Sales and Marketing

Small businesses added 44,000 jobs in the United States in August, according to a new report, but large companies shed 6,000 jobs last month, bringing the total number of new jobs to 38,000.

CPA firms saw big gains in both income and fees last year, thanks to the demand for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance services, according to a newly released survey.

It’s nice to see that CPAs and their firms are doing very well. According to the just-released 2007 Rosenberg MAP Survey, firms with net fees over $2 million enjoyed annual net fee growth of 11.4 percent in 2006, compared to 9.7 percent in 2005. The average income for partners in these firms, according to the survey, is $350,000.

Three accounting firms are expanding their presence in California and Florida.

If you didn’t see the WebCPA news item last week or the write-up in the 08/17/07 AICPA News Update e-mail newsletter, I’m telling you about the subject of those two pieces now. It is the AICPA’s Professional Ethics Executive Committee’s exposure draft that proposes a new Interpretation 101-17, Networks and Network Firms, under Rule 101, Independence, of the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct. I suggest you read the exposure draft.

CPA firm WithumSmith+Brown has outgrown its current location in downtown New Brunswick and is moving to a new location around the corner.

Software developer Centage introduced a business performance management tool that displays financial and operational key performance indicators on a user’s desktop.

I am increasingly noticing more and more businesses providing unsatisfactory customer service, or, just as irritating, virtually no customer service. Often, at these same businesses, not surprisingly, supervision is also missing. These businesses don’t generate loyal customers, or for that matter many happy, repeat customers. Also, these disgruntled patrons usually don’t provide constructive feedback to the business owner because they are too angry or feel it would be a waste of time. The Ken Blanchard Companies, which helps improve companies’ performance, productivity, and bottom-line results, reports in a survey that customer loyalty ranks as the fourth-most important management challenge to address, and is predicted to be more important by 2010. In the same study, customer relationship skills are cited as the second most important employee development skill, ranking just behind managerial skills.

Gina Gwozdz realized just how valuable blogging can be when, as a sole practitioner vying for clients with three other CPA firms in the small town of Bullard, Texas, she started looking to expand her reach beyond writing articles and columns in her local newspaper.Research led her to find a blogging community within the accounting and tax profession, and there she discovered that she could jumpstart her new practice by taking the plunge. She decided to go online and start Gina's Tax Articles at http://glgcpa.blogspot.com.

Accounting firm Friedman, Cohen, Taubman & Co. LLC has hooked up with Engineered Tax Services to provide cost segregation services to clients who own or invest in commercial and residential rental properties.