SOFTWARE & SERVICES
Adding power
Spreadsheet Web 2. 5
Pagos Inc.
www.spreadsheetweb.com
The fact that Microsoft Excel and Outlook are
so often the subject of upgrades and add-ons
from third-party vendors is a sign of their
ubiquity and usefulness — as well as all the
things they don’t do. Spreadsheet Web, for instance, lets users turn their spreadsheets into
browser-accessible applications with most of
the features of Excel, so they can share and
collaborate on them. All spreadsheets are
managed and accessed from a central location, allowing control of sensitive information and ensuring consistent data models.
The most recent release also adds data visualization and dashboard reporting features.
The Royale with tax
Taxcast International and Ask the Expert
Webinar
The Tax & Accounting business of Thomson
Reuters
www.sabrix.com
As Vincent Vega said in Pulp Fiction, “It’s the
little differences” that make foreign travel interesting — like calling a Quarter Pounder a
Royale, or having a VAT instead of a sales tax.
BOOKS
Leave ’em wanting
Accounting Best Practices, 6th Edition
John Wiley & Sons; $76 with WebCPA.com
discount
You don’t want your clients to be perfect
— then they wouldn’t need you — but you
do want them to get better. So our advice is
to get the sixth edition of Stephen Bragg’s
Accounting Best Practices, and then dole out
the hundreds of tips and techniques for improving their accounting processes in small
doses, so they come to depend on you utterly
for advice. You might even apply some of the
lessons to your own firm … .
Forensic procedural
Anatomy of a Fraud Investigation:
From Detection to Prosecution
John Wiley & Sons; $39.96 with WebCPA.com
discount
This fascinating book takes you step by step,
phone call by phone call, and missed meal
by missed meal through an entire fraud in-
Ordering incorrectly in a Paris McDonald’s,
though, doesn’t have the same consequences
as misunderstanding the local tax system,
which is why Thomson Reuters has two new
services to help companies avoid any em-
barrassing foreign faux pas. The first, Taxcast
International, is an online, interactive tool
with a user-friendly map interface that lets
users easily look up tax compliance issues
country by country, concise summaries of
recent tax rates changes, and expert analysis,
while the second, the Ask the Expert Webinar,
lets users interact with tax experts and peers,
and submit their specific sales and use tax
and VAT questions.
Untangling webs
EasyLinkMail
KM Sciences
www.easylinkmail.com
Back when we had conversations with spoken words, it was harder to remember which
lies you’d told to which people, but at least
you knew there was no hard-copy record of
your deceptions. Now that so many of our
lies have to be told in e-mails, it’s handy to
have a tool like EasyLinkMail to keep all your
webs untangled. EasyLinkMail adds a panel
to Outlook that tracks and organizes all the e-mails related to a particular conversation, investigation, from discovery through resolution and the payment of the investigator’s
invoice. Because of the almost obsessive level
of detail, it offers countless useful pointers
for these kinds of investigations — from how
to seal up garbage bags
of evidence to how to
determine whether
to pursue a criminal
or a civil case, or both
— and yet it doesn’t get
bogged down, and ends
up as something of a page-turner.
The latest on
leadership
The AMA Handbook of Leadership
Amacom Books; $29.95
Ordinarily, having more than one leader is a
recipe for disaster, but when it comes to learning about leadership, the more the merrier.
cluding both those you’ve sent and received,
and attachments, so that you can quickly and
easily get your story straight.
Always easier
Shoeboxed Accounting Professional Plan
Shoeboxed.com
www.shoeboxed.com
As if it wasn’t enough that Shoeboxed.com
has been taking a bullet for accountants and
tax preparers — you send them your clients’
piles of receipts, and they scan them, enter
the appropriate data, categorize the information and securely archive it online, so you can
use it in all sorts of reports, applications and
more — now they’ve launched the Shoeboxed
Accounting Professional Plan, which lets you
view, create, modify or cancel all of your clients’ accounts from one secure page, while
also allowing clients access only to their own
accounts. Next thing you know, Shoeboxed
will be preparing tax returns for you.
Better without people
ChoiceAnalyst
Catalyst Development Corp.
http://go.catalyst.com
We can’t think of a single human interaction
that wouldn’t be made immeasurably sim-The American Management Association’s
AMA Handbook of Leadership brings together a wide range of articles on the subject from
over 20 leaders in the field, on topics ranging
from change management and
succession planning, to talent
management and inspiring
your people.
Measuring ‘down’
Valuations for Gift and
Estate Tax Purposes in a
Troubled Economy
Lorman Education Services;
$159.20 with WebCPA discount
Words like “down,” “underwater”
and “plummeting” may describe
the value of your clients’ assets,
pler by removing the humans from it. They
insist on intruding, however, so the best we
can hope for is tools like Choice Analyst, a de-
cision-support tool for hiring and firing em-
ployees. It organizes both your criteria and
your options, and simplifies the process into
a series of the easiest possible choices, from
the results of which it calculates a ranked
order of your options. Among other things,
it gives you an objective rationale for your
hiring and firing decisions, which can come
in handy in the inevitable lawsuit — another
human interaction that would be improved
without people.
Those who can teach
Acumen Global Training
Acumen Global Training LLC
www.acumenglobaltraining.com
There’s a snarky phrase circulating about how
those who can, do — but it ignores the fact
that they can’t do whatever it is they do until
they’ve been taught how. In that spirit, we
mention Acumen Global Training, which offers businesses customized on-site events to
educate them on domestic and international
accounting topics, from the latest on IFRS
and GAAP, to XBRL, fraud, corporate governance and more. And its faculty includes
academics and practitioners, so you know
they can both do and teach.
New and improved!
AccuFund Inc. has released Version 3.09 of
its AccuFund Accounting Suite, adding general ledger allocations, e-mail capabilities
in the financial and standard report writers,
and client invoicing. … CYMA Systems Inc.
has partnered with Certify to offer subscrip-tion-based online expense account solutions, Certify Wallet for single users, and
Certify Corporate for larger businesses. …
Apex Analytix has released Version 9. 2 of
its FirstStrike business performance and er-ror-prevention software. … Maxwell Systems
Inc. has released ProContractorMX 2.0, a
construction business management solution
with capabilities for takeoff estimating; project, procurement, financials and employee
management; and intelligent dashboards
and reporting. … CashEdge has released
an integration kit to let financial planning,
CRM and portfolio management application
providers integrate their products with its All-Data Advisor account aggregation service.
… FiREapps has released Version 4. 5 of its
Software-as-a-Service foreign exchange exposure management solution.
