CPA Firm Technology Blog

Some Tech Sites and Some Updates to Google Docs

I follow a lot of tech blogs so I can know what's going on and keep lots of crisp, fresh tech goodness in front of you, the gentle reader..... but seriously, some of the better sources out there are:

• Merlin Mann, personal productivity guru - www.43folders.com
• Lifehacker.com - Gina Trapiani's superb tips blog
  
• This Week in Tech (podcast) - www.twit.tv - good general tech news
  
• The CPA Tech Advisor has some good podcasts as well (most notably, their round table podcast called "Tech to Go")

Speaking of Merlin Mann, The King of 43 Folders recently reported that Google has added 300 templates for various kinds of documents.  Like most templates, some are nice and some are campy.  My vote:  Stick with the MS templates - there are more of them, and there are more you could actually use at your office as opposed in your role as a member of the PTA.

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Tags: Lifehacker, 43 Folders, This Week in Tech, TWIT, Tech To Go, Web

Tech News and Notes - Week of 7/17/2008

I'm behind on reporting on the gadgetry in my office, so here are some updates on things :

• I've been working with my  Scansnap S300 for the last few weeks, and I'm really impressed with it.  Although I would like to have TWAIN or ISIS compatibility, it's an amazing little device, and well worth the $260 it costs on Amazon for this piece of hardware.  It has only jammed twice after running hundreds of pages through it, including a couple of hundred thermal receipts for an expense report.  (and in one of the two jams, I had forgotten to take the staples out of the original - Doh!
• I seem to be on a LOT of conference calls lately, and have been using a Plantronics Calisto Pro Phone ( Cordless, DECT 6.0, Bluetooth, speaker phone, and it comes with a really good headset).  If you're a Skyper, this thing even has a USB connection to your PC so you can use it for your VOIP application.  I also really like the range on this thing- in the spring (before my A/C was running all of the time), I could use this item connected to my Jawbone headset (which has noise cancelling) to talk to people while taking in the great outdoors in my yard.  [Don't tell anyone that working for yourself has perks like that....]
• I mentioned that I had converted my home internet connection to TDS' fiber optic (PON) service, and I've also got their digital TV offering.  Verdict: The fiber optic internet rocks, and the digital TV is also very good - but seems to be in early implementation.  Once they start offering On Demand and DVR's in September, the TV will be up to speed with the rest.  The TV service reminds me a lot of dish service, in that there is a slight delay between when you select a channel and when it is displayed on your PC.  It doesn't take long, but it's just long enough to be a little annoying.

A few other things came to my attention earlier this week:

• The Association of QuickBooks Technologists is having a conference this fall for CEO's, CFO's, IT Directors and Management Consultants looking to streamline business processes and who want to learn more about Business Solutions designed for QuickBooks users. The conference is in Deerfield Beach, Florida on October 16, 2008, and appears to be reasonably priced.  (There are worse places to be than South Florida in October).  For more information contact AQBT founding member Dawn Scranton.
  
• The cobranding I discussed a couple of weeks ago has been very interesting, and offers some neat potential marketing tools for mid-sized and larger CPA and bookkeeping firms.  I've actually considered creating a CD for clients with the trial/free versions of Peachtree, OA Express, and QuickBooks SimpleStart along with an HTML page which has links to my site..... really interesting stuff.  This is something I would look into if I was at a firm looking to grow their accounting software consulting business.

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Tags: Gadgetreviews and news items of note FYE 2008-07-17, Office Accounting, AQBT, Peachtree, QuickBooks, TDS, Fiber Optic Internet Access, PON, Plantronics Calisto Phone, Scansnap S300

Multiple Monitors!

Multiple Monitors are the way to go!

Here's a cool monitor stand for four monitors..... Ergotron makes good gear from everything I've experienced and heard.... Now all I need is:
1. 4 24" monitors.
2. A way to run 4 24" monitors off of my laptop OR a nice dual quad core processor desktop with about 16GB of RAM and a tricked out four head video card.....

It's the minor details in life that make things complicated....

I saw on the Techbargains.com website that Dell is now pricing some of their discounted deals with TWO 22" monitors.... entry level for the paperless office, but it's nice to see that Dell understands that you need more screen real estate when you're trying to kick the paper habit...  While people have been doing this for a while, it lets me know that the multi-monitor thing is going much more mainstream - especially since the Vostro line is targeted at home office users and small business users.... very interesting.

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Tags: MonitorStands and multiple monitors

FAST Internet.....

Dang. That's scary fast.

