Accounting technology news and resources

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May 1, 2001

Avoid Taxes in Liquidation

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY THE IRS SAYS DISTRIBUTIONS of customer-based intangibles to shareholders are taxable. When a firm or corporation distributes to its shareholders all of its assets, both tangible and intangible, and ceases doing business, the IRS says there is a taxable distribution of its intangible goodwill. THE CRITICAL ISSUE FOR

May 1, 2001

A CPA’s Guide to the Top Issues in Technology

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY EACH YEAR, THE AICPA’s INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY team assembles a group of tech-savvy CPAs to identify the topics it believes will most affect the profession, its clients and employers. SECURITY AND PRIVACY are two of the group’s top technology issues for 2001, reflecting concern that existing measures are not

April 1, 2001

Facing the Future

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY DON’T BE QUICK TO upgrade to the hot new technology. Those who rush to be at the forefront often pay a high price because the newest and hottest technology is usually the most expensive and the most vulnerable to initial design errors. AVOID GETTING LURED into buying the

March 1, 2001

Nine Ways to Make Your Firm More Exciting

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY THE EFFORT TO CREATE EXCITEMENT rewards modest expenditure with a generous payoff, fostering a pleasant, energetic workplace and making clients look forward to your visits. An exciting business will grow more than one that isn’t. SEMINARS, WORKSHOPS AND CONFERENCES are an important opportunity to learn and network. Motivational

January 1, 2001

How to Be Careful and Still Be Clear

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY IN AN EFFORT TO SIDESTEP POTENTIAL LIABILITY, CPAs may obscure rather than clarify important information presented to clients. The types of documents least affected by professional standards are the ones that are most important for practice development. A CPA WHO SPEAKS AND WRITES PLAIN ENGLISH develops a reputation

December 1, 2000

Pay Your Staff for Performance

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY INCREASING THE PRODUCTIVE, efficient, billable use of each staff member’s time well into the 1,500 to 2,000 hour annual range is the key to a firm’s bottom-line improvement. ANY FIRM THAT BILLS AND COLLECTS less than an average of 2.4 times base salary for staff time should

November 1, 2000

The Downside of Good Times

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A PRACTITIONER FOUND ONE RISK OF A STRONG economy is that small business clients may loosen their internal controls, discovering fraud or theft only long after it has happened. THE MOST VULNERABLE ARE PRIVATE COMPANIES in the $10 million to $30 million range because they are large

November 1, 2000

A New Standard of Tax Practice

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY THE AICPA HAS ISSUED EIGHT STATEMENTS on Standards for Tax Services as enforceable standards for AICPA members. Effective October 31, they replaced the advisory Statements on Responsibilities in Tax Practice. COMMENT LETTERS RAISED QUESTIONS ABOUT the necessity of enforceable tax practice standards. The strongest argument for enforceable

October 1, 2000

XBRL Approved for U.S. Implementation

The XBRL committee, an AICPA-led consortium of more than 50 accounting firms, financial services providers and technology companies, in July released XBRL for Financial Statements, a formal specification of the extensible business reporting language for implementation in the United States. (See “Comments Encouraged on Newly Named XBRL,” JofA, June00, page

September 1, 2000

The SEC’s Proposed Auditor Rule Threatens Our Profession and the Public.

SEPTEMBER 2000 VOLUME 190, NUMBER 3 Editorial Staff Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Colleen Katz Executive Editor Barbara J. Shildneck Managing Editor Elizabeth Uva Senior Editors Katharine W. Coveleski Peter D. Fleming Michael Hayes Raj Rangarajan Robert Tie Cynthia Waller Vallario Stanley Zarowin Assistant Editors Sarah Cobb Vincent Nolan Contributing Editors Maria

September 1, 2000

Expanding Into Cyberspace

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PRACTICALLY EVERY ASPECT OF THE tax preparation field is changing, evolving into a totally new market and business. The number of tax software brands on the market is shrinking, leaving thousands of CPAs tax software orphans with fewer replacement products to choose from. WHILE THE NUMBER OF

August 1, 2000

Drilling for Information

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY GIVES financial managers the opportunity to create interactive, multidimensional reports. With the click of a few buttons, you can prepare up-to-date financial reports automatically. IN ADDITION, THE REPORTS can provide drill-down functionality. Click on a number in the report, and the underlying support data appear.

August 1, 2000

Finally, Business Talks the Same Language

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY XBRL, EXTENSIBLE BUSINESS REPORTING LANGUAGE, soon will be the lingua franca for all business reporting—from issuing financial statements to banks and shareholders to filing 10-Ks with the SEC or uploading business information onto a Web site. The development surely will revolutionize how business information is reported, used

July 1, 2000

Harding Recognized for XBRL Efforts

The AICPA presented Wayne Harding, a vice president of Great Plains Software, Inc., with its Special Recognition Award at the Institute’s Tech 2000 conference in Atlanta recently. Harding played a key role in the development of XBRL (extensible business reporting language), an XML-based specification that allows for the preparation and

July 1, 2000

New AcSec Chairman

The AICPA named Mark V. Sever, a partner of Ernst & Young LLP, as chairman of its accounting standards executive committee (AcSEC), effective October 2000. Sever, who is a current AcSEC member, succeeds David Kaplan of PricewaterhouseCoopers, who completes his three-year term as chairman.

July 1, 2000

Confronting Retirement

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ALTHOUGH MOST CPAs HAVE their own personal retirement accounts, a surprising number of practitioners don’t have formal retirement plans for their businesses. AS RETIREMENT PLANS ARE DEVELOPED, senior partners may have doubts about whether their successors can honor future obligations, intend to stay with the firm or

July 1, 2000

IT Credential to Help CPAs Make Business Sense Out of Technology

Aimed at CPAs involved in information technology, strategic planning, management and implementation, the new certified information technology professional (CITP) designation the AICPA introduced in May was designed to leverage the CPA’s abilities as a strategist and general business adviser. “Market research reveals that business owners and executives need impartial guidance

June 1, 2000

Overnight to India

t sounds like magic: Send your back-office chores away at night and find the finished work waiting with your e-mail in the morning. Believe it or not, some CPA firms are doing it: e-mailing tasks to accounting and programming personnel in India, where the workday begins just as Americans head

June 1, 2000

Comments Requested on Newly Named Version of XML for Business Reporting

SPECIAL REPORT The first specification for a business-reporting variant (XBRL) of extensible markup language (XML) was the subject of an April symposium. The XBRL project committee held the meeting to encourage comments on the specification and to announce its new name. Until then, it had been known as XFRML—for financial

June 1, 2000

Lawmakers Tackle Privacy

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY E-COMMERCE PRIVACY ISSUES ARE HIGH PROFILE in Washington. Technology allows the easy accumulation and distribution of personal financial data as well as the theft of these data, and security must be ensured. INCIDENTS THAT CAUGHT THE ATTENTION OF Congress were a bank selling confidential information to third-party marketers;