Software reviews

Before write-up became a popular application, trial balance software ruled the market.The popular ATB (Accountant’s Trial Balance) is probably one of the best-known accountant-oriented applications ever created, even years after it ceased to be marketed.

Up until the beginning of 2008, the trends for nonprofit accounting software were simple and predictable — accountability, efficiency and better utilization of resources.But the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market and the ensuing slip toward recession will change that landscape for the worse, in three ways:

Accounting firms and consulting practices have different priorities when it comes to what applications are considered mission-critical. For some practices, the management aspect — knowing how firm resources are being applied to service clients and maintain and build the practice — is a prime concern. For others, especially smaller or more directed practices, this aspect of practice management is of less concern.Revenue management, however, is one aspect of practice management that’s of primary concern in any firm, large or small. It doesn’t much matter whether you are billing your clients on an hourly basis, or whether you have been able to switch over to value billing. If clients aren’t billed in an accurate and timely manner, there’s little chance that they will pay in a timely (and hopefully accurate) manner. And without that cash flow, it doesn’t much matter how efficiently your practice is being managed. You still have to pay the rent, salaries and other ongoing bills.

Practice management, as an application, appears differently to different viewers. To some, practice management is all about revenue management. To others, it’s about time management, and to yet others, it’s about project management.Practice management encompasses all of these areas and more. At its most basic definition, practice management is about resource management. Every firm is constrained by the resources that it has available, including staff hours and availability, and economic factors. A good practice management system allows a firm to maximize the use of these resources through awareness of how staff time is employed, making sure that the right resources are applied to the right tasks, and that revenue is generated in a profitable manner and collected in an appropriate time.

As the marketplace for business planning software matures, it is being cleanly divided into two separate branches. The first addresses the needs of established companies that are looking to validate the performance of the company and gain insights into decisions for growth, acquisitions and business valuation. The second more directly meets the needs of entrepreneurs and small businesses that are seeking initial or additional funding, or otherwise need presentation pieces to demonstrate business performance.The tools for mature companies are now termed "business intelligence" or "corporate performance management" software, and the tools for small business go by the historical name of "business planning software." Both categories utilize historical data to make forward projections that are charted graphically for quick comprehension (often through a management "dashboard"), though business planning software contains more descriptive text.

Lots of businesses are using entry-level accounting software bought at retail, and find that these packages do the job nicely. At some point, however, it's likely that your clients' businesses will grow to the point where these store-bought solutions no longer do the trick.There are lots of reasons why this can happen. One of the more frequent reasons is that there are more staff in the business who need simultaneous access to the accounting application. Most of the entry-level systems available today are limited to only a few simultaneous users, which presents a problem if you have a client who needs to provide access to 10, 20 or even more users.

Financial planning isn't magic, but it is an art as much as it is a science. Different planning practices deal with different kinds of investment vehicles. But regardless of the vehicle, financial plans are rarely static.That's because clients' investment goals and resources change over time. What was right for last year's goals may not be right today, and will almost certainly change tomorrow.

Most accountants have stopped worrying about their clients bringing bookkeeping in-house. Even with a client performing their own bookkeeping, there's plenty of work that only an accountant can perform, including making adjusting and closing entries, and producing compilation and review reports.In many firms that prepare tax returns for their clients, write-up software is used in lieu of a trial balance application to prepare the client's data for tax processing. Between these engagements, and the clients who would still prefer that you perform the bookkeeping, there's still plenty of need for a good write-up application in many practices.

Ask most people about the developments in the software markets for fixed asset management, and the responses will fall into two areas - the move toward a Web-based application service provider model in fixed assets, and the opportunities for compliance in the areas of FIN 48 and Sarbanes-Oxley.But more interesting in the long run may be the impact of convergence. For too long, fixed asset management systems have focused on the accounting side, leaving to chance or to manual spreadsheets the tasks of locating, identifying, marking and recording the assets themselves. With advances in new hardware and asset inventory technologies over the past two decades, the race for dominance in this class of software may depend less on the mad dash to go online than on a race to see which software can best merge the elements of asset inventory, construction-in-process accounting and asset accounting into a cohesive and coherent application.

You might think that five years after a bill was passed, figuring out how to comply with it would be pretty much cut-and-dried. That's simply not the case with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.While there is a good understanding of the kinds of excesses and vulnerabilities that its major sections are supposed to prevent, exactly how to go about implementing compliance procedures - and to what extent different-sized companies are responsible for compliance - is still very much up in the air.

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.

Before the advent of the personal computer, computerizing a business' accounting was a daunting experience, costing thousands of dollars just for the software component. Many companies hired a team of programmers to either customize a "turnkey" system of hardware and software to their specific requirements, or to write their own accounting applications.All that changed when the first PCs hit the market.