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H&R Block and the Credit Crunch

Interesting post on Footnoted.org, (one of the better financial blogs out there) about H&R Block's contingent liabilities related to the sale of its Option One sub-prime mortgage unit. 

http://www.footnoted.org/buried-treasure/still-singing-the-subprime-blues-at-hr-block/

Interesting times....

Report on the Fiber to the Home Connection....

I love fiber.

Fiber Optic Internet and New Software Business Models

I'm in the middle of getting fiber optic internet installed today (through TDS, my phone company - even though I don't have a land line), and am excited about it.  I'll post more, as well as some speed tests once I get things set up.  Speed on the line is advertised as 25Mbs down, 10Mbps up.  Hopefully this will eliminate the occasional flutter in my VOIP conversations. Intuit recently announced that they have 50,000 ProAdvisors, which is a pretty significant milestone.  For comparison, AICPA has 300,000 members - so there's plenty of room for growth - but 50K is going to be far and away the largest in the segment (as you would expect).  If you haven't looked at the partner programs from Intuit (ProAdvisor Program), Sage (Sage Accountants Network), and Microsoft (Microsoft Professional Accountants Network) as well.  One can join all three for a total about $1,200 per year, and get close to $30K in software.... good stuff, people. Not to be outdone, Sage and Microsoft have both announced some initiatives through their partner programs which are very innovative.  Sage has offered ads on job site Monster.com for SSAN members, is giving away a free license of Peachtree Complete Accounting (plus six months support) for clients of CPA's switching from Quickbooks (see their site, www.switchmyclients.com for details), and has a number of innovative offerings to help their members meet the needs of clients, including payroll tax subscriptions and a five user license of Peachtree Quantum for SSAN-Peachtree members.  Microsoft's MPAN program recently announced a co-branding initiative where MPAN members can put links to their own website in copies of Office Accounting and Office Accounting Express for clients, which is pretty interesting.  I'll write more about this later, but Microsoft still offers the Microsoft Action Pack to MPAN members in public practice or consulting.  This subscription is basically everything Microsoft you would ever use in a 10 person CPA firm for $299 a year.  They also are linking to the MPAN Certified Consultant directory from within the software - so if someone has the software and tries out a sample company, they can go to the "Find a Small Business Accountant" page on the Microsoft site, and find an MPAN member to help them (search this database under zip code 37922, and you'll find me as an "MPAN Consultant", which means that I have passed their certification exam on Office Accounting).  (Side note - take and pass as many of the certification exams as you can - my phone rang yesterday with a potentially very lucrative opportunity because I was on the QuickBooks ProAdvisor site for Enterprise Solutions.  I personally billed and collected about $4K off of leads from my ProAdvisor listing last year, with an average rate over $100 per hour, and actually turned away a lot of leads from this source.  This would not have been possible without taking and passing the ProAdvisor exams for the standard and enterprise editions of QuickBooks). On the software subscription vs. purchase front, Microsoft is now selling MS Office Home and Student on a subscription basis.  The new product is called "Equipt", and is bundled with some Windows Live / Office Live services, including Windows Live OneCare and Office Live Workspace.  This seems like a great offering for students and others who need MS Office software, but get sticker shock at the initial price of purchasing this software.

It's important to note the following:

• Same EULA as Home and Student (e.g. use for the student only or the parents when helping students with homework).  Accordingly, this is NOT and SHOULD NOT be used in a business environment.
• Software can be installed on up to three PC's.
• Office updates are pushed out automatically, and upgrades during the subscription term are automatic.

Some links for those wanting to know more:

• Microsoft Press Release on Equipt - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/jul08/07-02EquiptPR.mspx
• ZDNet Coverage of MS Announcement -http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1469
• Review of Equipt -http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=485

If you're doubting that software subscriptions are the wave of the future, let me remind you that Intuit announced a restructuring last week which realigns their workforce to focus on subscriptions and online services.  From Intuit's press release:

The changes better position the company to deliver on its comprehensive "Connected Services" strategy. The strategy increases Intuit's emphasis on developing value-added services for its desktop products and innovative online offerings. The company plans to focus on both traditional and new markets across the globe, while embracing social networking and mobile technology trends.

While I'm a serious technophile, I plan on celebrating the 4th with my family by taking my son and niece to a drive-in movie while they still exist.  (There's plenty of time to watch  HDTV and surf the internet over fiber later.)  Life is, after all, all about relationships, isn't it? Brian Tankersley is a Knoxville, Tennessee based CPA and consultant, and is an Associate with K2 Enterprises.  You can read more of Brian's writings either on AccountingWeb.com or at http://blog.bftcpa.com. 

