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Small businesses often forget the importance of backing up important data files as most of their time is spent growing revenues and cutting costs.  Both Mozy and Idrive offer a couple gigabytes free for personal or very small business use (this would be good for at least your Quickbooks files) but are limited to Windows based machines.  Unlimited personal use plans are also reasonably priced from these two vendors.

However, being a proponent of open-source programs and software, I expanded my search to find a company that at least supported a Linux solution.  It appears the standard solution is rsync.   Even Ibackup, the other provider I found uses the open-source rsync utility to facilitate Linux backups.

 So, no matter your machine’s configuration, make online backups part of your daily routine to ensure that no matter what calamity may strike, your business will be back up and running smoothly.

An article at PCWorld.com showcased several open-source projects that serve as alternatives to software products for which most users pay dearly.  One of my favorites as an accountant was GNUCash.  While I have not had time to thoroughly review the product, the screenshots appear similar to the registers in Quickbooks.

Considering the price of Quickbooks, and its lack of interoperability between versions (one of the greatest annoyances I have with the program) GNUCash may provide a very simple but powerful alternative for users that are familiar with accounting programs.  I doubt that it is as pretty, but it seems to be a great value.

There were several other products shown in the review and it is a great article for small business owners who are tired of paying high prices for products that overpromise and underdeliver.

In an article on WebCPA.com, there is an assertion that the workers in Generation Y (born 1978-1990) are gaining traction in the workforce due to increased demand for workers to replace those retiring baby boomers. The things that these Generation Y employees are looking for are career development and increased work/life balance (generally less work and more of a life). However, when you run a CPA firm that is dominated by the billable hour, how do you empower the employees and give them what they want while keeping up the hours/employee to remain profitable?

The simple truth, you either have to rethink your business model or somebody is going to not be happy with the outcome: more hours worked or less top-line revenue per employee. When there is a conflict of interest between partner desires (increased revenue) and employee desires (more life outside of work), who wins? In the past, partners would win this hands down because new accountants were plentiful, so if someone quit because of this issue, they were easily replaced. Now it appears the balance of power may be shifting to the employee as article after article in the accounting realm comes out touting ways to improve employee retention and attract top talent in an increasingly tight job market.

I don’t think we are near mutiny, as there is always a certain respect due to the one who signs your paycheck, but we are at a point where there is an opportunity for younger staff to have some input on the way firms are run going forward into the future. The partners and administrative staff in charge of recruiting are looking more to the recently hired staff to determine what it was that attracted them and what it takes to keep them happy and get them to stay.

I think it is in the best interest of public firms in this tight job market to keep pay very close to private sector pay and manage the workload as much as possible to avoid constant retraining due to increased lack of retention. Public accounting is great experience, but public practices need to work harder now more than ever to see the benefits of that experience within the firm, rather than letting private clients reap the benefits of the public accounting training.

Following a discussion with one of my former professors regarding an article from the Pennsylvania CPA Journal I was given an opportunity to speak to a group of students at Creighton University regarding certain Excel skills that I have ascertained and use on a daily basis to be effective in performing my work.  I know that the local universities do not require much in the way of developing technical proficiency with key tools because of my recent experience as a student and experience with new staff from various local schools that are astounded by some rather simple but effective formulas that make our work much quicker and easier.

My rule is basically to never do by hand what you can get the computer to do for you.  Use Excel as a spreadsheet, not as a calculator or worse, a typewriter.  Use Excel to perform valuable functions that speed up your work, instead of merely digitizing work that was previously done on paper.  I remember during my first month at work, someone on the other side of the cubical wall asked if anyone knew how to use a VLOOKUP function in Excel, and the local area of the office was silent.  Then there was a mention that a very technically inclined person from the other side of the office my know how to use the function properly.  I could not believe that no one who had been at the firm for several years knew how to use this function.  At the time, I was not familiar with it myself, but I have since become very familiar with the family of lookup functions.

