The system, which integrates with CCH ProSystem fx Document, also provides Bourke with control over processes that wasn't possible before. If a staff person has been working on a corporate tax return, "I can see that the return is ready for me to review. In the past, I wouldn’t have known it was to be reviewed until it was in my office.” XCM has several editions with pricing starting with XCMEssentials at $95 per month for a one- to five-person firm with one practice area.

But workflow has gotten to be much more than simply tracking documents as they make their way through a firm. It's becoming more about using these tools to help establish procedures that will make the workflow itself more effective.

"We see firms working on the nuts and bolts of process, down to the procedures level," says Steve Barrett, director of information technology at New York's of director of information technology at Held, Kranzler, McCosker & Pulice and a partner at HKMP Technologies. HKMP has worked more in workflow for larger organizations with Metastorm. But lately it has concentrated on its own audit worfklow application, Amelio, which takes its name from the word , “ameliorate.” "We’ve been continuing to work with metastorm to do business process management. The nice thing is linking the two together."

Barrett said previously tools for audit processes were limited largely to check lists and forms. Now, with Amelio, someone involved in an audit can say, "I’m done with cash, move along to the next task and know exactly where they are," says Barrett. Meanwhile, partners can ascertain details via a dashboard. Barrett notes, "A partner can say, ' I am 50 percent through my budget on cash and I have completed 50 percent of audit procedures.' We want to capture the detail and report on it and give them high-level information.

CCH's Brian Steiner agrees that workflow software has moved out of its role as primarily a tool for tracking tax documents and is evolving into one that can help redesign processes. "A lot of firms had the first step in standardizing processes and procedures with paperless products. Work flow provides the opportunity to standardize it, all the way until it goes out," says Steiner, director of project management. In the last few months, the Riverwoods, Ill.-based vendor entered the workflow market with Workstream, a product that has debuted in SaaS form and which will be available in on-premise form during the fourth quarter. The two products will have the same feature set.

Like XCM, Workstream goes beyond just tracking tax documents. “It’s not tied down to just managing audit or managing tax It can manage any type of project that happens within the firm," says Steiner. Workstream comes with templates that can be used "to mimic workflow" for 1040s, business returns or different types of audits. The application can provide multiple views, set up notifications to have a person alerted when a project's status has changed or if it's going over budget.

Workstream can function as a stand-alone application or tie into the next generation suite of products emerging from CCH, which are essentially Workstream enabled  The application comes in two editions, the Basic, which performs tracking, priced at $175 per user, and Premier which Steiner says has "all of the additional pieces" starting at $225 per user.

With the CS Professional Suite, the workflow duties are split between the Project Management module of Practice CS, which is described as providing a central hub and Engagement CS, which specializes in the workpaper side. "We have different applications that can perform different parts of workflow process," says Scott Fleszar, senior director, strategic marketing, for Thomson Reuters. He notes that the status tracking in UltraTax CS can also be lumped into the workflow tool category.

Rather than simply track documents, Project Management ties the jobs to the invoicing system. "It tracks due dates, staff availability, billable; what staff is working on which part of the project," says Fleszar.

Practice CS starts at $1,800 for a five-user license with Project Management priced at an additional $750.

The company offers an additional wrinkle to workflow with the outsourced Source Document Processing, through which firms that use FileCabinet CS can scan source documents and export them to Thomson Reuters. The company also extracts data from these scan documents for populating fields in UltraTax CS..