Tags: TDSFiber Optic Sage Microsoft Intuit MPAN ProAdvisor SSAN Software and Services

New Blog from John Thuneby of Microsoft

I got an e-mail this morning that one of my favorite Microsofties, John Thuneby, has started a MSDN Blog related to Office Accounting.  The blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/thuneby/default.aspx.  John is a brilliant mind, and has been an integral part of the Office Accounting team from the beginning.

One of the things which has always excited me about OA is the ability to natively create links to and from Microsoft SQL Server directly from Excel or Access without having to have a third party ODBC driver.  John's post from yesterday (at http://blogs.msdn.com/thuneby/archive/2008/06/12/creating-a-custom-list-in-excel.aspx) describes how to create a query straight off of MS SQL and put the data into Excel.  Very interesting stuff....

I hope you will join me in following John's blog, and I know he will have many good tips in the coming weeks.

Notes from the Road and Travel Tips

We're in our second quarter "mini busy season" here with K2, and the last few weeks have seen us present technology conferences in Connecticut, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Oregon (where I will speak today).  We're also preparing for our first CPA Firm Technology Symposium in Overland Park, KS on 6/10.  Since this is a new, all-day course, I've been working with Val Steed, K2's CEO, on prep for this course so we have plenty of material and other collateral to help our participants use technology in their firms as effectively and efficiently as possible. USA Today (normally just good for recycling, but there are exceptions) has a nice article this morning on how to pack for a long trip, as well as some tips for the chronic overpacker.  Doug Dyment, the creator of OneBag.com (a site dedicated to traveling light) does a nice Q&A on how to pack for a trip.  Since I'm headed to Connecticut (two teaching days), Montreal (Canadian GP), and Kansas City (three teaching days) in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be reading this article with interest. There is also a nice chart in the article which lists who will have to pay to check bags with various airlines.  Fortunately, the other airlines have not been as quick to match American's policy of charging for the first bag (although they are almost universally charging for the second checked bag.)  One of the few (hard earned) benefits of being a super-elite frequent flyer (Delta Platinum Medallion, Skyteam Elite Plus) is that I can check up to three bags for free.  While I very rarely use this benefit, it was nice to be able to handle all of the bags for free for my two companions when I went to Florida for the Memorial Day weekend. Some travel links readers may want to use for their upcoming trips:

• TripIt - www.tripit.com - This site will create itineraries from your confirmation e-mails from the various sources and put them into an iCal feed which you can add to Google Calendar or Outlook 2007.  You can also have "friends" on the site and share info with them or see when you will be in the same area as one of your far-clung cronies.
• Sidestep.com - This is a meta-search engine for travel which will look on numerous travel sites for a particular trip, and then allow you to find the best match of price and schedule for your trip.  While most people use this for airfare searches, the car rental searches are where I tend to save the most money, and they also offer other category searches as well.  I can't recommend this one highly enough.
• Google Transit - lets you plan trips using numerous public transportation systems around mostly North America and Europe.  While this is a new service, I'm expecting that the depth of integration with organizations and schedules is going to be really good on a going forward basis.  I'll let you know more once I've used the schedules for Montreal on my trip there next week.

I'm also in the process of implementing a hosted document management system for my little firm.  I actually installed the client software yesterday, and am now populating the database with a few documents until I can get a feel for how best to organize my documents (which don't really fit the typical organization structure for a CPA Firm, since I do so much oddball consulting).  I'll report more on this effort after I do the second revision of tags, categories, and other ways to implement this system.  K2 has some good tips on their Totally Paperless site, but I'm working to capture the various steps and factors considered as part of this whole process in a document which can be used for either blog content or teaching classes.  I'm also working with this vendor on integration with portals for secure interchange of information, and I hope to be able to write more about this in the near future.    

Tags: Travel, Road, Sidestep, Google Transit, Document Management, DMS, Packing, Suitcase, Airlines, Carry-on

DFW @ 0730 Local Time: Ground Stop/On Tarmac

It seems that we're on ground stop at DFW this morning. It has always amazed me that whenever there is lightning anywhere within the same state as an airport (OK, I'm exaggerating, but not by much), they make all of the arriving passengers sit on the tarmac and wait for the lightning to end, as if all of the danger existed for the ground crew, and none for the passengers sitting in the aluminum gas can that is a modern aircraft..

My advice to anyone traveling in or out of DFW today: get here as fast as you can. If they're this far behind at 0735, you can bet that there will be cancellations of the later stuff.