Wolters Kluwer’s CCH Tagetik operation has introduced a free online buyer’s guide to Corporate Performance Management Software. The guide is designed to enable finance leaders to compare a variety of CPM software features.

CPM features compared include budgeting and planning, analytics and reporting, close and consolidation and pricing.

Designed for finance leaders, the practical playbook includes a step-by-step process for conducting a successful software evaluation, including assessing and defining the current needs of businesses, creating a project timeline and building a buying committee.

Four tools area aare vailable to create a short list of products.

First is a CPM software checklist. The second includes vendor comparison features within the following analyst reports: a Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Cloud FP&A Solutions; Nucleus Research: CPM Technology Value Matrix and Dresner: Advisory Services Technology Innovation Awards. There is a Business Case Checklist and Sample RFP questions.

Users of QuickBooks Online Accountant can now tag clients or team members in Notes. The feature was among those added by Intuit to QBO in May.

Notes mentions can alerts others of notes that contain information relevant to a client or staff member.  If someone is tagged @ mention, they receive a notification about notes needed their review.

Intuit noted other recent enhancement to Notes include threaded notes, private notes, and Rich Text Format/

Sage says it is bringing new digital services to market. That includes Sage Accounting and Compliance as a Service which will debut in the United Kingdom this month and in North America at an undetermined date.

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Sage gave a basic outline for new digital services in announcing a rebrand in which it has redesigned the company logo. In its announcement, Sage said the new services involves, “giving SMBs access to essential accounting and bookkeeping tools directly via their bank app or web browser.”

In addition, all Sage customers will receive automatic access to Sage Membership, starting with Member Masterclass, which also rolls out this month. 

“Member Masterclass offers human insights through talks and articles from the world’s leading experts and trailblazers on the challenges that are most important for businesses today,” the company said. In the first season, the subject will be finding job talent.

The company said more details will be released about Sage Membership.

Mango Practice Management has been introduced. The product is a combination of ImagineTime with Mango Billing. 

Imagine Time acquired MangoBilling in December 2020. and changed its name to Mango Practice Management.

The cloud-based platform includes tracking, invoicing, workflow, and data analytics, along with native integrated payment processing.  

The company’s web site shows three pricing levels starting at $39 per month for one user for the Basic version. The Plus edition is $55 per month for one users and adds unlimited cloud storage, company dashboards and due date/project management. 

The Pro version includes document management, file sharing, eSignatures, Google calendar  and QuickBooks Online and desktop integration, email/marketing automation and advanced data import.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant changes to most segments of business. That includes payroll where remote work, staff shortages and resignations have steered businesses to their advisors to increasingly ask questions about human resource issues. And there is the complexity of businesses that have unexpectedly found themselves with worker in many different jurisdictions. This special report examines the significant changes faced by accounting professionals who deal with the payroll and people issues faced by their clients.

The last two years have been like nothing else the mid-market has experienced--indeed like nothing most peope alive have experienced. But for the ERP channel, the pandemic produced opporuntity as remote work accelerated the move of businesses to the cloud

But new opporunties and new problems usually go hand and hand and the demand for web-based financial products has been accompanied by a shortage of the consultants needed to install and implement them. This Special Report "Beyond the Pandemic" discusses these issues, as it announces the 2022 edition of Bob Scott's Top 100 VARs. It tells you where the leaders rank and examines how several of them have addressed the problems and the opportunities.

The title of this special report "Reselling the Era of COVID" sounds even more relevant with the recent outbreak of the Omicron variant. But one thing is for sure, the move to the cloud was accelerated by the pandemic in a way no one could have anticipated.

It has not beneftied everyone in the midmarket who sells ERP software. But a large number of resellers and software publishers have benefited, even as they work around issued such as remote work. So within that framework, we are pleased to announce the 100 resellers who have been chosen as
VAR Stars for 2021 and share some of their experiences of the last year. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has had changed the world of payroll. It put a premium on using cloud-based products since most employees were working remotely.

