SOFTWARE & SERVICES
Painless on the Web
AccountWeb
Universal Accounting
www.universalaccountingsites.com
Look, we’re not going to say this again: You
need a Web site. They’re essential to proving
that you’re a real business, and with all the
site-building services available, the excuse
that they’re difficult to set up no longer holds.
Universal Accounting’s new Account Web
service, for instance, requires no knowledge
of HTML, walks you through the entire site-creation process, and can have you up on the
Web is less than three days. They offer three
levels of site, and though the Ultimate Site
may frighten the Web-wary with confusing
things like blogging, their Basic site is gentle
enough for even the most timid Internet new-bie. Plus, they’ve offering a free six-month
trial, so you really have no excuse.
You can’t beat them
Outright
Outright.com
www.outright.com
Outright.com offers free, simple online
bookkeeping for self-employed profession-
als. If those are your clients, that makes it the
competition — but even if it takes your cli-
ents away, there’s still an upside, as Outright
is also building a whole online community
around back-office services like bookkeep-
ing, including business pages and a book-
keeper directory to help its users connect
with CPAs, tax professionals and bookkeep-
ers. So when they grow too big to do their
own bookkeeping (or just get tired of it), your
clients will know where to find you.
Less pain
Confirmation.com
Capital Confirmation
www.confirmation.com
One of the hallmarks of the auditor is the
willingness to take all the pains necessary to
determine the truth. Unnecessary pains, on
the other hand, are to be avoided, and Con-
firmation.com aims to render the audit con-
firmation process less painful. It replaces the
old paper-based system with the Internet to
request confirmations from banks and other
responding institutions on assets, liabilities,
securities held, lines of credit and more, and
claims to reduce the average turnaround time
by as much as 96 percent. It also lets auditors
roll data for ward from year to year, and offers
a secure collaboration tool for sharing docu-
ments among the audit team.
Phones of the future
Smart Business Phone System, M5 Networks
OfficeServ SMT-iSeries and Communicator,
Samsung Business Communication Systems
Remember VoIP, the Voice over Internet Protocol that was going to revolutionize phone
service by routing calls over the Net? If you
don’t, there’s no shame, as it’s been an extremely slow, very quiet revolution — but it’s
still ongoing, and the services are getting better, as attested by two new developments.
First, there’s M5 Networks’ new Smart Business Phone System, a VoIP service that offers
customizable call routing, simple administration tools for both users and administrators,
disaster recovery capabilities, plug-and-play
capabilities for remote workers, voicemail-to-e-mail transcription, real-time business
intelligence reports, and even integration
with CRM solutions.
Samsung, meanwhile, has released its lat-
est line of VoIP phones, the Samsung Mul-
timedia Telephone i-Series, which include
features like video calling and visual phone
books. It has also released OfficeServ Com-
municator, an integrated communications
application that expands the capabilities of
Samsung VoIP phones, with the Basic ver-
sion letting users control their calls right from
their desktop, and, with i-Series phones, up-
load and download contacts from Microsoft
Outlook, while the Professional version adds
all sorts of collaboration features like instant
messaging, whiteboarding, and file transfer.
House calls
Safelink Discovery
PlumChoice
www.plumchoice
Online computer support vendor PlumChoice has added an expansion of its Safelink technology care platform with the addition of Safelink Discovery, a downloadable
application that performs a full checkup on
a user’s computer, including checking for
anti-virus and anti-spyware software and
malware; evaluating CPU usage and running processes; assessing critical issues and
overall disk health; and more. It’s available
through PlumChoice’s service provider partners, who can also customize it to add their
own parameters.
BOOKS
Lawsuit insurance
The Audit Committee Handbook
Wiley; $76 (with WebCPA discount)
Gone are the days when serving on a company board required little more than a round
or two of golf (or drinks) with the chairman.
Now regulators and lawsuit-happy investors
are bandying about phrases like “fiduciary
duty,” and actually expect board members to
do something — particularly if they sit on the
audit committee. The new edition of Wiley’s
comprehensive Audit Committee Handbook
includes all the latest regulatory developments, as well as all the new thinking and
best practices to help audit committees fulfill
their responsibilities. It includes new chapters on internal and external audit planning
and oversight, fraud risk, and more. Along
with D&O insurance, it’s a must for the 21st
century board member.
More Marks
In God We Trust: Everyone Else Pays Cash
Quicker! Better! Wiser! Publications; $16.95
If, like us, you find Gene Marks’ column in our
Practice Resources section funny, insightful
and stuffed full of valuable business advice,
you’ll be glad to know that he’s recently pub-
lished a whole collection of his columns, In
God We Trust: Everyone Else Pays Cash, and
that it’s just as funny, insightful and stuffed
full of valuable business advice.
Fear of referral
Don’t Keep Me a Secret! Proven Tactics
to Get More Referrals and Introductions
McGraw-Hill; $16.95
About the most intimate thing you can do in
a business relationship is to ask for a referral,
which may explain why many accountants
don’t. According to Don’t Keep Me a Secret!,
unwillingness to ask for referrals is often driven by fear of seeming desperate, or of being
told that you’re not worth referring. The book
offers hundreds of tips for dealing with the
emotional side of referrals, from scripts of referral requests that make you seem confident
and valuable, but undemanding, to different
types of referral-generating events you can
hold, to personalized ways to incentivize your
current clients to get referring.
Best and worst
Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the
World’s Ongoing Financial Plague with
Limited Purpose Banking
Wiley; $27.95
One of the best parts of the recent economic
unpleasantness is that
it unleashed a flood
of stories illustrating
countless instances of
greed, arrogance and
idiocy on the part of our
financial markets and the
regulators who oversee
them. These are often en-
tertaining, frequently pro-
voke a self-satisfying rage,
occasionally prove cathar-
tic, and form the best part of
well-known economist Lau-
rence Kotlikoff’s Jimmy Stewart
Is Dead. His diagnosis of the problems of
our financial system is fascinating; the worst
parts of the book are in his proposed solution,
which is exactly what you might expect from
an economist: intriguing, verging on elegant,
and completely divorced from reality. Take
his proposal for a single financial regulator
that would “verify, supervise, custody, fully
disclose, and oversee the rating and trades
of all securities.” That’s all? What would it do
in its spare time?
Nexus
once-removed
Current Issues in Attribu-tional and Agency Nexus
Lorman Education Services:
$175.20 (with WebCPA discount)
If you encounter drive or creativity in a government agency, chances are it’s trying to
find revenue. Witness state tax
authorities’ getting clever with
nexus, focusing on third-party
and affiliated relationships that
can establish a basis to tax a company. This CD and reference manual from a
Lorman teleconference discuss the pitfalls to
avoid, and the latest legislative and case law
developments.
