CPA Firm Technology Blog

The Future’s So Bright, We Have to Wear Shades

There’s a very interesting article by Andy Kessler on the editorial page in the Wall Street Journal this morning which discusses the coming war in technology; the link is here.  While Microsoft and Google are the armies currently fighting the skirmishes around the future of technology, this is really simply a proxy war about how we will use technology in the future.  Just as there are different methods of transporting goods around the country (think: rail vs. truck vs. airplane), there are also different models of computing
(browser vs. local vs. mobile).  Processing power (thanks to Moore’s Law), bandwidth, and wireless technology have changed the level of real time information sharing.  HP has even come out with a laptop (HP Compaq 6720t) which is designed to be used as a thin client into corporate systems and which doesn’t even have a hard drive!.

Many accountants are rightly concerned with the security and information control implications of using online services for their
mission-critical applications.  While these are legitimate concerns, the reality of our digital infrastructure has generally made these concerns less of a problem now than in the past.  High speed internet is getting faster.  Last week, I received a flyer from my local telephone company offering a fiber internet connection which would have 25Mbps down/10Mbps up connectivity to my home. 

While I’m still mulling over whether or not I really need that fast a connection at home since my current connection is 10Mbps down/1Mbps up through my cable provider, it’s really interesting that this level of service is now available in Knoxville, Tennessee, which, although a nice-sized city, is admittedly not one of the first cities you think of when you imagine fast internet speeds.  My current internet connections (cable and Sprint wireless) continue to impress me with the speeds which are possible; my cable connection averages 8 Mbps down, 970K up whenever I test the speed, and my wireless connection (backup) has been running over 1.1 Mbps down/300K up on the road lately with EVDO Rev A. 

Anecdotal evidence suggests that telecommunications and other utilities are also more reliable than we have had in the past.  Where I used to reboot my router and modem every morning, I now go for months without rebooting these devices, and they seem to just work now.  My collaboration with others within K2 suggests that their experiences are similar:  I have noted only two critical outages among the team during the first four months of the year.  When I started my career 15 years ago, we would have two or three power outages during the busy season which would shut us down and cause us to lose work.  While utilities aren’t sexy, they certainly seem to have made significant improvements in the last generation.

If you haven’t tried some of the latest evolutions in Web-based applications, here are some for your consideration:

• Gliffy – Flowcharts on the Web
• QuickBooks Online
• Microsoft Office Live Small Business and OfficeLive Workspace
• Bill.com – Electronic workflow and AP/AR processing
• Copanion GruntWorx – An online application for scanning and organizing tax returns
• XCM – Workflow automation for CPA Firms
• Google Apps – An office suite which allows Web-based collaboration and processing of spreadsheets and word processing documents.  These documents can be taken offline with an app called Google Gears.
• Thomson and CCH offer hosted versions of their CPA firm applications.  Thomson’s offering is called Virtual Office CS, and CCH’s offering is called Global fx.  (Both have simplified life for many firms who want to quit applying updates and administering servers in their offices.)
• Capital Confirmation makes audit confirmations paperless and electronic (and really fast as well).
• Jungledisk – An application installed on your PC which creates an encrypted storage drive using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) .

While the future direction of computing hasn’t been finalized, there are really interesting things happening in technology, and some things (like those pages or CD’s for reference materials) are on the way out. The future appears to offer more choices for how tools are delivered to users, which will make it much easier to work from anywhere – even a condo in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Brian Tankersley is a CPA and CITP based in Knoxville, Tennessee.  You can learn more about him at www.bftcpa.com.

Tags: WebApplications cloud versus local accounting CPA space

Is QB 2008 Not Working on Your System? A .NET Issue May be the Reason

A NON-SECURITY WINDOWS UPDATE THAT WAS DISTRIBUTED BY MICROSOFT THIS WEEK MAY CAUSE QUICKBOOKS 2008 TO STOP OPERATING.

If you're affected by this problem, when you launch QuickBooks you may see the QuickBooks Splash Screen for a second or two, but the software doesn't open. Or, you may see an error message referring to the Web Connector failing to initialize, and the software won't run.