It forced accounting firms into offering human resource advice as they helped clients obtain Payroll Protection Plan loans and then pursue forgiveness of those loans, along with dealing with questions of possible furloughing employees and also bringing them back to the office. This special report, ”Payroll Moves into a New Era” examines issues involved in a new way of doing things.

Jeff Siegel is the owner of Siegel Solutions, an 11-person firm that provides outsourced bookkeeping solutions usingJeff Siegel is the owner of Siegel Solutions, an 11-person firm that provides outsourced bookkeeping solutions usingQuickBooks to over 300 clients. Jeff knows what it takes to grow a business: efficiency of scale, real-time insights thatbuild strong customer relationships, and a secure data environment. He gets all three from Right Networks.

In this ebook, we’ll examine:In this ebook, we’ll examine:

• Why DIY (Do-It-Yourself) accounting systems created forsmall businesses cause undue pain for both small businessowners and for accountants
• How the right cloud-based professional accounting systemcan not only eliminate that pain, but also open up newopportunities for accountants to better serve their clients

Steven Brewer, CPA is the President of Steven Brewer and Company, CPAs, located in Salem, IN. He talked to AccountantsWorld about how he’s grown his accounting practice without needing to increase his number of clients – and how those improvements have eased his tax season crunch.

BooXkeeping: How White Label Bookkeeping Services Provide Scalability to Your Firm When it comes to running a business the main thing that every business owner wants to do is sell their products or services, create brand awareness and generate profits that they can enjoy later in life. The last thing a business owner wants to do is to worry about bookkeeping, taxes, and the rest of time consuming accounting tasks needed to run a successful business, with limited resources and time, often the bookkeeping ends up being the last on the list of things that need to be completed.

Intuit will introduce  the Intuit Tax Advisor during the summer, the company says on its website this month. Tax Advisor is described as providing substantially broader tax planning capabilities than the currently available Lacerte Tax Planner,

The new software will build tax plans utilizing data imported rom Intuit ProConnect Tax or Lacerte Tax Software.  Preparers can generate these via Tax Advisor after  paying a $75-per-client credit for unlimited plans.

Intuit says the current Lacerte offering only projects taxable income and tax liability and is limited to four types of premade tax plans: a year/case analysis, difference analysis, Married Filing Jointly/Married Filing Separately comparison, and adjustment analysis. 

Tax Advisor imports 100 percent of tax data from return provides strategies for categories such as retirement plans, income and deduction timing, income shifting between entities, charitable contributions, state income shifting, tax credits, higher education, business expenses, health and wellness and investments.

Intuit is continuing to go after the assisted tax preparation market. And the new head of the company’s consumer tax business, EVP Varun Krishna, this month talked about being “able to offer a more disruptive offering”

Krishna made that statement in the webcast of a presentation at the BofA Securitas 22 Global Technology Conference.

The software company will continue to go after the business of stores, CPAs and Enrolled Agents, Krishna said, citing what Intuit see as “a lot of inefficiency in that space.”

In the last few years, Intuit itself has hired thousands of accountants to provide tax preparation services. This includes answering questions via in-product links through its TurboTax Live program and its newer Live Full Service offering in which Intuit preparers provide full tax preparation services.

With the talent pool Intuit has acquired through these programs, “it is now time to go after this market,” Krishna said.

Krishna said Intuit’s research show consumers value the “speed of the outcome” and are also looking for virtual products and services. In addition, he said, “we have offered an assisted offering at a destructive price.

 The Internal Revenue Service has increased the number of forms that can be amended electronically. The IRS said this month  the additions will aid it in working on its backlog of amended returns.

Corrections can now be filed for Form 1040-NR, U.S. Nonresident Alien Income Tax Return and Forms 1040-SS, U.S. Self-Employment Tax Return (Including the Additional Child Tax Credit for Bona Fide Residents of Puerto Rico) and Forms 1040-PR, Self-Employment Tax Return – Puerto Rico.

