Priya has eleven days before the first wave of client tax filings is due, and a storage warning banner sitting at the top of the SharePoint admin centre that nobody has time to deal with.
The Firm
Bellhouse & Cho is a 45-person accounting practice with offices in two cities, handling individual and small-business tax preparation, bookkeeping, and quarterly compliance work for around 900 ongoing clients. Every client has a dedicated SharePoint site: workpapers, prior-year returns, correspondence, and supporting documents all live there, organised by financial year. Priya is the firm's Practice Operations Manager and the closest thing the firm has to an IT administrator.
Tax season runs from early July through late October in the firm's jurisdiction, and it is by far the busiest period for document activity. Every workpaper gets opened, edited, and re-saved multiple times a day across hundreds of client sites simultaneously. The storage warning arrived on the first day of the busy period, which is the worst possible timing for a cleanup project nobody had scheduled.
Finding Out Where the Space Had Gone
Priya pulled a tenant-wide storage export through Report Master. The report broke storage down by site and by library, and the pattern was immediate: version history, not current file content, was consuming the majority of the allocation. Workpaper templates that got edited dozens of times per return had version counts running into the hundreds. Client engagement letters going back six or seven years still had every draft version sitting in storage, most of them created years before anyone at the firm expected to review them again.
A smaller but still meaningful chunk of storage came from client sites for engagements the firm had closed out entirely: former clients whose sites had never been archived or cleared, sitting untouched with years of stale documents.
An Eleven-Day Cleanup Window
With filing deadlines bearing down, Priya could not risk a manual, library-by-library cleanup. She used two tools from ShareMaster's Space Master suite, both connecting directly to the firm's tenant with her existing SharePoint administrator account.
First, the Version Trimmer ran across every client site with a policy of keeping the 15 most recent major versions on active libraries and 5 on closed-engagement libraries. The tool previewed the projected reduction before Priya committed to anything, which mattered given how little room there was for a mistake during filing season. The trim ran overnight across the full tenant and completed before staff logged in the next morning.
Second, Priya used Bulk Delete Files against a filtered list of sites belonging to clients the firm had formally offboarded more than three years earlier, after confirming with the partners which sites were safe to clear. Files went to the recycle bin rather than being permanently removed, giving the firm a safety net during the retention window in case anything needed to be pulled back.
What It Freed Up
The version trim alone reclaimed the majority of the space the firm needed. Combined with the offboarded-client cleanup, the tenant's storage consumption dropped from a warning-triggering level back to a comfortable margin, well before the first filing wave hit its peak. No emergency storage purchase was needed, and no partner conversation about unplanned software spend had to happen mid-season.
Just as importantly, the work ran without interrupting anyone. Staff kept working on live returns throughout, because the trim and cleanup operated in the background rather than requiring libraries to be taken offline.
What Changed Going Forward
Priya set a standing version limit across all new client sites so the same accumulation could not build up unchecked again, and she ran a Report Master export every quarter rather than waiting for a warning banner to force the issue. She also built a simple end-of-engagement checklist: when a client relationship formally closes, the site gets flagged for review and, after the retention period the partners require, cleared with Bulk Delete Files rather than left to sit indefinitely.
The bigger lesson for the firm was timing. Running a version and storage review before the start of the next busy season, rather than during it, turned what had been a scramble into a routine thirty-minute task. For a walkthrough of the trimming approach Priya used, see the guide to trimming SharePoint version history.
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