How a 22-person Stockport accountancy practice cut IT incidents by 73% in six months
When a Stockport-based chartered accountancy switched to Inology in late 2025, they had 47 tickets/month, no MFA on personal accounts, and an audit due in March. Here's what changed.
"We didn't realise how much firefighting we'd normalised until it stopped." — Managing Partner
The situation
A Stockport chartered accountancy practice — 22 staff, two partners, mostly senior client accounts — came to us in October 2025. They'd been with the same MSP for eight years. The relationship had drifted: tickets took 2–3 days, monthly reports had stopped arriving, and a recent ICAEW practice assurance review had flagged IT controls as a concern.
The trigger was a phishing email that nearly succeeded — a finance assistant clicked through to a fake Microsoft login page. MFA blocked the actual breach, but the post-incident review showed the firm had no idea how many other near-misses were happening.
What we found in the audit
Our 2-week onboarding audit surfaced:
- 47 tickets/month with average resolution time of 2.4 days
- Zero MFA on personal Microsoft accounts (only enforced on shared mailboxes)
- Patch compliance at 64% across the device fleet
- Backups running but never tested for restore in 18 months
- Conditional access policies entirely absent
- Cyber Essentials certificate lapsed 11 months prior
What we did
The first 30 days were focused on stopping the bleeding. We:
- Rolled MFA with number matching to all 22 users in week one
- Deployed EDR across the device fleet
- Brought patch compliance to 96% within three weeks
- Restored a test backup end-to-end (it failed; we fixed it)
- Set up conditional access blocking sign-ins from outside the UK
The next 90 days were structural: re-issued Cyber Essentials, migrated their on-prem file server to SharePoint with proper retention policies, replaced their ageing print/scan setup, and onboarded all staff onto our standard ticketing/comms model.
The numbers, six months in
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets per month | 47 | 13 |
| Avg resolution time | 2.4 days | 4.2 hours |
| MFA coverage | 30% | 100% |
| Patch compliance | 64% | 98% |
| Cyber Essentials | Lapsed | Renewed |
| Practice-assurance IT findings | 4 | 0 |
The 73% drop in tickets was the headline number — but the partner's favourite stat was "avg resolution time": from 2.4 days to 4.2 hours. Translation: nobody loses half a day to IT anymore.
What the client said
"The thing that surprised us was how much our previous IT had become invisible. Things weren't broken enough to switch, just persistently mediocre. The Inology team turned up, audited honestly, fixed the actual problems, and now we just get on with the day. It feels like a different firm."
Could you be next?
If your practice is wondering whether IT could be quieter, more secure, or more predictable — we offer a no-obligation 1-hour audit conversation. We'll give you a straight read on where you stand, even if the answer is "you're fine, don't switch."
Want to talk to a human about this?
We're a Manchester-based MSP serving small businesses across Greater Manchester. Genuinely happy to give straight answers, even if we're not the right fit.
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