234-0895.
