Software reviews

It used to be pretty easy to define "entry-level" accounting software. It was either available at retail, like QuickBooks and Peachtree, or direct from the vendor and under a certain price point, like MYOB.

Write-up software is in the midst of major changes.

We've been hearing that the paperless office is imminent, and we've been hearing it for years.

The reviews are in

Ben Franklin's famous quote about the certainty of death and taxes actually wasn't a comment about taxes on income. In fact, the tax that prompted his reflection was the one that ignited the Boston Tea Party—the tax on tea.

Accounting and bookkeeping haven't always been particularly easy to accomplish. Before the advent of mechanized bookkeeping, keeping track of financial transactions, and their ultimate effect on a business, was a matter of sorting transactions into the proper category and recording them by hand into paper ledgers, using specialized paper to physically emulate the T-Account concept.

By most accounts, there have been three great evolutions in accounting software over the past three decades: the introduction of the personal computer, the emergence of software that served small-business accounting needs, and the likely move to Web-based/Software-as-a-Service/cloud-based accounting services that take accounting online. But when it comes to low-cost accounting systems, there are three equally important revolutions taking place.

Taxes are, unfortunately, a fact of life. There's taxes for this and taxes on that. Your clients who derive revenue from sales probably have it worse than most.

You might think that, with the advent and popularity of comprehensive write-up software, trial balance applications would have disappeared from the scene. That hasn't happened, nor does it appear to be likely at any time in the near future.

Technology has spurred a revolution in the tax and accounting practices of most firms. What were once rather mundane practice areas of Internal Revenue Service forms and findings and Financial Accounting Standards Board releases has exploded into a content-rich, profit-generating segment of the industry. And nowhere is that more evident than in the emergence over the past decade of strong Web-based research sites and resources to make accountants more efficient and their advice more pertinent to the needs of their clients.

Asset allocation - dividing resources among different investment categories - is a way to lessen the risk of losses in a financial portfolio. Over the past decade, it has become increasingly critical to advisory firms seeking to better serve their clients, particularly high-net-worth clients. This roundup focuses on nine solutions for asset allocation, ranging from the simple and most basic to the most sophisticated. Each is designed to meet the needs of a different size of advisor, and each has a significant presence among accounting firms engaged in financial planning and wealth management.

Given how many businesses perform their own accounting, you might think that write-up is a thing of the past. After all, why should a business pay you to do something that they can do in-house?

The field of computer-assisted accounting has changed dramatically. For many years, the process of bookkeeping and accounting was best left to those professionals who understood the arcane tasks and uttered strange pronouncements like:

This has not been the best of years for retirement planning software. First, in spite of an upward-trending market, retirement plans and portfolios have been badly battered. Second and worse, the whole class of software has come under attack for perceived inadequacies.

Times are tough, and while it's often been difficult in the past to get clients to pay on time, it's even more of a task these days. But you're not doing your clients, or your practice, a favor by being late in billing for services, or allowing clients to run up large past-due balances.

Ben Franklin is credited with saying that the only sure things in life are death and taxes, so there's probably not going to be a way to make the payroll application pleasant. But the right software or service provider can make a big difference in both your clients' experience and your practice. There's no big secret - it's just a matter of helping your clients match their needs with the cost and capabilities of the available solutions.

The term "basic analysis" has evolved in recent years. Where once it referred to the ability to determine a client's financial position, net worth, goals and willingness to take risks with a portfolio, more recent definitions have focused more intensely on the process of asset allocation, re-allocation and portfolio balancing.

Practice management is one of those applications that is difficult to define. For many practitioners, it's a souped-up form of time & billing - an application to implement when T&B no longer serves the needs of a practice.

If ever there was a class of software that could be expected not to change much, it would be accounting software for midsized companies. After all, the companies themselves have survived the worst of their growth pains. The accounting requirements, while slightly more demanding, are well-defined and easily within the range of the systems available on the market.

In the worst economy in 75 years, the challenge of asset allocation for a given portfolio has never been greater. But that doesn