This problem may also be affecting Lacerte and Pro Series software (not a good week for that to happen). This could also cause a problem for users who are trying to install QuickBooks on a computer that received this Windows update.

Do NOT uninstall and reinstall QuickBooks (and disregard any advice from a technical support person to uninstall and reinstall). This is not a QuickBooks file problem that requires reinstallation to cure.

The problem is a .NET 2.0 problem arising from this latest Windows Update.  Microsoft moved this .NET 2.0 Service Pack 1 into the “high priority and critical” section of Microsoft updates.  This means that more people updated than would have if it had remained lower in the priority sections.

If you're running QuickBooks 2008 on Windows XP, you can uninstall and reinstall .NET 2.0. If you're running QuickBooks 2008 on Windows Vista, you cannot uninstall and reinstall .NET 2.0, but you can fix it.

Step by step instructions on replacing or repairing .NET 2.0 for Windows XP and Windows Vista are available at the following URL:

http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/Pages/KnowledgeBaseArticle/1009275

QB Accountant’s Copy Issue with Importing Edits

Since today is March 14^th, many of my friends who do predominately taxes for a living are working away trying to get those client trial balances adjusted so they can complete those last-minute C and S-Corp tax returns. If you’re one of those accountants who uses the great functionality of the Accountant’s Copy in QuickBooks (and you know who you are), read on. If you aren’t using Accountant’s Copy (e.g. you don’t have files with a file extension of QBX, QBY, and QBA in your QuickBooks directory, please ignore this issue).

Here’s the issue:

 Unpatched systems using the QuickBooks 2008 Accountant’s Copy can sometimes fail to import edits when converting data from a QBY to a QBW file (e.g. importing the Accountant’s Change file into the client’s production QuickBooks file). This happens only under certain circumstances (some examples below).  This can be a very small problem if the accountant has made very few edits. However, there is also the chance of losing large sets of data when an accountant makes extensive edits. 

QuickBooks 2008 Update Release 5, due March 13, 2008, addresses most of the existing circumstances under which the above issue occurs.  However, we know that not all ProAdvisors install all releases for many reasons (such as the extreme workload compression we all experience this time of the year).

 The error may occur under the following circumstances on unpatched systems:

•  If reconciled account names contain special characters
•  If the accountant enters and then modifies a journal entry
•  If the accountant modifies a deposit, then enters a new line
• If the accountant enters an account number that duplicates a number that the client has entered while the accountant has the file

 Here’s what you should do:

1.  If you are using the Accountant’s Copy feature, you should download and install all available updates for QuickBooks 2008 as soon as possible.
2. You should also advise your clients of the risks here, and pay extra attention to confirm that your client’s adjusted trial balance (e.g. after importing the QBY file) matches the values on the accountant’s final adjusted trial balance.

If you have questions about this, please read Intuit KnowledgeBase Article #1009092, or contact Intuit support.

Greetings from Convergence 2008

 

I'm back on the road again, with the AIIM conference in Boston last week, some vendor site visits Thursday and Friday, and I'm writing this from Orlando where I've been attending Microsoft partner briefings and Convergence.
It struck me this weekend how far we have come with technology since I graduated from college. I had just signed up for the new Sprint unlimited phone/data plan ($100/mo, all you can talk and surf), and I was thinking about my business travel when I had just graduated from college. I remember that whenever you got off of the plane, you made a mad dash for the pay phone banks to check your messages with a human at the office (and by messages, I mean paper messages). Last week, I downloaded a 3mb pdf file on my Treo 755P while the plane was loading, and reviewed the listings of sessions at Convergence next week from my phone. Crazy changes in a very short period of time- and it's still evolving. I wonder what things will be like in another 15 years...
Convergence is quite the experience- imagine a massive convention center with thousands of MS Partners, as many as 2000 employees, and a trade show the size of a football field focused on all of the MS Dynamics products. A few things to not miss if you're here:
1. Avalara has a booth (just inside the expo area against the left hand wall). They do outsourced sales tax as an add-in app for GP, and have some really amazing geospatial technology which helps you make the byzantine world of sales tax easy. Visit their booth, or go to Avalara.com. They have a super-primo tiki party on Thursday night- if you're a GP partner, see Marshall and get the passes. I'm told that it's THE party of the show.
2. HP is here in force- you can't miss them- right inside the front door. They have enough computing power here for a small data center, and I recall some nice giveaways as well.
3. The MS Dynamics and other Microsoft groups have a strong presence here, including FRx. You should go speak to some of the product managers here while you are in Orlando- they are really nice, and have been very helpful.
4. CCH is here with their sales tax solutions for companies. Since the IRS uses their solutions, they're one of the 800 lb gorillas in this space.
5. Captaris looks interesting- will be going back to learn more about their products this afternoon.
6. Lots of good-looking report writers here, including the Solver Excel reporter. I'm going to kick the tires on a few while I'm here.

