This time of year is one of introspection for many accountants as we evaluate what went right and what went wrong during the season.  For many firms, the focus quickly narrows to the firm’s technology.  For many firms, the performance of the technology is troublesome for the firm and we endeavor to make improvements to enhance our productivity.  For our firm, this tax season has been the most trouble free and technologically productive tax season in a long time.  Some of this stability was due to solving or finding workarounds for several issues which affected individual applications, but a large part of it, in my opinion, was due to a 2008 year end server upgrade which implemented Windows Server 2008 on most of our servers.

At this point, your thoughts might be wandering about whether this article is actually going to be about remote computer security in Windows Server 2008.  It is, but in order to understand the benefits of the security improvements, it is important to have an understanding of the overall benefits of Windows Server 2008.

Is “good enough, and cheap” taking over for “I’m a professional and I need the very best tools”? Does the economy of 2009 mean that much change in our habits? I’m experimenting today.

As many of you know, I spend 125 days traveling every year --- that’s a lot of airplanes, a lot of hotels, and a lot of laptop lugging. Well this trip, instead of carrying my beloved MacBook Pro (a gorgeous piece of corporate jewelry with all the horsepower and flexibility one could ever want) I have a little 2 pound wonder that sells for about 1/10th of the cost of the MacBook Pro. Today I’m sitting on an airplane with a $325 MSI Wind netbook. I saw this device in January at CES and was instantly taken (like thousands of others) by its diminutive size. Will the combination of dirt cheap, super convenient sizing and just over adequate performance be a hit? Time will tell. I’ll know more in a few days.

It depends.  SEO is used by companies that want to get prospects through their website and convert them into new clients.  If you have a full practice and don’t want new clients, SEO is not necessary!

However, if you are looking to build your practice, SEO is a great resource that will only become more and more relevant in the future.

Definition:  SEO is a way to optimize your website’s performance on search engine rankings like Google, Yahoo! and MSN.  There is a lot of intensive programming that goes in to it, but SEO companies take care of that for you and its all “back-end,” meaning that the appearance and content of your website will be unaffected.  They will build links that go to your website, submit your site to all the major search engines, submit your site to directories and use many other strategies to gradually bring up your ranking.

As an increasing number of tax and accounting professionals begin to develop a web presence, they may be overlooking the inclusion of a simple and valuable web-based tool—secure file exchange.  Sometimes referred to as an “online file cabinet,” a file exchange portal is of particular interest in our current time of economic difficulty as it’s an inexpensive technology investment that improves productivity, client service, and saves YOU time and money.

In its simplest terms, a file exchange portal is a quick and efficient method of securely transferring bookkeeping documents, tax returns, and other financial documents from one computer to another. Read more...