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.

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CPA2Biz today announced a preferred vendor agreement with Intaact, one of the oldest accounting services players in the “cloud computing” world. Intacct and CPA2Biz will co-develop a new version of Intacct’s financial management and accounting application specifically for CPA firms and their clients that will include unique content from the AICPA. In a closed briefing CPA2Biz CEO Erik Asgeirsson assured me that the special preferred vendor arrangement constituted  a new offering for Intaact, one especially targeted to small and medium-sized and their clients and that the new service would be offered exclusively through CPAs via the CPA2Biz channel.   Read more...

It’s harvest time and our colleagues all over America are “burning the midnight oil” in an effort to stem the ever-rising tide of personal tax returns our profession is charged to prepare. In a perfect world we’d have met with most (many, some, a few …) of our clients back in September for a preliminary tax planning session. Yeah, and in that world I’d exercise daily, floss after every meal, write in my journal regularly, and spend more quality time with my spouse. And none of my clients would be fee sensitive, and all would be proactive in financial matters. I wonder what color the sky would be in that world. Read more...