Consulting

When coaching accounting firms on crafting an industry niche-driven growth strategy, there are three critical questions that we work together to answer. The first step is to assess how well aligned your firm is with the industry.

Despite being highly sophisticated and capable, ERP systems are so often under-optimized and not used to their maximum potential, either due to busy CFO leadership, expensive consulting costs, and the never-ending budget constraints on IT investments.

David Weiner, CEO of Microsoft Dynamics partner UXC Eclipse USA, explains how being a technology consultant has changed drastically in the last 25 years and being a VAR is more about service than software than ever.

Software partner veteran Terry Petrzelka, now a valued advisor and consultant to vendors and resellers discusses the top concerns for accounting technology consultants in this monthly Q&A series.

Clients expect you to know about accounting. Impress them by showing you know about their field as well.

These days you’re not likely to pick up an accounting publication or surf the blogosphere without coming across an article on portals, or more specifically, client portals for file sharing.

Whether it’s locked in audit and tax preparation systems, time and billing records, or lying dormant in individual Excel files, there’s a huge amount of value in data residing in CPA firms’ information systems simply waiting to be mined and turned into profitability and growth.

Biz2Credit, an online credit provider for small businesses, has launched a partnership program for CPAs and other accountants and tax preparers who refer their small business clients for loans.

Every company in every industry faces some degree of risk. But some risks are greater than others, particularly sensitivity risk (related to external factors like commodity prices and competition), which accounts for about half of all risk incurred by any company.

Your client has a successful closely held business. Perhaps your client has already indicated that, at some indeterminate point in the future, the business will be sold. Even if your client has not given such an indication, you are well advised to at least broach the topic as a matter of long-term contingency planning.

A continued focus on customer experience, cloud and mobile initiatives and payments -- along with staying the branding and product course laid out over the past two years -- was the primary tone of this year’s Sage Summit user and partner event.

I'd like to take this opportunity to diverge from the news of the week to expound upon a couple of topics, namely what has become somewhat of a religious debate over the cloud as well as some thoughts on upcoming vendor events.

Seth Zarny, head of Raffa P.C.'s technology consulting practice, explores the renewed interest in CPA firms providing technology consulting services, and summarizes the reasons for successes and failures in this area.

Everyone is talking about moving to the cloud as though you can just snap your fingers and suddenly change everything from software to workflow to paperless systems. But the reality is that getting completely to the cloud, no matter how compelling, will take a while.

Armanino has released Dynamic Insights, a software package for reporting and analytics designed to integrate with and utilize data from a company’s existing Microsoft Dynamics AX or GP system.

NetSuite partner ERP Guru has unveiled its Business Monitoring Suite (BMS), designed to allow customers the ability to better monitor and benchmark their business in real-time versus industry peers.

CPA-focused business intelligence tool provider iLumen has added a survey platform as well as budgeting and forecasting capabilities to work in conjunction with its Client Intelligence and Industry Intelligence products.

The American Institute of CPAs has written a letter to members of Congress to support legislation that would block the U.S. Department of Labor’s 2010 proposal to change its definition of fiduciary under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to include appraisers of employee stock ownership plans.

With the formal release of the 2013 AICPA Guide, Valuation of Privately-Held Company Equity Securities Issued as Compensation, there are two valuation concepts that are new to the updated guide, but are already in fairly wide use.

Palo Alto Software has launched a service to integrate QuickBooks data with the company’s LivePlan software to remotely monitor the performance of a business for its accountants.