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Collaboration has been one of the hot buttons of the Internet era. People can work together via the Web. Accountants and clients can collaborate. That was one of the key messages this week when Thomson Reuters launched Accounting CS, its next-generation accounting package. Whether or not it's revolutionary, the word used in the press release with "groundbreaking" in the headline, we'll let users decided. But it only took until the second paragraph to get to the following: "The new architecture makes it possible for firms and clients to collaborate online in real-time and opens new possibilities in staff utilization and division of duties."

For the record, Accounting CS is represented as being the first package to combine "write-up, live and after-the-fact payroll, trial balance, financial reporting, and client accounting into a single unified platform". I suppose there are a few qualifiers in here that Thomson can say separates its product from the AccountsWorld line, which has done many of these same things for several years.

What interests me is the extent to which collaboration is a big selling point. As president of a small community pool, we work with an accountant, but I can't remember that I particularly have a great interest in collaborating with her over the Web. We want her to catch problems, fix them and file appropriate reports.

This may have something to do with the fact that I don't earn my money via this organization. On the other hand, we've had to solve a lot of typical business issues and some very heavy-duty ones that are peculiar to running a highly regulated, seasonal business in which teenaged employees (lifeguards) make life-and-death decisions.

At some point, there's a line above which businesses know what they are doing and have time to work more cooperatively with advisors, and certainly Thomson's discussion of staff utiliziation suggests it's not aimed at the very smallest firm. And below the line, there are the people for whom virtually anything new is something additional to learn and something to fit in an already jammed business day.

There is an appeal to a one-stop shop and a great appeal to being able to deal with things remotely. But to some extent, I want the advisor or the software to be able to function without taking any more of my time than necessary, and that may be even more true of a part-time business endeavor. However, I'm sure it's also true of many full-time ones.

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