Comparison & migration guide

AccessPoint vs. iCasework

iCasework is the information-governance case system a great many UK councils already run, delivered from Civica's cloud. AccessPoint runs the same statutory work — FOIA, EIR and UK GDPR subject access — plus the privacy programme around it, inside the Microsoft 365 tenant you already own.

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The short answer

iCasework is a serious, actively sold product and very plausibly the most widely deployed information-governance case system in UK local government: FOI, EIR, subject access, data incidents, complaints and member enquiries in one place, delivered as on-demand SaaS and bought through G-Cloud. The decision against AccessPoint is not old versus new — it is architecture and scope. iCasework holds your casework, and the documents under review, in Civica's cloud, and covers a wide spread of council case types. AccessPoint runs inside your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant, searches the records where they already live, and carries the privacy side of the mandate — DPIAs, breach response with a live notification calculator, an Article 30 record of processing and a risk register — on the same audit ledger as the requests.

What is Civica Case Management, powered by iCasework (Civica Information Governance)?

iCasework began in 1998 as a specialist case-management product for public-sector correspondence and information rights, and was acquired by Civica in October 2018 to strengthen Civica's GDPR and information-governance offering. It is sold today as Civica Case Management, powered by iCasework, and marketed within the Civica Information Governance line. Civica's own published figures for the product are more than 200 customers worldwide, over 6 million cases processed a year, and 25-plus years in the market — vendor claims, but consistent with how often the product turns up in UK council procurement.

The case-type list is broad for an information-governance product: FOI and EIR requests, DPA and UK GDPR personal information requests (subject access is bundled with FOI rather than sold as a separate product), data incidents, public record requests, law-enforcement disclosure, complaints, member and councillor enquiries, safeguarding and social care casework. It is delivered as on-demand SaaS from the vendor's cloud and listed on G-Cloud, the Crown Commercial Service framework most UK public bodies buy through. Publicly identifiable adopters include the London Borough of Barnet, which went live in April 2022, and Liverpool City Council.

One widely repeated claim deserves care. The figures about 95% of UK local authorities and more than 90% of police forces are Civica-wide statements covering its entire portfolio — housing, revenues, social care, education and much else — not iCasework adoption and not FOI-specific. When you evaluate, ask for reference counts for the information-governance product specifically. For market context, mySociety's independent 2019 research found roughly two-thirds of UK principal authorities used some form of case-management system for FOI, that there is no standard or universally adopted software for FOI case management, and that some councils had built their own on SharePoint or Salesforce.

iCasework and AccessPoint, side by side

iCasework AccessPoint
Where your data lives Civica's cloud, delivered as on-demand SaaS Your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant — no third-party cloud and no vendor access to your records
Records collection Documents brought into the platform Searched and pulled straight from SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams, where council records already sit
Breadth of case types Wider — safeguarding, social care, member and councillor enquiries alongside information governance Focused on the access and privacy mandate; complaints and appeals mean information-rights challenges, not social care casework
Privacy programme Data incidents handled as another case type Breach response with a live notification calculator, DPIAs and AIAs, an Article 30 record of processing, and an ISO 31000 risk register
Statutory configuration Configured per customer during implementation 106 jurisdiction packs — the FOIA section 10 twenty-working-day clock, the EIR regulation 7 extension to 40, the UK GDPR one-month subject access clock, exemptions and correspondence templates preloaded, with fee schedules already quoted in £ and the fiscal year set to your convention
Redaction Within the platform Browser-native redaction studio with primary and fall-back exemption tagging, find-and-redact across a set, and optional AI-proposed redactions a person approves
Audit trail Application audit logging Append-only, hash-chained ledger across every module, with court-ready case audit exports
Pricing Quoted, with pricing documents published per G-Cloud service Flat annual USD $2,990 / $7,990 / $14,990 by organisation size, no per-user fees, billed through the Microsoft commercial marketplace

Competitor capabilities vary by product edition and configuration; this table reflects each product's public positioning as of August 2026.

Where iCasework fits

A fair comparison cuts both ways — iCasework is a reasonable choice when:

  • Your council wants one system for information governance and everything beside it — complaints, member and councillor enquiries, safeguarding, social care. That breadth is genuinely wider than AccessPoint, which stops at the access and privacy mandate.
  • Vendor-hosted SaaS suits your assurance posture and you would rather not deploy or bill Azure resources in your own tenant's subscription. AccessPoint deliberately requires that you do.
  • You already run other Civica systems and value a single supplier relationship, a familiar procurement route through G-Cloud, and a long list of UK council references you can call.

