Software reviews

No one enjoys paying taxes. That's especially true when the tax structure is complex and convoluted. Payroll taxes often fall into this category, but perhaps the most convoluted taxes that some of your clients will have to track, compute and remit are sales and use taxes.

Trial balance and engagement workpaper software solutions are two completely different kinds of applications that must be treated differently. Yet they are increasingly brought together, either as a matched pair of critical applications or within the same software suite, so it only makes sense to consider them together.

Software solutions tackle Sarbanes-Oxley from many different directions

The best solutions can squeeze more out of a popular service

There are fewer, but tougher, low-cost accounting packages.

There's a great tendency, especially in smaller practices, to concentrate on getting the work out on time, and catching up on the business side of the business when time permits.

The general consensus in the industry is that accounting software is accounting software. While there are different bells and whistles, the underlying processes are the same whether the entity is a professional practice or a retail store. Sure, there are plenty of vertical packages available to more comfortably accommodate specific kinds of businesses, but for the most part, you can use pretty much any full-featured accounting system and make it work.

The economic meltdown has many companies evaluating methods for preparing payroll.

Given the current economic situation, conducting a financial planning practice isn't getting easier. With the financial uncertainty of the past several years, investors have become uncomfortable with the "business as usual" planning approach.To some extent, this is good news for planners, as it provides the opportunity to perform more in-depth planning for many clients, as well as providing clients with a more proactive approach to investing and planning. With investor goals undergoing frequent revisions, and the means to achieve those goals also increasingly unstable, clients are increasingly willing to allow you to play a more active part in monitoring their investments on an ongoing basis and suggesting changes when appropriate, not just at an annual or bi-annual planning session.

A year ago, the emphasis in document management systems remained on the core areas of scanning, storing and retrieving documents. But the emphasis has changed in the past year, making it clear that document management alone will give way to integrated workflow in which document management is only one part.This makes sense, given that the concept of managing documents simply to produce a "paperless office" never really got off the ground. It wasn't that accountants were disinterested in saving trees or eliminating the cost of storage. Rather, it was the fact that document storage was relatively cheap and the systems used to store and retrieve documents were already integrated into the practice workflow.

Economic recessions are no time to be plowing into software development unless the company either needs the cash flow from a new version to keep going, or the product is so outdated that an update is mandatory. Otherwise, the money is better spent in beefing up product support and planning for marketing when the economy recovers.That's a pretty basic rule, and one that holds true in particular for business-planning software. We have not seen many substantial changes in the software, and don't expect to see much other than patches and a change in version name for 2009.

There are a number of ways that your clients can outgrow their entry-level accounting software. One of the more common instances is that a growing client totally embraces the accounting system to a degree where it has more people that want to use it than the software can support.Most entry-level accounting applications are built on proprietary databases and limit access to five or so simultaneous users.

Let's face it - the economy is in bad shape. Investment houses are going out of business, banks are failing, and many investments have lost an incredible amount of value.If anything good has come out of this financial mess, it might be that it underscores the fact that financial planning and investment strategies almost always have some element of risk, and that the process has to be a dynamic one, with strategies changing as needs and risk aversion on the part of the investor change.

Accounting firms have been doing write-up work since well before computers were available. When computers became affordable, many switched over to using general ledger applications, sometimes on time-shared mini and mainframe computers.Gradually, true write-up applications began to take hold, and this vertical application really started to take off with the advent of the IBM PC.

World War II may have ended over half a century ago, but we are still reaping the benefits of developments initiated during that conflict. While the computer may be the most obvious, the war also saw the application of mathematics to logistics, which, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, morphed into "operations research" - many of the techniques of which have become pretty commonplace to accountants these days.One outgrowth of operations research was systems analysis - looking at things as an integrated entity, not separate pieces. Workflow analysis is an application of systems analysis to examine how the applications and tasks performed in an office or practice interact with each other, as well as with the staff performing them. Workflow software applies these analyses to make sure that the right staff member gets assigned the right task, along with the appropriate documents and data files.

While there was a minor flurry of fixed asset activity surrounding the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and its depreciation and tax impact on businesses, the major focus in fixed asset software packages for 2008 continues to be in the areas of audit and compliance.The goal continues to be a melding of asset inventory, construction-in-process accounting and asset accounting into a cohesive and coherent application, but increasingly the demands of faster, easier and more sophisticated audit support are also garnering attention.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in 2002. Six years later, subject companies are still in the process of trying to comply with its provisions. Add in the fact that other countries are implementing similar financial regulations, some of which U.S. companies operating in those countries are subject to, and it’s easy to see why SOX compliance is still a hot issue.While it seems like everyone is still arguing about implementation issues and which companies should be subject to which provisions, the main effect of Sarbanes-Oxley is to move the ultimate responsibility for the accuracy of financial reports from the outside auditor to the company’s management. “The accountant cooked the books!” is no longer acceptable. The company has to have sufficient internal controls and procedures to detect if the books are being cooked. Under Section 302, management has to certify the appropriateness and fairness of the financial statements, regardless of what an external auditor reports.

Payroll is becoming a seminal battleground in accounting software, with more than a dozen major companies offering a variety of programs. And that doesn't begin to measure new competition from banks and other financial services firms.Nor is there any consensus on the format. Established online payroll services such as CompuPay and MPay are now seeing additional competition from the likes of ADP's Run and Intuit Online Payroll. But service bureaus are likewise making a comeback as they diversify their offerings and compete more strongly on price, as the new myPay service from Thomson-Reuters is demonstrating.

It seems that there always has to be a “killer” application to justify our interest and efforts in using PCs. Spreadsheets were the first of these, and have been followed over the years by word processing, desktop publishing, customer relationship management and, most recently, document management.Some of the fascination with document management comes about because many users think that it’s effectively the “paperless office.”

Personal computers revolutionized a lot of things, including the way that bookkeeping and accounting is performed. Before the Apple //, TRS-80, and IBM PC, bookkeeping was a manual process, and general ledgers were, for the most part, exactly that — large hard-covered binders containing T-Account paper with manual entries. Sure, computers were being used for accounting, but with the buy-in costing tens of thousands of dollars on the low end, the average small business or accounting firm could at best afford an accounting machine such as those sold by NCR and Burroughs.