QuickBooks Online Passes 100,000 User Mark

Well, it's official - QuickBooks Online has passed 100,000 users (see link to press release here).  If you haven't looked at the service, you can learn more about it at www.qboe.com.  While there were a flurry of people setting up data centers 7-8 years ago to run hosted Great Plains and other apps, QBOE passing this milestone shows that the Application Service Provider (ASP) concept is playing well on main street.

As I look at the issues people have with running applications on their PC's, I think more people should look into hosted applications like QuickBooks Online (QBOE), the Thomson Virtual Office CS Suite of hosted applications, and CCH's Global fx.  I don't know about you all, but I'm finding that my internet connection is more reliable than my cell phone (even the cellular internet connection I have is better than the voice coverage I have).  Less infrastructure, less maintenance, accessible from anywhere, immediate online backup - and you just pay a monthly fee.  It's definitely something to look at for the future.

Another interesting phenomona is that users can work from anywhere - whether it's the bonus room or Hyperabad - so if your star senior associate is married to a Peace Corps member and is moving to somewhere with a good internet connection, they can do tax returns from Malaysia.  While it's not as good as having them locally, it's better than losing them forever.  Also, sick kids don't put young paremts out of business for the day - they can just go home, and during the kids' nap, work on some returns (although I know this is hard -my five year old wears me out).

Look at some of these sites - and test them out if the ASP concept appeal sto you.  It might be one of the last times your tech guy has to come out to make your applications work together.

Happy Birthday, Cougar Mountain

Cougar Mountain software announced today that they are celebrating their 25th anniversary in business.  In an industry which realistically hasn't been around very long (my parents business in the 1980's was run on manual books and VisiCalc spreadsheets), that's quite an achievement.

Happy birthday, guys!

The Big Three at War

I wrote an article for TheTechGap.com, a website affiliated with the CPA Technology Advisor about the big three accounting software companies (Intuit (QuickBooks), Sage (Peachtree), and Microsoft (Office Accounting)) and their efforts to lure new customers.  If you would like to read it, please click here.  (Thanks to Greg LaFollette for posting this to his site.)

QuickBooks Financial Statements w/o Account #s

('Four Kings'- oil on canvas. Hey- Elvis is like those dogs playing poker- he proves that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.)
Many CPA's I know express frustration with the treatment of account numbers in QuickBooks. While most accountants want to use account numbers (even if it's just because we're use to using them), we really don't want to see them on financial statements. Just as a programmer likes to tweak the embedded documentation in their code to make it more user-friendly, the account numbers seem to confuse non-accountants, and like a good editor, we want to remove any superfluous junk on our work product (e.g. financial statements).
I frequently am asked for a method of tweaking QuickBooks settings to use account numbers on most reports, but exclude them on the balance sheet and income statement. What follows is a guide on how to get rid of those pesky numeros de acuentos the heck out of your financials.
There is a description field associated with each general ledger account on the accounts list. Few people use this field, and by default, it is blank.
The trick here is to populate the description field with the account name or other caption to be used on the financial reports for that account. While you could go in and retype the account name in each record, it may be more efficient for you to export the list of accounts, copy the title to the Description field in Excel, and then reimport the IIF file into QuickBooks. (n.b. If the description field for an account is blank, QB prints the account number and name instead- just what we didn't want- so make sure to populate the right field).
Once the description field has been populated, you will then want to change a few default report settings. These change where QB gets its labels for financial statements.
1. Click on Edit, Preferences, and select first the Reports and Graphs tab, followed by the Company Preferences tab. On this screen, change the general report preference to show 'account descriptions' instead of 'account titles. Note there is also a setting which shows both the title and the description. As my wife told me about the painting in the picture, ''I have no idea why you would want that, but it's good to know it can be done.''
2. Select Print, Preview to confirm that the account numbers are gone- follow up on anywhere these numbers exist on this.
3. Dance at your desk- because you can.

