As a financial services professional, one of your key responsibilities is to find balance between your credits and debits at the end of the month, the quarter and the fiscal year. But what happens when debits or credits are missing, or when you cannot access vital records online?You could be facing a major problem.

INTUIT ELEVATES GOODARZI AND WARD; COMBINES DIVISIONSTax and financial software provider Intuit Inc. has named Sasan Goodarzi president of its Intuit Financial Institutions Division and a senior vice president of the company, and tapped Jill Ward, vice president of its Accountants Central unit, to serve as vice president and general manager of its newly formed Intuit Accounting Professionals Division.

The development of future partners is of utmost importance in firms of all sizes due to the number of Baby Boomers now occupying those seats.What criteria is your firm using to select future partners? At what age do you select them for the partner track? Who is responsible for their development and learning the economics of today's accounting firm? Or are you simply waiting for another firm to acquire yours?

Intuit said it plans to avoid the electronic filing delays that kept many last-minute tax returns from being processed last April.

Brad Smith, an Indianapolis-based CPA, has created two add-in products for Microsoft Word that he is selling to help accountants and regular Word users employ formulas more easily in the word processor's tables.

Sage’s move to remove its top American management wasn’t unusual. It was dramatic. But it was not unusual in the sense that the leadership of much of the accounting software market has changed. Mike Braun replaced a CEO at Intacct who was sent packing. Steve Bennett is retiring from Intuit to be replaced by SVP Brad Smith.

ILumen has launched the iLumen Online Business Community, a service designed to combine online social networking features with iLumen's financial analysis capabilities.

Sage Software has selected a list of top-producing business partners for 2007.

Intuit is launching a nationwide series of seminars to tell accountants about the latest version of its QuickBooks software to help them service clients.

AccountantsWorld has released its Accounting Relief software with Web 2.0 features that allow accountants to collaborate with small business clients.

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.

SAGE UPGRADES ABRA HR; CREATES ADVISORY BOARDSage Software has unveiled its latest versions (7.6 and 8.3) of Sage Abra HRMS, the company's human resource management system for small and midsized businesses and organizations in North America, featuring Employer Information Report EEO-1 and compatibility with the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system.

For the past two decades, I have watched accountants price services based upon the cost of labor plus a desired profit. This is the effort-based economy trap.About 15 years ago, we developed a pricing matrix for consulting services in an attempt to capture the perceived value of the services in the eyes of our clients. We coupled this with a strong engagement letter that clearly defined the scope of our services; in addition, we utilized change orders as engagements expanded.

Serenic has updated its Serenic Navigator software with new features for managing financial grants.

CCH has introduced CorpSystem, a new line of software for corporate professionals who do tax and accounting work.

Document management provider Cabinet NG has launched a new function that will allow users of any Windows-based business application to integrate with its flagship document management system, CNG-SAFE.

Microsoft has identified an odd bug in Excel 2007 that incorrectly displays 100,000 as the multiplication result in a cell when the answer should be 65,535 or 65,536.

WennSoft released Version 10.0 of its business management software in an effort to keep up with Microsoft's latest release of Dynamics GP, also at Version 10, with which it integrates.

Online cash management service CashView said it received $6.5 million in a second round of funding led by Emergence Capital, giving the company a lift as it launches its product with a free trial.

The Treasury Department is upgrading its Electronic Federal Tax Payment System while phasing out some of its older systems.