Like motherhood and apple pie, a pipeline process that helps you organize and realize your opportunities is easy to label "a good thing."But there's a considerable gap between knowing this and making it happen in your own firm. My goal in this article is to help you bridge that gap.

Two accounting students have launched a used books site to combat the rising prices of textbooks.

CCH and H&R Block signed an agreement that gives Block tax preparers and franchisees access to tax-training courses from the online CCH Learning Center.

Workstream introduced an on-demand compensation-planning system, Workstream Compensation Professional, aimed at midsized companies.

In 2007, it's clear that payroll processing has become better, cheaper and faster - particularly at the small-business end of the marketplace.Companies like Intuit and Sage are building payroll into their accounting products for all but the very tail end of the market, while Sage, Thomson and Microsoft are beefing up their ERP and human resources offerings for the mid-range and enterprise markets.

Attracting fresh talent isn’t an impossible dream, but get them while they’re young and still in school. Establishing relationships with universities and individual college professors helps Grant Thornton attract the best students. But even small firms without big budgets can focus on recruiting at the local level, especially if they start the process when the students are still impressionable sophomores. By the time they have their diplomas in hand, most grads already have made up their minds as to where they want to work, according to Ed Nusbaum, Grant Thornton’s CEO and executive partner. Investing in them for a summer internship—even when the workload is light—could pay off when they become seniors, he says. The good news is that many of those young prospects are making conscious decisions to start their careers on a smaller scale. “When I pursued accounting, everyone looked at the Big 8, and Grant Thornton was No. 9. Nobody went anywhere else,” says Nusbaum, an Ohio State University alumnus who began working for Grant Thornton nearly three decades ago. “Today, the top six to seven firms attract the majority, but people go straight into industry or with local firms. Back then, if you did that, professors would say you’re crazy—and they have a lot of influence.” The American Institute of CPAs is targeting an even younger audience, high schoolers. Start Here, Go Places, is the AICPA’s student recruitment campaign, aimed at “building awareness” and “changing perceptions” about the profession. It connects students to a Web site that speaks their language, using words like “awesome,” providing ways for them to “get a leg up” on other college applicants by taking business courses in high school and offering quick facts, such as the inventor of bubble gum was an accountant. There are even video clips with real-life CPAs who drive—get ready for this—Corvettes (That means they’re cool.) This content is relevant to its readers and feels more like something they’d find in Seventeen magazine than, well, an accounting publication. No one knows how many kids say “I want to be an accountant when I grow up.” But at least they are learning that the profession exists and that jobs are available. Enron might have made those jobs more difficult, but it also drove awareness and made the thought of becoming an auditor “more enticing,” Nusbaum says. But work-life balance is also important, as much of a cliché as that may be. There’s no denying the fact that most teens don’t envision themselves working around the clock. Thirty years ago, when Nusbaum began his accounting career, he worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day, from January to March. On Sundays, he left at 5 p.m. “That was the easy day,” he says. Today, people put in a lot less time in the office. Kids don’t say they want “work-life balance.” They say they “want to have a life.” And the perception today is that accountants do have lives because people like Nusbaum are helping to influence their views and shape the next generation of CPAs.

Three academics from the U.K. who have written a book about auditing, and a Virginia professor who has developed a taxation education curriculum, will receive awards from Deloitte & Touche’s not-for-profit Deloitte Foundation.

Accounting and finance workers are slightly more optimistic about their jobs and the overall economy, according to a quarterly survey commissioned by recruitment company Spherion and conducted by Harris Interactive.

Carol Stacey, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporate Finance, has become vice president of The SEC Institute, an organization that holds conferences and workshops around the country to explain SEC and PCAOB rules and regulations.

KPMG, through its private foundation, has awarded 10 more $10,000 minority doctoral scholarships for accounting students, on top of the 35 it has already handed out in the 2007-2008 academic year.

Put a dozen managers and executives from financial planning firms in the same room, and before too long the conversation is likely to turn to the business issue that concerns them all: profitability. Whether they represent a one-person shop or are part of a large corporate structure, planners are almost universally challenged to serve the needs of their clients at a profit.To achieve that profitability, you must first address two other challenges - those presented by staffing and compensation. Getting the right people in place, giving them the tools to excel, and rewarding them for performance are all critical steps in achieving profitable growth.

The retirement plan for Fresno County, Calif., employees appeared to be in a pickle when an actuarial firm determined that 5,200 former and current county employees who had been told they would be getting refunds found out they might have to pay extra money into the fund instead.