A, electronic checkbox has also been added for Forms 1040/1040-SR, 1040-NR and 1040-SS/1040-PR to show  a superseding return is being filed electronically. 

Forms 1040 and 1040-SR can still be amended electronically for tax years 2019, 2020 and 2021 along with amended Form 1040-NR and corrected Forms 1040-SS and Form 1040-PR for tax year 2021.

The Internal Revenue Service will complete work on the backlog of 1040 paper returns from 2021 this week, according to the agency. Business returns from last year will be completed “shortly after”, it said.

The returns piled up last year because most of the IRS staff was not in government offices to process the paper during the pandemic.

As of June 10, more than 4.5 million of 4.7 million 1040 returns received in 2021 had been processed. The vast majority of tax returns received this year have been processed, the IRS said.

The IRS said efforts to handle unprocessed inventory of returns and correspondence by the end of this year include "aggressive, unprecedented steps to accelerate this important processing work while maintaining accuracy.” Those efforts included newly created  special teams of employees focused on the backlog with plans to hire thousands of new employees and contractors as part of the effort.

Additionally, it said a process was established to speed error resolutions. During the 2021 filing season, the IRS reported a tax examiner could correct an average of 70 returns with errors per hour. Technology implemented for the 2022 filing season has sped this up to 180 to 240 returns per hour.

There were 8.9 million tax returns in error resolution as of June 12 2021. As June 10, 360,000 returns were awaiting correction.

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Wave Financial, which markets small business accounting software, is changing CEOs effective July 1. CEO and cofounder, Kirk Simpson, is stepping down after 15 years in the position.

Simpson is being replaced by Zahir Koja, with Simpson remaining through September as an Advisor. According to the announcement, Wave recently surpassed $100 million Canadian annual revenue—about $77.2 million.

The company is owned by H&R Block and Khoja will report to Block CEO Jeff Jones as a member of the company’s senior leadership team.

Khoja was most recently general manager for North America for Afterpay since  April 2021. Before that, he was with MasterCard for eight years 10 months, the last two years as EVP of global merchant solution and partnerships

CapinCrouse, an Indianapolis, Ind.-based CPA firm, has named three partners. The firm, which specializes in working with nonprofit clients, has promoted Daren Daiga, Chris Purnell, and Logan Sharrett to partner effective this month.

Tax partner, Daren Daiga, joined the firm in February 2013. She specializes in tax-exempt compliance services, including Form 990 and 990-T and related state forms and assists exempt organizations with a wide variety of general tax matters. Previously, she was NFP tax manager at Crowe Horwath, where she worked for seven years, seven months.

Chris Purnell, partner and tax counsel, came to CapinCrouse this month. A licensed attorney, he advises exempt organizations of all sizes on a wide range of issues and also assists clients with general tax issues, unrelated business income, charitable solicitation, and missionary employment structures. He spent  11 years two months before that at the Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic, a faith-based nonprofit that provides legal services to low-income individuals.

Employed by CapinCrouse since June 2015, Logan Sharrett, based in Atlanta, Ga., was an audit manager and senior manager before his promotion. He has more than 10 years of professional experience serving a wide variety of nonprofit organizations, including schools, colleges and universities, foundations, church denominations, and international mission organizations.

 The Maryland Association of CPAs has named staff member Rebekah J. Brown, CPA, as its next president and CEO. She will succeed Jackie Brown, who is retiring on June 30.

 Jackie Brown, who became CEO early in 2021, is retiring following a 42-year career with the association.

 Rebekah Brown joined staff in December 2021 as customized learning consulting and became the manager of membership development and engagement in 2014. She was named director of development in 2018.

The Internal Revenue Service has named Guy Ficco as its next deputy chief for IRS Criminal Investigation. He takes over on July 15 from Jim Robnett, who is retiring after 36 years of IRS service, of which 28 years were with IRS-CI.