Another great decision making / problem solving skill that would be great to have out of the university is to quickly recognize a situation where a database program is going to be more effective than a spreadsheet.  I have done a ton of trial balances for tax clients in Excel, because that is the way it has been done for the past 20 years.  However, with the integration of improved trial balance software (CaseWare), I am starting to wonder if anyone’s trial balance should see the inside of a spreadsheet, no matter how simple (especially if there will be a lot of book-keeping adjustments made).  The trial balance software reduces errors and duplication of work from year to year by giving accounts permanent associations that generate useful reports automatically.

Not that universities don’t do a great job at giving us the proper foundation to be adequate accountants, but firms as well as other employers expect someone who has graduated from an accounting program to have a certain level of proficiency with these types of tools that is not necessarily instilled in our post-secondary educational system.  I was thrilled that this professor understood the issue and allowed me to speak to his class, but I would like to see the next step of required curriculum or testing to establish a baseline for technical proficiency that employers can depend upon.

With the recent decision by the SEC to allow foreign corporations to file their financial statements in accordance with IFRS (no reconciliation to GAAP required), does GAAP (and FASB) have much of a future?  FASB, recognized by the SEC as a standard setting body, has traditionally served setting standards for public companies who report to the SEC.

However, with the recent decision to no longer require foreign companies to reconcile with GAAP, the SEC has taken the first step towards requiring no publicly traded company to report based on GAAP if they use IFRS.  FASB and the IASB are still working on their convergence project to create a single international standard for accounting, but with this move the SEC has tilted the balance of power in favor of the IASB.

If FASB and IASB have a serious disagreement, I doubt IASB will have much incentive to concede (or even compromise).  FASB may remain in play for privately held companies, or public companies that are deeply entrenched in GAAP and have no international components, but the a large number of US based public companies will probably take the option to report on IFRS when it is given to them.  This proposition is already being floated around the SEC and will probably be approved shortly (if IFRS is good enough for one set of publicly held companies, it is good enough for another set of publicly held companies).

Accountants and auditors for publicly held companies may have only one set of standards to be intimately familiar with in the near future as IFRS is positioned to take the place of the American standard of accounting embodied in GAAP.  Apparently good guiding principles trump stringent, sticky, loophole-filled rules.

The majority of small and medium sized businesses utilize some type of desktop accounting software to handle their book-keeping and accounting chores.  Among the most prolific are Quickbooks and Peachtree.  Quickbooks is now offering its own web-based solution called Quickbooks Online Edition for $24.95 per month ($300 annually).  However, from a review of the comparison between Quickbooks Pro 2008 and Quickbooks Online Edition, it appears that the online edition is missing support for inventory tracking and pricing, as well as additional cost for customized invoicing, delayed billing, class tracking, and time tracking. 

Another plus for the online edition is its support for 3 users plus your accountant at the $24.95 per month base fee compared with $200 per user for QB Pro.  If you’re a small company with no inventory, QB Online may provide a sufficient solution, or you may be stuck on your desktop if you are in love with either the QB or Peachtree software for handling all facets of your business.

There is a very acceptable alternative that I have had a chance to review lately that has flown largely under the radar.  An Ohio based software development firm, Noguska, LLC, has developed a web-based accounting software that appears to be a comprehensive solution that is completely scalable in NolaPro.  NolaPro is free to download and install on your server or desktop, however you can opt for a NolaPro hosted solution for $25 per month, $60 quarterly ($20/month), or $200 annually ($16.67/month).

As an accountant I often have instances where I have one entity with multiple companies and multiple QB files and Quickbooks is slower than dirt at switching between the companies as it unloads one database and loads up another.  In NolaPro, separate companies are on drop down boxes that switch nearly instantly.  More than one user?  NolaPro doesn’t mind as it supports unlimited users with customizable rights.

