SpidNums vs OfficeTools: moving a firm off legacy practice management

What OfficeTools does well

This section comes first deliberately. OfficeTools is a serious product with real customers, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

• Deep, mature feature coverage built up over many years of real firm use.
• Firms that have run it for a decade have workflows and reports tuned exactly to how they work.
• Institutional familiarity: long-serving staff know it, and that has genuine value.

Where the fit differs

These are differences in model rather than claims about missing features. Where a capability is not listed for OfficeTools, that means we did not verify it — not that it is absent.

• Architecture: SpidNums is browser-based with no local install and no per-machine setup.
• Client-facing surface: SpidNums gives clients a branded, no-login page to sign engagement letters.
• Jurisdiction: SpidNums encodes Canadian filing rules directly.
• Pricing model: a flat per-firm fee with everything included.

Pricing

OfficeTools does not publish pricing we could verify, so this page does not state a number for it — ask the vendor for a current quote. SpidNums is a flat USD $1,200 per firm per year with every feature included, including white-label branding.

What SpidNums is, plainly

SpidNums is practice management for Canadian accounting firms: the client list, the services each client buys, the deadlines those services generate, the person who owns each one, and the engagement letter that defined the scope. It is not a general ledger, it does not prepare or transmit returns, and it does not calculate payroll — those stay in the tools your firm already files with.

The list below is the complete set of claims this site makes about the product. If a capability is not on it, we do not claim it.

• Multi-tenant white-label branding per firm — name, logo, colours, emails and letterhead
• Colour-coded SLA deadline dashboard ranked by proximity
• Aggregated reminders across tasks, service cadences and fiscal year-ends
• E-signed engagement letters with a public, no-login client portal
• Per-tenant Google Workspace integration
• Client portal
• Staff roles with confidential-client gating
• Canadian-hosted data (Supabase ca-central-1)
• Flat USD $1,200 per firm per year, all inclusive
• CSV/XLSX client import and export

Questions worth asking both vendors

Comparison grids converge because feature names converge. These six questions separate products that look identical on paper, and they are worth asking of OfficeTools and of SpidNums alike.

• How is a deadline generated — from a rule tied to the client's fiscal year-end and reporting period, or from a recurring task somebody configured by hand?
• When a client's filing cadence changes, is that one field or a rewrite of every future date?
• Whose brand does the client see on emails, on the portal and on a signed engagement letter — and on which plan does that become true?
• Where is client data hosted, and is tenant isolation enforced in the database or only in the application? Get the answer in writing.
• What is the total annual cost at three seats and at ten? Ask for the total, not the per-user figure.
• What comes across on migration, and what does not? Clients usually move; documents, notes and completed work usually do not.

Who should choose OfficeTools

A firm with a decade of OfficeTools history, custom reporting and staff who know it cold should think very hard before moving. Migration cost is real and the incumbent's institutional knowledge is real. Change when the tool blocks something you need, not because it is old.

If that describes your firm, take the other product seriously. If it does not, the practice management overview covers what SpidNums does in full.

Switching

Legacy migrations are the hardest kind. Export the client list to CSV or XLSX and import it; then rebuild recurring work as services with cadences rather than trying to replicate a decade of accumulated configuration. Keep the old system readable for the retention period.

SpidNums imports and exports clients as CSV or XLSX. There is no direct migration connector, so historical documents, notes and completed work do not come across automatically — plan the cutover around a period boundary rather than mid-season.