Where AccessPoint differs

Your tenant, not the vendor's cloud No established UK FOI case-management product runs inside your Microsoft 365 tenant — they are vendor-cloud SaaS, with an on-premise option here and there. AccessPoint is the exception: it deploys into the Microsoft 365 and Azure environment your council already secures, so the documents under review never leave it and your Defender, Purview and Sentinel controls govern them.
The whole mandate, not just the casework The same team answers FOIA and EIR requests, handles subject access under the UK GDPR, investigates data incidents, and is asked for a DPIA before a new system goes live. AccessPoint runs all of that on one platform and one audit ledger instead of leaving the assessment and risk work in Word and Excel.
The statute, preloaded Jurisdiction packs carry the FOIA 2000 twenty-working-day clock and Part II exemptions with the section 2 public-interest test, the EIR 2004 exceptions with the presumption in favour of disclosure, and the UK GDPR one calendar-month subject access clock — with the UK bank-holiday calendar and statutory letter wording, rather than years of local configuration.
Priced in public Flat annual pricing published on the site, billed through the Microsoft commercial marketplace, with no per-user fees and a 30-day free trial in your own tenant. Azure hosting runs in your own tenant's subscription at typically around $175 a month, billed to you by Microsoft with no vendor markup.

Migrating from iCasework to AccessPoint

Councils on iCasework hold years of FOI, EIR and subject access history, and it should come with you — including the cases still open. AccessPoint's Data import & export panel is built for exactly this move: no ETL project, no developer, no cutover weekend.

  1. Export your caseload to Excel from iCasework's reporting. Any report that reaches a spreadsheet is enough — you do not need a database extract or a vendor engagement.
  2. Download AccessPoint's import template from Settings → Data import & export. It is generated for your tenant, so its dropdowns already carry your own request types, stages and codes, and your existing case references travel with you in the Legacy reference column.
  3. Upload and read the per-row validation report — created, skipped, errors — before anything imports, with a fix-and-reupload error workbook for the rows that need attention. Imports are create-only, so re-runs are always safe.
  4. Stage your case documents in the pre-provisioned migration-staging container in your own tenant's Azure storage, with optional MD5 hash verification for chain of custody.
  5. Import in the background. Records arrive with their status, due dates and documents intact, so in-progress cases simply carry on — there is no cutover, no notifications fire, nothing recomputes, and every record carries an Imported entry in the audit trail.

Rehearse it first if you like: the Export tab produces the same workbook the importer accepts, so a trial run against a test tenant validates cleanly before you touch live casework.

Plan your migration →  ·  Data Import & Export guide  ·  Migration & onboarding services

Questions people ask about iCasework and AccessPoint

Who owns iCasework?
Civica. iCasework was founded in 1998 as an independent case-management specialist and was acquired by Civica in October 2018, reported at the time as a move to bolster Civica's GDPR and information-governance capability. It is sold today as Civica Case Management, powered by iCasework, within the Civica Information Governance line.

Is iCasework really used by 95% of UK local authorities?
No — that figure is a Civica-wide claim covering the company's entire product portfolio across housing, revenues, social care, education and more, and the related police-force figure works the same way. Neither is an iCasework or FOI-specific adoption number. Civica's own published figures for the case-management product are more than 200 customers worldwide and over 6 million cases processed a year. iCasework is still very plausibly the most widely deployed information-governance case system in UK local government; just ask any vendor, including us, for reference counts for the actual product you are buying.

How is AccessPoint different from iCasework?
Three structural differences. Architecture: iCasework is on-demand SaaS in Civica's cloud, while AccessPoint deploys into your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant and searches SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams directly rather than having documents uploaded to a vendor. Scope: both handle FOI, EIR and subject access together, but AccessPoint also runs DPIAs and algorithmic impact assessments, breach response with a live statutory notification checklist, an Article 30 record of processing, and an ISO 31000 risk register on the same hash-chained audit ledger. Commercials: AccessPoint's pricing is flat, annual and published, with no per-user fees. In the other direction, iCasework covers council case types AccessPoint does not touch — safeguarding, social care and member enquiries.

Will new case management software fix our FOI compliance?
Not on its own, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. mySociety's independent research into UK local-government FOI found no correlation between having a case-management system and better performance against the statutory deadline — process, staffing and how quickly service areas return records matter at least as much. What software can do is remove the failure modes you control: computing the twenty-working-day date on the UK bank-holiday calendar, reminding owners before a case ages, making the public-interest test a recorded step rather than an email, and showing a manager the whole queue on one screen. Buy it for that, and fix the process alongside it.

Can we migrate our iCasework history into AccessPoint?
Yes. Any iCasework report that reaches Excel can be mapped into AccessPoint's tenant-generated import template — historical and in-progress cases keep their old references as legacy references, requestor contacts import alongside them, and case documents stage through your own tenant's Azure storage with optional hash verification. Because imported records arrive with their status, due dates and documents intact, cases that are still running simply continue: no cutover, no notification storm, nothing recomputed, and an Imported entry on every record's audit trail.

Competitor information on this page is drawn from public sources — vendor websites, government reports, and press coverage — and was last reviewed in August 2026. Products evolve, and a comparison is never the whole story: capabilities vary by edition and configuration. Spot something out of date? Tell us and we'll correct it.

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