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August 2010 |  BY Greg Hammermaster |  Article

In a tight economy, small businesses are finding it increasingly necessary to offer their customers a payment card (creditdebit) option. CPAs can use these tips to educate their small business clients about payment processing Advise clients to choose a technically savvy and financially stable payments provider.

April 2010 |  BY ALEXANDRA DEFELICE |  Article

Lewis A. Dulitz, vice president of accounting policies and research at Covidien—a $10.7 billion health care products company with 42,000 employees in more than 60 countries—was part of a team that implemented the necessary technology changes in Europe to help Covidien convert to IFRS and led a similar team in the U.S.

March 2010 |  BY Joseph Manzelli, CPA/CITP |  Article

Nearly all CPA firms prepare tax returns electronically. However, many still also use some oldfashioned methods, such as sending out tax organizers manually. Here are tips to more fully realize what it means to go paperless. First, understand and share the goal A more efficient, digital tax process can help firms provide a better worklife balance for employees, giving them more control over when, where and how they work.

February 2010 |  BY RANDY JOHNSTON |  Article

“Why should we change the way we track tax work through the office? Isn’t the manual system better?” I have heard these types of questions many times over the years, and it never surprises me because accountants, like many of us, don’t like change. Firms that use a manual system or their tax software as a workflow system need to review how much those systems are costing them.

February 2010 |  BY Alexandra DeFelice |  Article

Federal and state laws continue to get stricter about maintaining the security of clients’ Social Security numbers. Accountants in Massachusetts and Nevada are required to encrypt emails that contain clients’ personally identifiable information, and several states have similar legislation pending. Client portals—secure online storage areas—offer an alternative to email for communicating and collaborating with clients.

January 2010 |  BY ALEXANDRA DEFELICE |  Article

Highperforming firms include technology in their strategic plans and leverage those tools to help them succeed in areas such as client service, practice management and staffing, according to a survey by Opinion Research Center commissioned by CCH. The survey included quantitative interviews with 100 partners at firms ranging in size from five to more than 100 employees that reported aboveaverage revenue per employee.

December 2009 |  BY ALEXANDRA DEFELICE |  Article

Another tax season is coming and with it come renewed vows of “going paperless”—or at least going in that direction. The CPAs who have gone completely paperless—scanning in the beginning of the process, using triple monitors so the third screen replaces the physical source docs and essentially never touching a piece of paper during preparation—say they’d never go back.

November 2009 |  BY SUSAN E. BRADLEY, CPA/CITP/CFF |  Article

Windows 7, the newest version of Microsoft’s desktop operating system, comes with numerous functional improvements over its widely used predecessors, Vista and XP. Some of these enhancements—such as more powerful hard drive search and data encryption capabilities—will save time and boost security others, including 64bit application support and Applelike multifinger touchscreen technology for resizing windows, will enable you to do things you couldn’t do on a Windows PC until now.

August 2009 |  Article

When the IRS announced in June that it would launch a review of tax return preparers, the Maryland Association of CPAs (MACPA) spread the word to its members with a news item on the association Web site. But it didn’t stop there. The association posted the IRS news on its Facebook page and blog.

August 2009 |  BY MEGAN PINKSTON |  Article

Twitter has taken the Internet by storm. Like LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter hosts a growing community of CPAs and financial professionals, but unlike its socialnetworking peers, the microblogging Web site limits users’ messages, questions and conversations to 140 characters (including spaces). To put this limit into perspective, this paragraph has 425 characters—more than three times Twitter’s character limit for posts.