Adult supervision

Balance Professional

Balance Financial Inc.

www.balancefinancial.com/professional

Clients, like children, cannot be watched all the time. No matter how good the advice you give them, once they are beyond your immediate vicinity, they will inevitably do something stupid. You can't prevent this entirely, but you can delay its onset with new tools like Balance Professional, which lets you leverage the personal bookkeeping and expense and financial management services of Balance Financial to keep a watchful eye on your clients and hopefully keep them out of trouble. The Web-based solution gives you and your clients tools for expense tracking, budgeting, filing, document management and bill payment, as well as account aggregation, a customized client portal for sharing documents and messages, and detailed reports. You can also brand the tool with your logo and contact info, so your clients will know who's looking out for them.

Adult supervision, Pt. 2

Enhanced Practice CS

The Tax & Accounting business of Thomson Reuters

http:cs.thomsonreuters.com/practice

Staff members, like clients and children, cannot be watched all the time, but the recent enhancements to Thomson Reuters' Practice CS practice management system should make it a little easier to keep them busy, productive and out of trouble. There are a number of new features focused on giving managers more control over scheduling and prioritizing assignments, including a brand-new Assignments tab for dragging and dropping items into specific unsuspecting staff members' laps; new tabs for automatically scheduling items; a tab for defining schedule items as urgent; an Infotips function to make it easier to view staff members' availability and qualifications for a particular task; and the ability to make meetings, to-do items and phone calls recurring.

Office-safe

RemoteAccountant.com

RemoteAccountant.com

www.remoteaccountant.com

Very little in the way of live video chatting is acceptable in the office environment, but RemoteAccountant.com is one of the exceptions. The new networking site aims to connect financial professionals like CPAs, accountants, enrolled agents and tax return preparers with remote clients via video chats, for which the clients pay by the minute. Clients get quick answers to their questions, and accountants like you get paid - and an excellent opportunity to get in front of potential new clients.

Always a good time

Enloop

Enloop Inc.

www.enloop.com

When times are tough and business news is slow (or too depressing), editors like to trot out the evergreen story of how many successful companies were founded during recessions; big businesses like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and GE always get a mention. The fact is that businesses are founded constantly, and good ideas will rise above bad times. It helps, of course, if they're well-executed, and that starts with creating a sound business plan. The makers of Enloop are helping entrepreneurs do just that: The free Web app takes would-be business owners through a step-by-step process to autowrite a bank-ready business plan in a professionally formatted PDF document, along with customized financial forecasts. Better still, it gives you an Enloop Performance Score as you go along, rating your plan as it develops to encourage better planning.

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