So QB roles out a new edition, you have to run out and buy the latest and greatest, and your accountant has to do the same to remain compatible.  In the hosted NolaPro solution, upgrades are made automatically and free of charge, and if you choose to host yourself, the upgrade is free for download, just as the original program was.  NolaPro makes its money by the natural consulting business that develops from the utilization of its software.  The software is encrypted so that they have the rights to customization and such.  So if you have a highly specialized invoice for customers, but you want to be cheap, you can download the NolaPro program for free and take the money you saved to hire NolaPro consultants to make your special invoice.

QB Online did not offer an inventory solution with its product, but NolaPro includes an integrated inventory/shopping cart program, where the online shopping cart is tied directly to the inventory system within the accounting package.  I do not know how this works on a desktop installation, but it is pretty neat to see it work on a web-based installation.

There is a demo on the NolaPro site, but it has been messed with quite a bit and doesn’t really give you a feel of what your initial installation will look like, but it is at https://demo.nolapro.com/.

I desired to do an evaluation of Netsuite, as I have read about their solutions on WebCPA.com, but it has been almost a month since I emailed the company asking for more information and I have received no reply.  However, I am happy that I found NolaPro in my search for solutions to aid the small and medium sized business customers my firm serves.

Over the past few weeks I have tried a few different office suites for personal applications and my experience has crowned a definitive winner.  The applications that I have compared are Google Docs, Zoho Office, and Edit Grid.  For the most part, I care about the performance of the spreadsheet application  (that is why Edit Grid is included although it is only a spreadsheet application-I’m an accountant so the spreadsheet the most important part of the suite in my opinion), but I have had cause to evaluate the word processing applications as well. 

The most important part of any online application for my purposes is speed.  For an online application to be a viable substitute (or even a good compliment to) for a hard disk based program, it must offer similar performance in terms of responsiveness to the user and speed of loading a document. 

Both Zoho Office and Edit Grid strive to give you the familiar look and feel of the Microsoft productivity suite (for Edit Grid this is only Excel), while Google shows no respect for the leader of the pack and gives you a bare bones utilitarian feel.  Google offers several top level toolbars on tabs that may make you think you have less options available because the extra functions you would normally have in toolbars stacked upon one another are really on a different tab.  However, Google does make good use of most standard shortcuts that regular users utilize reflexively.

I was rather impressed with both the Edit Grid and Google spreadsheet programs.  Google was by far faster than Edit Grid, although I may not have the fastest connection at my office.  The connection was fast enough for Google’s spreadsheet to respond with little lag or delay.  One feature in Google’s spreadsheet program that was missing from both Edit Grid and Zoho was the ability to duplicate an existing worksheet into a new sheet.  In Edit Grid and Zoho one had to insert a new sheet and copy and paste the information into the new sheet.  Had these programs accomplished this task quickly, it would not have caught my attention as a problem, however, they both stalled terribly in the copy and paste function of one whole sheet to another whole sheet.  They eventually got the job done, but it consumed a lot of resources on my machine to accomplish what seemed to me to be a rather simple task.

Overall, neither the familiarity oferred by Zoho nor Edit Grid was substantial enough to overcome the shortcomings associated with consumption of resources and slow speed.  Another annoyance specifically associated with the Zoho writer (which looks great) is that it frequently autosaves and on my machine it stalled what I was typing and returned my cursor to the top of the page (thus I am writing this in Google’s writer).  In my opinion, Google’s web based applications would make a suitable compliment if not nearly a replacement for my desktop applications if I were not a professional consumer of Excel.  For my personal needs, having Google based documents is handy and provides a quality experience that doesn’t lead to more frustration than productivity. 

I would love to see the other applications become more competitive, but until they adopt a “function over form” mentality, they product will continue to be subpar compared to Google.

An article at Canada.com addresses the issues surrounding business models, client services, employee retention, and recruiting for knowledge based firms like attorneys, engineers, architects, and accountants.  The assertion is that knowledge firms need to move to a more communal structure of governance to maintain their continuity and attract new talent.  

the traditional model of billable hours and working your way up to partnership is under siege thanks to a blend of economic pressures, including new client demands, business consolidation and the fight for talent.

