"

Articles

The outlook of Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters, for the rest of this year might not be the yardstick for all vendors in the tax and accounting community. But the fact that the company has adjusted its outlook for revenue to flat to slightly up from the original flat to slightly down is good. The really good news was that the company's Tax & Accounting business did far better than the rest of Thomson and is likely to improve.

While company-wide revenue was virtually unchanged, revenue and operating profit for the Tax & Accounting business were both up 8 percent, after currency adjustments. That's the best yardstrick available, but other companies are showing similar results with prospects for a slightly better future.

CBiz CEO Steven Girard said the historically weak September quarter was a very strong quarter for his organization. Automatic Data Processing saw better client retention during the same period. And that company raised the revenue forecast for the year ending June 30 from the earlier 1 percent to 3 percent to a range of 3 percent to 5 percent.

Wolters Kluwer, parent to CCH is also looking up. Today it released a trading update for 2010. In these updates, European companies do not provide specific numbers but discuss the general outlook. And the Dutch company said it expects a slow, but steady recovery in North America. Wolters Kluwer faces the same pressures as Thomson and noted new sales and retention rates for its software products "grew at a solid rate which helped offset pressure on print-based publishing."

The Bureau of National Affairs reported earlier that its sales for the 12 weeks ended September 11 were flat, but it also rebounded with good earnings from a year-earlier loss. That research company also had strong growth from its BNA Software operation. BNA saw improvement in sales and renewals of BNA and Tax Management, which management expects will continue during the current quarter. As far as the future, the company used that four-letter word "slow" to describe the longer-term outlook.

In general, software companies are doing better than the tax products companies, at least partly because the latter face the drag of selling print products. Software companies are also more subject to changes depending on how the market is receiving individual products.

Microsoft saw sales of its Dynamics software rise by 4 percent for the September quarter after being flat in fiscal 2010. Fueled by a hot new product, Epicor had a 16 percent increase in revenue. Nonprofit vendor Blackbaud was also cautiously optimistic about the December quarter with subscription revenue outstripping product sales.

Visit other PMG Sites:

Template Settings

Color

For each color, the params below will give default values
Tomato Green Blue Cyan Dark_Red Dark_Blue

Body

Background Color
Text Color

Header

Background Color

Footer

Select menu
Google Font
Body Font-size
Body Font-family
Direction
PMG360 is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal data we collect from our subscribers/agents/customers/exhibitors and sponsors. On May 25th, the European's GDPR policy will be enforced. Nothing is changing about your current settings or how your information is processed, however, we have made a few changes. We have updated our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to make it easier for you to understand what information we collect, how and why we collect it.