RSM McGladrey has introduced Firm Foundation, an association and program for small CPA firms that gives them tools and training in areas such as practice management and marketing.Firms with approximately 10 to 30 full-time employees can join the association. Members get access to technical tools for tax and auditing, as well as assistance in succession planning, recruiting, people management, profitability, growth, human resources and technology.

A tax manager who left her firm in Hawaii and moved to South Carolina was the subject of a very interesting article in the July 2007 Boomer Bulletin from Boomer Consulting Inc. What was so interesting was that not much changed for the Hawaiian firm, as she continues to work for it remotely from South Carolina.

Business management application provider NetSuite has rolled out a new function that will allow users to integrate the software with the Apple iPhone.The SuitePhone offers NetSuite customers the opportunity to run their company’s customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and e-commerce business applications through the iPhone. The new capability provides native support for Safari, the iPhone and Mac browser, which allows for interface technologies such as drop-down menus, drag-and-drop, and in-line editing.

Sage Software has hired a new head of human resources functions in North America, appointing Lisa Codispoti as chief people officer.The company, a subsidiary of the U.K.-based Sage Group, employs more than 5,000 people.

Chief financial officers are split on the importance of an accounting graduate’s university when evaluating a candidate for an entry-level job, says a new survey.Forty-nine percent of the 1,400 U.S. CFOs polled by the staffing service Accountemps said the prestige of the candidate’s university was not important at all.

The National Association of Black Accountants said at its 36th annual convention that it is distributing $201,000 in scholarships to 60 college students nationwide, a threefold increase in fundraising compared to a year ago.The group also said Ernst & Young would donate $200,000 in scholarship money over the next four years to support students interested in pursuing careers in professional services.

Smart firms realize it’s better to hire a good guy and teach him the right skills than to hire a skilled psycho. Resumes tell employers something about skill sets, but little about candidates’ personalities. It takes the right interviewing techniques to figure out which people will be the best fit for your firm and to avoid hiring nightmares. Linda Bryan, owner of Dallas-based Tamlin Software Developers, was the poster woman for how not to select staff. “I was a disaster,” she confesses. “I hired some real goofballs, really weird people that didn’t work out.” These poor decisions resulted in a high turnaround, which can financially burden any company, as well as some embarrassing situations. One day a Fortune 100 drug company client came to the computer consulting company’s offices to discuss a large project and was waiting for one of Bryan’s new hires—someone who seemed “very business like and sharp”—for nearly two hours. She never would have expected the excuse he provided when he made his grand entrance. “He was supposed to show up at 9 and at 11:30, here he comes barreling through the conference room door and his hair is all disheveled and his suit is actually torn on the sleeve and we all just look at him and he says, ‘I’m sorry I’m late. There was this exotic bird and I’m an exotic bird lover and I jumped through a wired fence [chasing it] and it ripped my coat.’ He just went off,” Bryan recalls. “I just thought ‘You’re so fired.’ That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I thought I have got to get better at this.” She started asking advice and others told her she needed to hire on attitude, not aptitude. When she thought about it, she realized that she had hired people who had the right skills on paper but not the right personality. She found a book called “The Smart Interviewer,” which taught her how to ask questions that would allow her to get to know candidates to better determine whether they would fit into Tamlin’s culture. Only if they pass that part of the interview do they get tested on their technical know-how. “I started using that interview process and we started calling it the Good Guy Test. The first thing is do you have the right attitude/the right personality to fit in here. Then the second thing is do you have the right skills. It’s the reverse of what I used to do,” Bryan says. “Since then we’ve had some good longevity and some really good people.” It is not uncommon these days to have prospects meet their future colleagues to see how well they jibe. Some companies invite candidates to lunch. Others have subordinates interview their potential bosses. Just because a candidate doesn’t connect with the rest of your staff doesn’t mean he or she is not a talented individual. Every firm has different policies and ways of doing business. It just means that this particular individual is a bad fit for your particular firm’s needs. It behooves both the employer and employee to figure this out before signing on the dotted line and risk having to “mutually agree to part ways” soon thereafter.

The number of finance and accounting workers who expected their companies to increase headcount in the upcoming months fell 8 points to 30 percent in the latest Hudson Employment Index. Following a substantial rise in May, overall worker confidence plunged 9.8 points, to 106.3. The responses came from roughly 9,000 workers across all sectors. In addition, 19 percent of those polled anticipated layoffs, versus 15 percent who projected layoffs in May. The number of workers who felt their finances were getting worse rose three points in June to 38 percent.Those who said their finances were improving dropped three points to 44 percent.