Special Reports (153)
The Progressive Accountant is the leading online communit of public tax and accounting professionals focused on using technology to better manage and grow their practice.
Review: Budget Software 2013
- Wednesday, 09 January 2013
- Special Reports
- Written by John Hedtke
Budgeting is one of those unpleasant tasks every manager has to do. It's a lot of number-crunching, comparing actual expenses versus last year's estimates and adding information about upcoming projects and known expenses. Thousands of people do their budgeting in a spreadsheet. However, while this is adequate for a basic budget for a department or small company, you have to enter the budget data manually, making it difficult to scale your budgets for larger companies. Moreover, spreadsheets rarely provide the analysis tools to create an accurate, tight budget based on existing numbers, and they are not suited for collaborative financial planning. This is where budgeting software comes in.
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REVIEW: Tax Planning Software 2012
- Wednesday, 05 December 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by Dave McClure
Microsoft Surface Swims into the Mobile Ocean
- Tuesday, 20 November 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by Richard Oppenheim CPA
Microsoft has come out from behind the curtain to join the mobility party. With the launch of its Surface line of tablets, this is a key moment for the personal computing universe. After a long hiatus which must have been filled with days and months of inner reflections and torment, Microsoft has made another move to include hardware as a company product.
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Review: Invoicing Software 2012
- Monday, 12 November 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by John Hedtke
Although most service businesses are used to generating invoices manually in a word processor, there are many disadvantages to this. First, you have to find all the charges billed to a particular client and project. Next, you have to add everything up correctly and send it out. Finally, you have to manually enter invoice amounts received from the client in your accounting software.
Read more...Review: Time & Billing 2012
- Thursday, 11 October 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by Dave McClure
There are two ways to bill for client services, and neither is perfect. The first is known as project billing, or billing-by-the-job. Under this method, the client is quoted a full price for the job based on the estimated time and costs anticipated for the job. This usually works to the advantage of the accounting firm, since no firm wants to lose money on a job and thus will quote just a little on the high side.
REVIEW: Fixed Asset Software
- Tuesday, 02 October 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by Geni Whitehouse CPA.CITP, CSPM
You can't fully appreciate the complexity of a concept until you attempt to explain it to someone else. Over the course of the past year, I had just such an opportunity while trying to explain U.S. rules for depreciating fixed assets to a very bright individual from France. When we compared notes regarding every other element of accounting, we were happy to discover more similarities than differences between the two countries.
Read more...iPhone 5: Faster, Thinner, Lighter
- Wednesday, 26 September 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by Robert Prusa
Unless you have been living in a cave, you know that Apple recently introduced the iPhone 5. The prior releases from Apple, the iPhone 4 and 4S, have been well crafted, highly popular, and have solidified the feature set of the innovative phone series. We were all waiting to see if, with Steve Jobs no longer at the helm, Apple could continue the innovation that has been the catalyst for its recent success.
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Homeplug: Networking through a Powerline
- Monday, 24 September 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by Dave McClure
When it comes to networking the small office or home office, the choices can be very limited. The ideal network would be Ethernet or another wired technology, but it is not always possible to run cable through the walls of rental offices, older office or home offices.
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REVIEW: Overdue Upgrade - New QuickBooks Interface
- Tuesday, 11 September 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by Kathy Yakal
If you've been involved in accounting technology for a couple of decades, you remember what a pleasure QuickBooks was to use at first. That graphical flowchart on the home page. Those pretty icons. That uniform look and simplicity.
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REVIEW: CRM Software 2012
- Thursday, 16 August 2012
- Special Reports
- Written by Dave McClure
Customer relationship management software has never been more critical for accounting firms - and never more confusing. Literally dozens of solutions are available in the marketplace, at price points that range from a hundred dollars to many thousands. And yet, most are useless for accounting firms because their focus is less on relationship management than on sales force automation. Read more...
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