Most accountants have stopped worrying about their clients bringing bookkeeping in-house. Even with a client performing their own bookkeeping, there's plenty of work that only an accountant can perform, including making adjusting and closing entries, and producing compilation and review reports. In many firms that prepare tax returns for their clients, write-up software is used in lieu of a trial balance application to prepare the client's data for tax processing. Between these engagements, and the clients who would still prefer that you perform the bookkeeping, there's still plenty of need for a good write-up application in many practices.

At its core, write-up is simply a general ledger application with some additional functionality built in to make it more suitable for use in an accounting practice. One such feature is the ability to easily set up a new client, either by using a boilerplate chart of accounts or, if another client is similar in makeup and operation, by copying that other client's set-up to create a new client.

Write-up software, in general, also has more extensive reporting capabilities than many standard GL applications. This is often accomplished by adding reports such as a working trial balance to ease the task of preparing adjusting and closing entries, and beefing up the custom report and financial statement-generation capabilities.

Another area where a write-up package often differs from a plain-vanilla general ledger system is in its import and export capabilities. Because an accountant will often need to work with books and records generated by a variety of different vendors' applications being used at client sites, having the ability to import from many different software packages can save considerable time and effort, as well as improve the accuracy of the transferred data. Good export functionality is important when an accountant needs to perform an analysis that is not provided by the accounting software and must be completed in Excel or another application, such as budgeting software.

After-the-fact payroll is another hallmark of many write-up packages. With an accountant often responsible for computing required payroll tax depositories, having the ability to reconstruct the payroll is a handy thing. This feature is less of a benefit when the majority of a practice's clients are using a payroll service bureau or in-house application that can provide these depository amounts.

Finally, many write-up packages incorporate depreciation/amortization capabilities or link into a fixed assets application to perform these computations. And suites of accountant-oriented applications, with write-up one of the components of the suite, are becoming increasingly popular.

I'LL TAKE ONE OF THOSE ...

While the markets for many applications are shrinking and consolidating, the number of write-up applications available to accountants is remaining fairly consistent. This provides accountants with a good choice in vendors and solutions. Depending upon your client's needs, you might be best off with a write-up package that offers a client "checkbook" application, where the client can enter disbursements and receipts. If you have a number of a specific vendor's accountant-oriented applications, staying within the suite for write-up provides easy data transfer. No one package does it all, but by knowing what you and your clients need, you can come pretty close.

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