A roundup of new software, hardware, books and services for accountants.
Brain trust
Bridging the Gap: Strengthening the Connection between Current and Emerging Leaders in the CPA Profession
The CPA Consultants’ Alliance; $49.97
The gap in Bridging the Gap is the metaphorical distance between the accounting profession’s current leadership and its emerging leaders, a mutual incomprehension that has older CPAs wondering why the younger generation doesn’t step up, and the younger generation wondering why they should. It’s a dangerous disconnect, and bravely leaping in to resolve it are some of the leading consultants to the accounting profession, a veritable brain trust who have put together a guide that is chock-full of their combined insights and strategies to help both sides come together to resolve the issues that are impeding the profession’s progress.
One-stop shop
MyFirmsApp
MyFirmsApp Ltd.
Once, an up-and-coming firm might have proudly cut the ribbon on larger, swankier offices in a premium location; nowadays, you’re better served in upgrading your digital footprint, creating an online environment that your clients will be comfortable visiting from wherever they (and their phones and tablets) can find an Internet connection. Think of MyFirmsApp as the architect/interior decorator on your swanky new online premises — they’ll build a white-labeled app for you that gives your clients one-stop access to all of your cloud-based applications, so they don’t have to fumble with multiple log-ins and portals, as well as adding all sorts of useful tools like receipt managers, mileage trackers, messaging capabilities and more. All you need is a ribbon-cutting app.
Wing in the cloud
Cloud deployment for CenterPoint products; CenterPoint Version 10
Red Wing Software
As accountants grow more comfortable with the cloud, more and more vendors are bringing on-premise solutions along, and this month we’ll note that Red Wing software has released a cloud deployment solution for its line of CenterPoint Accounting and Payroll Software products. Previous users can switch for an additional fee, and new users can start right up in the cloud, and the programs are the same whether installed locally or accessed online, with no difference in features. That’s nice, since the company also just released Version 10 of CenterPoint, which lets users scan and attach documents to all major transaction screens.
Tweet this book
The Accountant’s Social Media Handbook: Dominating Strategies for CPAs
CPA Trendlines; $295.95
And don’t just tweet it; share it on Facebook, create a LinkedIn group about it, share it with your friends on Instagram, and so on — all of which you should be better prepared to do once you’ve read the book, since it’s a comprehensive guide to how you should be using social media to boost your practice and your career. With content ranging from case studies to step-by-step procedures, it covers both the how and the why, and will leave you better prepared to gain new clients, interact with old ones, recruit new talent and generally make yourself famous.
Following up
Checkpoint Marketing for Firms Social Media Solutions
Thomson Reuters
We here at New Products are just following up to see if you if you read the book on social media that we recommended above, because we haven’t noticed a significant increase in your activity in the last five minutes. But that’s OK! If you still need help with the tweets, the Instagrams, the Facebookings and other elements of social media, you might want to check out the new Social Media Solutions on Thomson Reuters’ Checkpoint Marketing for Firms, which not only offers a platform for publishing to unlimited social accounts, and for reputation-monitoring and metric-capturing tools, but also timely, formatted content on a wide range of business subjects that you can share with your audiences.
Don’t be modest
OverWatch
Let’s face it: Of all your clients’ different advisors, you’re the best, right? That pre-eminence is certainly good for your ego, but it also comes with some extra responsibilities, particularly when it comes to making sure that all of those other advisors are pulling their weight. OverWatch aims to make that easier for you, with a whole host of tools, assessments and checklists to help you vet your clients’ portfolios, levels of diversification, their outside financial advisors, and their overall financial readiness — without having to take direct responsibility for them. It can also help you judge which advisors you want to refer clients to.
Safer transcripts
Canopy Transcripts
Canopy
When you put “transcripts” and “IRS” in the same sentence, people quite rightly get nervous, so it’s nice to know you have an alternative with Canopy Transcripts, which lets you retrieve transcripts much more quickly and analyze them more efficiently, presenting them in a series of reports and documents that are easy to read and well-organized.
Rising regs
The New Era of Regulatory Enforcement: A Comprehensive Guide for Raising the Bar to Manage Risk
McGraw-Hill Education; $59.50
If it can be regulated, it will be — and if it’s already regulated, that regulation is likely to get more complex. And that means risk, according to the two forensic leaders from Big Four firm KPMG who wrote this book, which aims to show businesses how to mitigate that risk. It offers an inside look at the policies, strategies and tactics driving governmental enforcement activity, and outlines the most effective approaches for preventing, detecting and responding to the risks in areas like bribery and corruption, money laundering, market manipulation, financial reporting fraud, offshore tax evasion, and more.
Innovations in fraud
Xcellerator enhancements
Incisive Software Corp.
We here at New Products never cease to be surprised and delighted by the lengths people will go to to commit fraud, or all the little tricks they’ll dream up to further their nefarious schemes. For instance, until Incisive Software added a function to its Xcellerator spreadsheet management software to detect them, we didn’t know that people would create hidden cells that were teeny-tiny so that people wouldn’t see them. Similarly, the new Xcellerator feature that finds hidden data in merged cells opened our eyes to that possibility, as did its new ability to proactively identify numeric data to prevent the misrepresentation of something that appears to be a number when it is actually formatted as text. (Xcellerator now also scans and compares spreadsheets more quickly, and lets users select which Excel sheets to scan, but we couldn’t find any fraud tips there.)
New and improved!
Thomson Reuters has released a new version of its ONESOURCE Operational Transfer Pricing application. … The IFRS Foundation has released the 2016 edition of its Pocket Guide to IFRS Standards, which reports on how the standards are used in different countries around the world. … Tipalti has launched an end-to-end accounts payable automation platform. … Bill.com has added an Auto Bill Entry service that automatically processes and prepares uploaded, e-mailed or faxed invoices. … Host Analytics announced the Spring16 Release of its Host Analytics Performance Platform, with a number of enhancements. … Vena Solutions’ corporate performance management solution CPM Suite app has achieved “Built for NetSuite” status, as has Sovos Compliance’s Sovos Sales Tax SuiteApp. … COSO and the American Accounting Association are working together to offer faculty and students at post-secondary academic institutions low-cost online access to the COSO Internal Control Integrated Framework.