Ficco will oversee 20 field offices and 11 foreign posts, including approximately 2,000 special agents investigating tax fraud and other financial crimes.

Ficco started with the IRS in July 1995. He is currently, executive director of global operations policy and support, a job he has held since May 2021.  In that position, he oversees CI's policies related to investigations, as well as the agency's international footprint.

Avalara has introduced Transfer Pricing Reports for Accountants. The indirect tax software company this week said the product is designed for use by both transfer pricing experts and non experts at accounting firms.

The system automates the production of U.S. and OECD transfer pricing reports, documenting the process andenabling firms to produce reports for clients in three steps: data collection, documentation review and report generation. 

The application creates templated reports by combining predetermined, fixed benchmarks with a guided questionnaire, which prepopulates data based on transaction types selecied.

Transfer Reports covers both local file and master file for countries that have adopted OECD guidelines. Built-in databased on best practices from publicly available data, covering the Americas, Europe, and Asia.  Reports included built-in, noneditable date and time stamps, benchmark-related appendices, and analysis.

The software also offers management tools with built-in visibility and tracking.

Sales tax vendor Avalara has laid out its plans for Crush Global, its annual conference. The free virtual conference, the company's sixth annaul event, will be held May 17 and 18, the company said this week as it opened registration

Besides offering breakout sessions about industry topics, the conference will again feature Crush City, described as “an experiential activity center with access to a variety of on-demand resources, including videos, podcasts, downloadable guides and reports, and more, specific to the needs of different industries and business sizes.” Attendees will have experiences based on their country or region.

Major sessions include “Managing Growth in the Global Economy”. Moderated by global economist, Todd Buchholz, ecommerce experts on the panel are Craig Cohen, CRO at WooCommerce, and  Miriam González Durántez, international trade lawyer with Cohen & Gresser, and founder and chair of Inspiring Girls International,

Siri Bulusu, former tax reporter with Bloomberg Industry Group, will moderate “Staying Ahead of Shifting Government Regulations” with panelists Daniel Bunn, VP, global projects at the Tax Foundation, Gino Dossche, principal, U.S. VAT practice at EY, and  Dr. Lindsey Piegza, chief economist for Stifel Financial,

The moderator, Mickey North Rizza, program VP, Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce at IDC, is hosting “Discover the Value of Embedding Tax Within Finance” Panelists fopr this session are  Catherine Barba, a digital revolution pioneer and expert in omnichannel retail and digital retail, Dara Meath, Ddvisional CIO, Digital/Ecommerce at Conair Corporation and Avalara customer, and Paul Farrell, VP, product management at Oracle NetSuite.

 Thomson Reuters has introduced Indirect Tax Determination Anywhere. The company this week said the platform sits on top of private and public cloud or on-premise applications to provide tax calculations.

The company said the application, gives tax professionals “the power of a tax determination engine at any point of transaction, within any channel.”

Determination was launched in conjunction with the Thomson Reuters Institute’s new2021 Tax Technology Report, Indirect Taxes – Much More than Just a Process, The inaugural product “shows how the growth and complexity of indirect taxes continues to impact compliance and operational efficiency across the global business landscape.”

The company said “Determination Anywhere's proprietary cloud-based technology ensures that tax rates and jurisdictional regulations are current and accurate, enabling reliable tax compliance, a frictionless customer experience and increased revenues for businesses. “

Wolters Kluwer has acquired BusinessLogix, which markets business licensing services. Terms were not disclosed.

Business licensing appears to be one of the areas in which companies offering indirect tax services are increasing competing. Avalara acquired a similar business, Business Licenses, to enter market in September.

LicenseLogix provides license filing, research, verification, compliance and assessment services. Its operations will be combined with WK’s sales tax services.

Based in White Plains, N.Y. was founded in 2011 by lawyers, technology professionals and legal service industry veterans.