The fact that there has been no Baby Boomer "bust" has been due in large part to the skill of retirement planners, accountants and their clients.The bust was supposed to occur as Boomers began reaching retirement age without having saved enough to retire. This, coupled with the dismantling of the retirement and pension programs at a host of corporations nationwide, could have created the most poverty-stricken generation of retirees since the Great Depression.

Years ago, write-up software was fairly rare, and the market was dominated by trial balance applications. Over the years, as software applications have become more sophisticated, the distribution has switched, with write-up becoming predominant. While not as popular as it was in the past, software specifically designed for trial balance use is still available, and still selling very nicely.While the two applications are somewhat similar, they are far from identical. Nor is trial balance a subset of write-up. Sure, you enter financial data into either of them, and both can produce financial statements, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

Though you wouldn't know it from the software, there are serious changes underway in the market for nonprofit accounting solutions.The software itself has shown only small, incremental improvements in the past year, largely because 2006 was a year of heavy development and major upgrades for most of the major packages. But in the not-for-profit sector, a number of issue are stirring:

During its annual Convergence user conference in March, Microsoft issued a press release announcing that it had promoted a Dane, Klaus Holse Andersen, to the position of corporate VP worldwide sales and operations for its Dynamics operations Other than that, Microsoft didn’t make a big deal of the news Andersen’s name was not mentioned during keynotes at the events. At interviews with Dynamics head Doug Burgum and Satya Nadella, held during the conference, neither man said, “Of course, you know we are strengthening our executive team. Would you like to talk to Klaus?” That didn’t happen. Nor did Andersen’s named get mentioned by Burgum or corporate VP Tami Reller when they announced that Nadella was unexpectedly moving to head Microsoft’s search engine wars. A PR person said Andersen was highly visible at reseller events, but the only reseller I got to talk to about this claim said essentially, “Baloney.” It’s possible this was all simply disarray triggered by the sudden move with Nadella. Or maybe it’s an attempt to manipulate the press--something Microsoft has always excelled at. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for the first time, someone with the title of operations has been placed outside the United States, out side of Fargo, N.D., which gave us Dynamics. Andersen will remain in Copenhagen. There’s been no rush to explain the title and most of the press coverage has been straightforward rehashing of the official press release. In the words of the Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men,” the secret is to follow the money and the money is increasingly coming from Dynamics AX and NAV, still largely called Axapta and Navision, even by top Dynamics people Whether or not there is still something called Project Green, designed to give the four Dynamics accounting packages a common engine, the fact is that all the key people I’ve met in programming over the last four years have been Danish. Now, I don’t think any of this means we’ve seen the last of Great Plains or Solomon (Dynamic GP and SL), because Microsoft would be pretty dumb to snub those installed bases. But it’s also clear these are largely U.S. products while AX and NAV are international products which have a lot more growth potential. The more important question is whether Denmark runs everything. Does Microsoft put Burgum’s successor in America, much less in Fargo, with the head of operations now in Copenhagen? More intriguing was that most of the sales functionality had been drained from Dynamics and placed under Kevin Johnson over the last four years. This is the first exec with a sales title at Dynamics in a while. And also intriguing is that Andersen has CEO experience. A lot of people think Reller is the favorite to replace Burgum. But I’m starting to think it that were going to happen, it would have happened already. But Microsoft has been full of surprises.

It's little wonder that in many accounting firms, time and billing is still one of the most critical applications, as well as the one most likely to be neglected. The reasons for this importance are underscored by the name of the application itself.While you might argue that it's the expertise of your staff and the product that you sell, the actuality is that what the client pays for is the time your staff spends on their behalf. Value billing is a great concept, but even after all these years of trying to move clients over to this method of billing, many clients still want to see how much effort, in the form of time, is being spent on their account.

The term "financial planning" covers a lot of area. On the high end, it can mean managing millions of dollars in assets, and continuously analyzing the results, yields and needs to determine the best allocation of capital.Financial planning also refers to the accountant or tax preparer who sees or hears from a client once a year, and uses the annual tax preparation appointment as a way of offering planning advice as well.

For accounting firms, the term "practice management" covers a range of definitions that includes virtually everything from codes of practice to the assignment of parking spaces. But when it comes to software, the term rapidly focuses on four capabilities that the management of any accounting firm needs to have available:1. The accurate collection of time, expense and billing data, with the added ability to integrate this information into the firm's internal accounting system.

It's always interesting to see when software trends are failing. Four years ago, software vendors couldn't get over their love affair with the big "enterprise" customers, ditching their small business and mid-market customers in favor of wealthier global concerns. The accounting software industry was no exception.Now the trend is reversing itself, due in part to the fact that there are only a relative handful of enterprise customers to be had - and most of them do not want to go through the pain and cost of switching accounting systems unless it is absolutely necessary. Today, the mantra is to move into the mid-market, where companies are forced by growth to upgrade their systems. Little software vendors are moving up to the mid-market; big vendors are moving down.