Joe Gibbons worked in retail management at a now-defunct national sporting goods company for six years before establishing Gibbons & Gibbons PC, a CPA firm in Vienna, Va.Since then, he has witnessed firsthand how far integration has come between point-of-sale software and back-office accounting solutions.

XBRL International, the consortium working toward global adoption of the Extensible Business Reporting Language, said that it would form a standards board to upgrade its technical materials and to oversee and monitor their production.The consortium said that it would formally establish the board over the upcoming months, and has appointed Michael Ohata of Microsoft Corp. as founding standards board chair and issued a call for nominations to other positions. Ohata serves as controller of reporting standards for Microsoft Finance.

CCH INTEGRATES WITH MICROSOFT DYNAMICS: CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business and provider of tax and compliance software, has launched seamless integration between its CertiTax product and Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning solutions.CertiTax, a Web-based suite for sales and use tax calculation spanning 8,000 jurisdictions, contains a new, quicker and easier-to-use interface with Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly branded as Great Plains), AX (Axapta), SL (Solomon) and NAV (Navision). "The new CertiTax integration can save hours of work by allowing an accounting department to manage sales tax for all its customers and products with a single tax schedule," said CCH sales and use tax product manager Bruce Krumlauf, in a statement.

All too often, companies either rely upon personal knowledge and skill to recover from emergency situations, or they write a multi-volume encyclopedia of recovery procedures. When disaster strikes, neither approach lends itself to rapid response.You simply cannot rely upon any particular individual to be available during an emergency. Neither can you expect your staff to read through pages and pages of process documentation while chaos reins. There is a better way: Think in terms of recovery phases and align your documentation and recovery efforts with them.

Imagine a plane that is about to take off. On the plane are a client's financial advisors. Who is in the pilot's seat? Who is in the co-pilot's seat? Who is in first class and who is in coach? These are questions CPAs should ask themselves in today's commoditized and competitive world.Most clients have a team of advisors and the size of the team is growing. Clients often look to multiple advisors within a firm, as well as to those on the outside.

Numerous upgrades and products were announced at Insights 2006, Sage Software's annual partner conference. Accounting and operations management, customer relationship management, human resources and payroll services are some of the areas in which new products and upgrades will be released by this fall.

Sales tax and compliance software provider Avalara revealed its streamlined sales tax certified editions of AvaTax, a sales tax automation solution line, for Sage's enterprise resource planning applications MAS 90, MAS 200, 500 and Accpac.

Excel rules. This is the one law and will be the one law.

Creative Solutions, a unit of Thomson Tax & Accounting, has acquired the assets of Dunphy Systems, a Columbus, Ohio-based publisher and marketer of tax software.

Is the payment processing business the next great thing for accounting software vendors and their channels?

Creative Solutions, a provider of business software and part of the Thomson Corp., and Rivet Software, a financial management and Extensible Business Reporting Language software developer, have partnered to make Rivet's Dragon Tag and Dragon View XBRL applications available to CS customers.

NetSuite Inc., an on-demand business software provider, unveiled NetSuite - Software Edition, a software company-geared version of their online flagship software system.NetSuite - Software Edition has updated three specific areas of its original online edition to meet the special needs of software companies. The new edition enhances the financial management, customer relationship management and dashboards of the software system.

SAGE BUYS NORWEGIAN SOFTWARE FIRM: The Sage Group has a deal in place to acquire Norwegian software and accounting firm Visma for approximately $584 million.With 200,000 customers, Visma is the largest Scandinavian vendor of business management solutions for small and midsized businesses. Visma's revenues for 2005 were approximately $290 million, up almost $40 million from the 2004 figures. As of December 31, Visma had gross assets of approximately $345 million.

Microsoft's annual business software confab, Convergence 2006, centered on the combination of Microsoft business products into one Microsoft enterprise resource planning system, and also on converging communication devices for both work and home."The opportunity to do better software has never been stronger," said Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates, in a keynote address to roughly 7,000 attendees. "We talk about this digital decade and people living a digital work style or a digital lifestyle when they go home -and that is becoming more and more commonly accepted. As you move things away from paperwork and onto the digital approach, everything is software value-added."

Recruiting quality, experienced people: It's the No. 1 issue facing the CPA and IT clients we coach.There is a "science" to recruiting, a series of tasks that, when done, usually will produce some candidates. These tasks include defining the duties, skills and compensation for each new hire, identifying sources for finding candidates, and agreeing on who will be involved in screening and how you will make your offer.

If there were a single word to describe the state of the not-for-profit marketplace, it would be "accountability."The scrutiny given many nonprofits in the wake of the tsunami and hurricane crises of the past 18 months, combined with some high-profile scandals among national and local nonprofits, has done for this market what Enron did for public corporations - driven the demand for clear audit trails and better reporting of nonprofit financial information.

What are portals and why are they one of the hottest technologies in client service?While definitions differ, to me a portal is a secure Web site where clients can store, access and retrieve business content.

Intuit will host its first QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions User Conference at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass in Phoenix. The two-day conference, starting on May 31, will consist of Intuit executives, industry experts and midsized business QuickBooks Enterprise users.

NetSuite Inc. announced that users of its business software will be able to use a new module, Google OneBox for Enterprise, for added flexibility when searching business data across a company.

CPAs are increasingly using technologies in new ways in their practice. Data mining and data analysis are two applications that have been particularly hot as of late. Interestingly, CPAs aren't the only ones taking advantage of these advances in technology. Taxing authorities are also doing so.