Moved Overnight. Open for Business at 8:51 AM.
GC Tax, a tax office in Kissimmee, runs its whole practice on one cloud server: tax software, years of client files, bookkeeping, and the scans from both office copiers. That server needed replacing, and tax season was coming. So this cloud server migration had one rule: nobody loses a morning.
No week off before tax season
A tax office can’t take a week off while someone works out why last year’s program won’t open. Most of the work happened where nobody could see it: I built the new server and copied the files across while staff kept working on the old one. CrossLink went on for every year back to 2018, along with Drake and QuickBooks. Then I rehearsed the hard parts on a practice copy. If something was going to break, I wanted it to break there.
One evening
On Wednesday afternoon I asked the office whether that night worked. At 4:24 PM the answer came back: “Yes!” Here is how the night went.
The final copy picked up the day’s work on top of more than 234,000 files, and the number I cared about was in the last column: zero failed. Then I pointed the address staff connect to at the new server.
Thursday morning
At 8:51 AM the first person signed in. Their desktop, documents and browser bookmarks were already there. At 9:30 AM the first scan from the copier landed on the new server. That was the whole drama of the morning, which was the point.
Behind the scenes
The copying, the checking and a timestamped record of every step were done by BRAVO, the AI system I built to work alongside me.
For tax firms on my WISP platform, BRAVO feeds the real settings from the PCs and Microsoft 365 accounts I manage into the plan the FTC Safeguards Rule calls for, and a safeguard is marked “in place” only when there’s proof behind it.
I run Microsoft 365 audit monitoring with alerting: it reads the audit log every five minutes and messages me in Teams when something serious shows up.
Thinking about a move?
If your office runs on one server and the thought of touching it before tax season makes you nervous, I’ll tell you plainly what it would take.
