So a new client walks into the office of a local CPA firm in the Midwest, a not-so-organized contractor/landlord/real estate guy who buys and sells and rents out not-so-great places. His records are terrible, so the CPA sits down with him and tries to put things together, running a trial balance.

“You made $475,000 last year,” the CPA says. All the blood drains out of the client’s face. He says that’s absolutely impossible, that he didn’t make that much money.

“What are we missing?” the CPA asks. “Do you owe anyone any money except people at these three banks?” Nope.

How about properties, is this list accurate? The client looks through the properties list and says, “You don’t have the fourplex on here. I paid $500,000 for it.” The CPA sighs and says, “Now your income is a million dollars.”

The client looks at the CPA and says, “Forget about the fourplex.”

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In one corner, you’ve got Sharepoint, an extraordinary tool for building office collaboration systems. In the other, generic social media tools like FaceBook and Twitter. What if neither works for your firm?

There’s an option in the middle, “Sharepoint for the rest of us,” as the company calls it. Box.net provides a ready-made framework for collaborating online and sharing files in an office environment. The company recently added full-text search capabilities that support Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, as well as PDFs, TXT, and CSV files.

In upcoming weeks, the company plans to add enhancements in areas like collaboration, full-text search, and workflow and project management.

The Business version costs $15/user/month, and there’s a free lite version.

Kathy Yakal

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There are plenty of QuickBooks add-ons that help your clients manage their inventory, but wouldn’t it be nice if they could optimize it, maintaining an inventory balance that maximizes economic profit?

There’s only one adjunct QuickBooks program that accomplishes such a feat. Phitch 9.0, from ePhiphony Incorporated, uses patent pending technology to determine inventory alerts, reorder points, safety stocks, and order quantities at your point of maximum economic profit, in order to optimize your company's investment in inventory.

Phitch works with QuickBooks Premiere and Enterprise, and founder John Krech is working on versions for SAP and Microsoft Dynamics. Setup and integration are easy, as is regular use; color-coded flags indicate when inventory needs attention.

$1,597 per user buys you the first year’s license, and year two costs $377 per user. A free trial is available, as is a weekly Webinar -- visit the site for details.
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