New Products

The auditor’s due

IDEA Audit Solutions

Audimation Services Inc.

www.audimation.com

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: The auditor has not benefited from the technological revolution anywhere near as much as the bookkeeper and the tax preparer. And so we’re always glad to see new tools for auditors, like the new IDEA Audit Solutions from Audimation Services, a series of prewritten tests that auditors can run to help determine that the internal controls in a client’s key financial accounts are working as intended. The tests come with dialog boxes to help users choose and tag the appropriate field names, and include detailed documentation. They are available for AP, expense controls, general ledger controls, journal entries, procurement controls, and travel expense controls.

 

Next-wave networking

Strategic Connections: The New Face of Networking in a Collaborative World

Amacom Books; $21.95

Networking is like writing — everybody does it, without realizing the vast gap between just doing it, and doing it on a professional level. Strategic Connections aims to be the Strunk & White of 21st century networking, minimizing the gross schmoozing element and maximizing the professional interaction and mutual service elements. What’s more, it integrates all the new social media and online tools, without overemphasizing or losing sight of the value of the face-to-face. And as an aside, we found the idea that you can have not just one, but four networks — for immediate co-workers, distant members of your organization, family and friends, and for professional contacts — to be a fascinating and useful refinement of the whole concept.

 

Not on your own

QuickBooks Online Self-Employed

Intuit Inc.

www.intuit.com

Intuit is predicting that by 2020, a staggering 43 percent of the workforce will be self-employed, and for them it created QuickBooks Online Self-Employed, which aims to help them manage their financials, as well as all those tasks that Finance and HR handle for those  in the corporate world. It lets them import bank and credit card information, track deductions all year round, and calculate quarterly and year-end taxes.

 

Get on board

Women on Board: Insider Secrets to Getting on a Board and Succeeding
as a Director

Quotation Media; $22.95

Here’s an interesting contradiction: Many of those who aspire to corporate boards of directors are leaders, but being on a board isn’t about leading. Instead, it’s about fitting into the board’s culture. That’s just one of the lessons from Women on Board, a primer for women looking to become directors. The co-authors (a global lead partner from Big Four firm KPMG and the leader of the largest membership organization of female corporate directors) did extensive research with chairmen, chief executives, search experts and others to find out exactly what women need to do to break the glass ceiling.

 

What fits

myRIARegistration

RIA in a Box

www.riainabox

The Web has made us rethink what, exactly, you can fit in a box — Amazon proves that you can fit a vast bookstore in a box no bigger than your computer monitor, while iTunes fits all the world’s concert halls into a box the size of a deck of cards. RIA in a Box may not literally be putting a registered investment advisor in a box, but it does offer a host of regulatory compliance and tech services to RIAs, and now it offers something else that didn’t used to fit in boxes: certainty. It’s new online myRIARegistration tool lets you double-check the status of your RIA firm to make sure you’re registered in the proper jurisdictions.

 

The old and the new

Profiling the Fraudster: Removing the Mask to Prevent and Detect Fraud, and Fraud and Fraud Detection: A Data Analytics Approach (and Web site)

Wiley; $65 each (hardcover), or $42.99 (e-book)

Fraud! It’s eternal, but also ever-new, as new technologies, regulations, forms of business and forms of finance offer a wealth of new opportunities to the fraudster — who almost inevitably displays a set of characteristics that have been the same since Jacob swindled Esau and Isaac. Profiling the Fraudster is a great overview of those characteristics, with a focus on helping the reader identify potential fraudsters among their employees and new hires, and how it all plays out in the workplace. So much for the eternal — Fraud and Fraud Detection takes a very 21st century approach to fighting fraud, describing the host of new data tools that are available to find traces of even the most carefully hidden wrongdoing in the vast oceans of data that fraudsters swim in. It also has a companion Web site that offers access to a demo version of Caseware’s IDEA software, one of the premiere tools in data analysis.

 

Better cabinets

eFileCabinet enhancements and releases

eFileCabinet Inc.

www.efilecabinet.com

Document management systems provider eFileCabinet announced the release of the 2015 versions of a number of products, with improvements and new features all around. Its eFileCabinet Desktop version for 2015 offers regular, automated backups to the cloud, as well as integration with its SecureDrawer online portal solution, which lets users share confidential files securely over the Web, and also supports eSignatures. Meanwhile, 2015 features for eFile Online include automated synchronization of files with your desktop, integration with SalesForce, and more.

Crowning cash

Small Business Workbench

Small Business Payments Co.

www.sbworkbench.com

The sort of capabilities that used to be available only to corporate behemoths with vast Finance Departments and access to mainframe computers are now well within reach for even the smallest of companies. Small Business Workbench is a perfect example: It’s an app that offers cash flow forecasting for as far into the future as the user wishes to project, helping them manage their cash in much more sophisticated ways. It also has an e-invoicing app to let small businesses get paid faster, and an inventory app to track inventory balances.

 

New and improved!

The American Institute of CPAs’ Not-for-Profit Entities Expert Panel has issued Q&A Section 6140.26 to give guidance on nonprofit entities with for-profit subsidiaries, while the Auditing Standards Board has issued four new auditing interpretations for SAS No. 126 on going concerns in response to updates to accounting standards. … Acumatica has released Version 5.0 of its ERP cloud accounting software. … Thomson Reuters Checkpoint has released a special report on the Tax Increase Prevention Act of 2014, as well as a new module for its Transfer Pricing Documenter, which incorporates key data from Moody’s Analytics’ RiskCalc to help companies benchmark, document and audit intercompany loans. … Bill.com’s Payment for NetSuite SuiteApp has earned “Built for NetSuite” certification. … Epson announced that three of its document scanners — the WorkForce DS-510, DS-760 and the DS-860 — have been certified for use with eFileCabinet. … Citrix has integrated ShareFile with Fujitsu’s ScanSnap products, and added a Print-to-ShareFile feature.

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