Notes from 30,000 Feet

I recently completed an article titled 'The Technology of Financial Services' (as well as one called "Just the Apps, Ma'am") for the CPA Technology Advisor. It was an interesting project, and I even got to interview a man named ‘Batman'- Tony Batman, that is. (I had to work on the wordings to avoid phrases like 'According to Batman' and 'Batman says', as I enjoy the writing, but don't want an excerpt to end up in Jay Leno's monologue. All kidding aside, thanks to Tony and all of those who made time to allow me to interview them- I think the article came out well.

Big thanks to Averatec for replacing my Averatec 3715-EH1 with an AV2260-EH1 this week. The 3715 had been a lemon from the start, and had spent almost as much time in the shop as it spent in use. The new laptop has a 1280x800 12.1'' screen (very bright), a Turion 64 processor, and weighs four pounds. The 2260 also has an easily accessible service panel on the bottom- a welcome change from the 3715, which in addition to being cheaply made, required technical skills beyond most mortals to upgrade the RAM or HDD. Seriously- the old machine required me to remove no less than 10 screws, the keyboard, three ribbons, the processor fan, and disassemble the screen from the base, and took me (a guy who has worked on PC hardware starting with an Apple II+ in the 1980's) a full half hour of concentrated work to perform this work. Thanks for standing behind your product, guys. I'll be reporting how well the device holds up to the demands of a road warrior.

My HP Compaq nx6125 is on its way to recovery after a corrupted registry. It's in Kansas now, recuperating from its recent illness (owner overinstallation disease). I'm looking for a good comparison of the performance of VMware vs. MS Virtual PC/virtual server, as I'm in the process of moving my testing to a virtualized environment- maybe this will help me keep my teaching machine leaner & meaner. Any tips and tricks from readers on how to max out the performance of VM's would be appreciated. I'm particularly intrigued by the concept of booting to a 64 bit version of Linux which would be locked down and let me just run virtuals of Windows, Linux, and Windows Small Business server. I have two desktop boxes at home which I'd like to get more out of than I'm currently receiving. I also have a four year old who needs an environment which can be easily refreshed- so I'm going to be playing with the VM products in the next few weeks.

I am currently working on an article about Portable Apps and the new computing models which it ushers in. An example is my 2GB Kingston u3 drive- I run the following apps directly from the drive:
- Firefox Browser
- Thunderbird E-mail
- Zinio Magazines (PC World and PC Week, of course)
- Skype (!)
- Open Office
(it's worth noting that I would prefer to run MS Office 2003 instead of OpenOffice for my portable office apps, but have no clue how to set up Office as a U3 app. It occurs to me that portable apps could be combined with an MP3 player (think iPod with Linux) to allow you to present Powerpoints from the iPod's video out (and use the Apple remote to control the slideshow). This, combined with video clips of software demos could make it possible for a guy like me to use my iPod video as a backup to live presentation. Ahhhhh.... the projects for the Fall conference season. (Lots of new toys in my future, for sure.) If anyone knows how to boot an OS on a PC from a thumbdrive or an iPod (with a universal setup like the ones out there on the Linux boot disks), please drop me a line with any useful links.

Users Helping Users: Newsgroups

We all occasionally hit a wall working with an application.  Whether we're working with Office, Quickbooks, SBA, or other applications, sometimes we reach the natural and logical limits of our experience with an application.  Support lines and knowledgebases help when things break, but there are still gaps between the normal resources (reference materials, vendor blogs, training courses and reference manuals), and the things you need to know to accomplish.  One underutilized resource for support is various USENET newsgroups.  Newsgroups allow users to have questions answered by other users, and are a remarkably effective way to figure out how to do things with a software app.  Some of the newsgroups I use frequently include:

• microsoft.public.excel (n.b. all MS groups are from the newsserver at news.microsoft.com)
• microsoft.public.excel.programming
• alt.comp.software.financial.quickbooks
• alt.comp.software.financial.peachtree
• microsoft.public.sba.general
Try them out, and see - many times, questions are answered before you can get back from lunch (!)