The preceding was uncovered through a survey of mid-sized legal, engineering, and architectural firms.  Although accounting firms were not specifically surveyed, it seems that the issues addressed are similarly applicable to them as a knowledge based industry.  The arguments set forth are rather similar to some of the same arguments set forth by proponents of value based pricing in professional service firms, especially with regards to the treatment of the staff worker in a knowledge based firm.

It appears that the new leaders within the knowledge based industry will be the ones that take the biggest steps in creating loyalty among their employees and an atmosphere that makes work a desirable location. One of the greatest costs and losses for a knowledge firm is when a major investment in time and education walks out the door for another opportunity and that human capital asset is replaced by one fresh from school that must undergo the process of time and capital investment to replace the prior employee.

However, not all partners will see a more communal environment positively (especially the “rainmakers” who are most enriched by the eat what you kill system). This dichotomy of interests is similar to the dichotomy of interests often faced by businesses with divided ownership interests. As accountants we know how we would advise our clients to handle situations where incentive packages do not promote the overall health of the business. We would tell them to change the incentive package so that the health of the business is aligned with the individual motivations within it.

Finally, would a more communal partnership or other system of corporate governance for knowledge based firms disincentivise the rainmakers and drive them away into their own businesses or to other firms where they are more enriched?  Part of this depends on who the people are, how they are motivated, and how loyal they feel towards their current organization.  Will a more communal system really improve the business environment and the services provided to clients or merely drive down revenues and profits as the rainmakers seek opportunity elsewhere?

Accounting Web featured an article applauding the value that HSA’s (Health Savings Accounts) may add to health care options during this fall’s open enrollment season.  High deductible health plans (HDHP’s) paired with an HSA account give employees the option to shoulder the burden of first dollar coverage (up to their deductible - minimum of $1,100 for individuals and $2,200 for families) while maintaining an adequate plan to cover catastrophic events.

This is an excellent option for those that are not often sick and will likely need only routine checkups to maintain their health.  Many HDHP plans offer coverage for preventative care in total, but not for sick care.  However, those with young children or sickly spouses will quickly eat up big chunks of their deductible on sick care and have to shoulder the burden of these costs up to their deductible amount. 

In the end, a lower upfront premium can become a higher total cost of health care for employees with families that do not have an alternative option elsewhere.  However, insurance companies will penalize employers for offering an regular PPO plan alongside the HDHP plan because of issues with adverse selection (those with families and those that are sickly will likely choose the regular PPO, while the young, single, and healthy will take advantage of the premium savings and tax advantaged savings in the HDHP/HSA combination).

For employers and employees in the open market more options are better, but for those that switch from a regular PPO as their only option to an HDHP/HSA combination as their only option, the winners will be the employers and young, single, and healthy employees at the expense of employees with families that do not have a PPO option through the spouses employment (it is very likely that both spouses may simultaneously lose the PPO option as employers opt for lower premiums offered by the HSA/HDHP combination).

An article in the World Herald addresses the dangers and explosive growth of payday loan companies in Nebraska and throughout the country.  Around my neighborhood I have definitely noticed this as well.  It seems that half of the time when a legitimate business goes under and sells its storefront it is eventually replaced by a predatory payday lender. 

I think a town like Council Bluffs compounds the problem with the payday loan / casino combination that can leave many people in a payday predicament.  Add to that the Methamphetamine problem in the Midwest (recently highlighted by Tom Becka) and communities can crumble in financial and family disasters.

I think it is especially sad when I see a payday predator camped out next to an HR Block and seeing people go to get their taxes done, opt for an instant refund (really a refund advance loan) and take that check directly to the payday predator to save next week’s paycheck. 

If we can pass laws requiring people to wear seat-belts to save them from themselves, we can pass laws to save them from themselves in the lines of payday predators.