Viral Marketing Hits The Accounting World

You know you love them, even if you won't admit it publically.  Elf Bowling.  Joe Cartoon.  The Jib-Jab video of Kerry and W singing "This Land is Your Land".  Yes, they're silly, but they are fun.  And a sense of humor is the key to surviving busy season - anywhere.

PayCycle, a web-based payroll company, has recently created a humorous Pc-based ad promoting their online payroll service.  It's pretty amusing, and may  reduce your stress in this very busy time of the year.  You can see their video by clicking here. 

Hope you all have a great busy season.

QB 2006: Setting Up Multiple Users, New SQL DB

I recently received my ProAdvisor copy of Quickbooks Pro 2006, Premier Accountant Edition.  It seems to be a nice upgrade - new features are listed here, and it seems to be stable from my limited testing.  While you might not notice it, Intuit has replaced the underlying database with Sybase SQL, which is a more robust solution than has been available in the past.  This will result in larger files, but the software should handle them better as well.

While this new database offers more opportunities, any techie who has supported a CPA firm knows that changing database platforms is a potential area for new conflicts where things worked and played well together in the past.  One issue which seems to concern many CPA/Technologists is the best way to set up QB 2006 in a networked environment.  Intuit recommends setting up one user workstation as the "server" in a networked environment, and for those who don't have a dedicated server such as Microsoft's Small Business Server 2003, this will be the only option.  With the new security emphasis at Microsoft, as well as the firewalls built into Win XP SP2 and Symantec's Norton Internet Security, this may make the job of setting up the new program a little more complex than you thought, what with the client/server architecture and other changes.  For those who do have a dedicated server, Doug Sleeter, the CEO of Quickbooks Consultants "The Sleeter Group," has posted an article to his website on how to serve up Quickbooks on a server such as SBS2003.

One of the interesting dilemmas which will need to be addressed by CPA Firm Technologists is the way security is handled in the two programs:

• Quickbooks requires (pretty much) Admin access on the local PC to run effectively. (see Susan's post , and numerous others on her blog)
• MS Small Business Accounting - appears to have security tied into the Windows login.  This excerpt from the Software Guide MS provides its partners through their Professional Accountants Network and the partner program illustrates the issue better than I can alone:

All members of the Windows Administrator Group have full access to Small Business accounting, including installation, setting up the company, managing user roles, installing add-ins, creating or importing an accountant's backup copy, setting up access for multiple users, and using any of the Data Utilities commands on the File menu (emphasis added)

The issue here is this:  If your bookkeeper (or your client's bookkeeper) is supporting clients on QB and SBA, QB requires local admin access, which will then negate your ability to restrict that same users' rights on SBA databases.  While this may not be a big deal at small shops, this does introduce a new internal control risk here.  MS's approach is superior in the long run, and will be hopefully enabled by the upcoming release of Windows Vista, which places emphasis on restrictiing user rights wherever possible, but until QB changes its approach, there may be some risks here.  This also creates problems for those running QB in a terminal server/Citrix environment.  While experts such as Susan Bradley have workarounds, they are reported to still have some conflicts which require the use of admin rights for some activities.

BTW, the Sleeter Group publishes a text which I own called the Quickbooks Consultants Reference Guide - get 10% off by using code "K2" at the checkout on their site, www.sleetergroup.com.  I own and recommend that you consider this guide, which includes all sorts of "real world consultant tips" with your clients).  K2 also has a discount code for those in the ProAdvisor Program which will get you $100 off of the standard price for this resource.  (and based on my blog's traffic reports, if you're here, you probably found out about me from a seminar through either K2 or AICPA) The code is 11089-07986.

Disclosure: I teach seminars for K2 Enterprises, who receives travel funds from numerous clients and consults with software and hardware vendors, including Intuit and The Sleeter Group.  I don't personally receive any commissions, incentives, or other payments from these discount codes, and the only thing I get above fees for teaching classes is evaluation copies of software and other materials to use in preparing for seminars.