NEW PRODUCTS
SOFTWARE
An app, at last
Mobile Accountant
Techselect Consulting Inc.
www.tech-select.com and itunes.apple.com
There’s an iPhone app for everyone and everything under the sun — including, now,
accountants, with the release of Mobile Accountant. Designed specifically for accountants, it lets users track time and expenses,
client information, professional certifications, CPE, schedules, deadlines and more,
with selection lists and pickers customized
for the profession. So now you can sit in a
Starbucks and look cool with your iPhone,
and still get some work done.
The middle of wisdom
Checkpoint Learning Competency Model
Thomson Reuters
https://checkpointlearning.thomsonreuters.
com
We’re not sure if it was Socrates or Yoda, but
a great philosopher once suggested that the
beginning of wisdom was to recognize that
you know nothing. Thing is, that’s just the be-
BOOKS
A shield against madness
PPC’s Guide to Compilation and Review
Engagements
Thomson Reuters; $240
One of the reasons small businesses love accountants is that they’re willing to bone up on
the millions of rules and regulations that engender terror and madness in mere mortals.
And one of the reasons accountants love reference works like PPC’s Guide to Compilation
and Review Engagements is that they allow
them to do their boning up without succumbing to the terror and madness. In this case,
the guide offers comprehensive protection
against the horrors of the rules on compilations and reviews, including the changes
wrought by the recent release of SSARS 19.
One-volume library
Barron’s Accounting Handbook, 5th Ed.
Barron’s; $39.99
Nothing says “professional firm” like a wall
full of fat leather-bound tomes of esoteric
knowledge — even if they’re never opened.
More useful, if not necessarily contributing
as much to the ambiance of your office, is the
Fifth Edition of Barron’s Accounting Hand-
ginning — in the middle (and harder) part,
you have to start learning some of the things
you don’t know. Remember, though, that
you know nothing, so how are you going to
know what you need to know? The answer, at
least when it comes to CPE, is to let Thomson
Reuters tell you. The new Competency Model on its Checkpoint Learning platform lets
accountants assess their proficiencies and
identify gaps in their knowledge and skills. It
covers four career levels (staff, senior, manager and director) in finance, tax, audit and accounting; lets users standardize or customize
competencies across a firm or department;
lets management review staff assessments
and learning plans; and, naturally, points you
to courses on Checkpoint that will teach you
all you need to know.
Security you’ll use
AVG Internet Security 2011 and
AVG Anti-Virus 2011
AVG Technologies
www.avg.com
The annals of technology are filled with instances of security breaches that took place
book, a mammoth reference to the latest state
of accounting (including government, nonprofit and forensic accounting, and IFRS).
And while it will certainly be useful in your
office, it may be even more useful in your clients’ offices, where the 400-
plus-page dictionary of accounting terms that it contains
will help make sure they know
what you’re talking about.
Made, sadly
How the Best Leaders Lead
Amacom Books; $24.95
We here at New Products have
always clung to the belief that leaders are
born, not made, largely because this absolves
us from any responsibility for being leaders.
Unfortunately, books like How the Best Lead-
ers Lead are making that position harder and
harder to maintain. It lays out all the secrets
to great leadership and the way to attain it, ef-
fectively demolishing our hope that we could
blame our perpetual followership on genet-
ics. It lays out the seven major responsibili-
ties of leaders, then takes the reader through
a self-assessment to determine what matters
to them and the skills they need to develop
because the systems designed to prevent
them were deemed too complicated or time-
consuming for users to bother with. Bearing
in mind the time and resource constraints of
small-business owners, AVG’s recently re-
leased Internet Security 2011 Business Edi-
tion and Anti-Virus 2011 Business Edition are
designed to be easy to use, while still provid-
ing serious protection for online transactions,
e-mail, sensitive customer data and more.
XBRL inside
Crossfire 3.0
Rivet Software
www.rivetsoftware.com
Rivet Software has released Crossfire 3.0, the
latest version of its Software-as-a-Service
platform for Securities and Exchange Com-
mission reporting and filings. It makes full
use of the Extensible Business Reporting
Language, or XBRL, that the SEC has begun
mandating for filings; among other things, it
now preserves existing tags and comments
when rolling forward to a new filing, applying
them to data that matches, as well as letting
users change XBRL-tagged data in one place,
to achieve it. And it tops it all off with advice
and examples from great leaders from a wide
variety of fields. The final lesson is that the
only thing standing between us and lead-
ership is a great deal of hard work and in-
trospection — and if you know
anyone willing to undertake
that, let them know that we’re
happy to serve as a ready-made
set of followers.
The next step
Best Practices in Electronic
Invoices and Electronic Pay-
ments
Lorman Education Services;
CD and manual — $159.20
(with WebCPA discount)
Curiously, while consumers have taken up
electronic payments with glee, many businesses remain tied to the physical stage of
paper invoices and checks. This CD and
manual from a Lorman teleconference aims
to teach businesses why they should embrace
the paperless invoicing and payment revolution, and, perhaps more important, how they
should go about it, including a roadmap for
the transition.
and then apply that change to matching data
throughout the filing document. Crossfire 3.0
also includes a number of features to make
collaboration and document control easier,
and to streamline the whole process.
Confirmative
Confirmation.com
Capital Confirmation Inc.
www.confirmation.com
It’s tough to single out any one particular part
of the audit process that’s more annoying than
the rest, but getting confirmations certainly
ranks high — though Confirmation.com is
making it less annoying by allowing auditors and organizations to ask for and deliver
confirmations electronically, and thus much
more efficiently. They recently added 17 new
types of confirmations that can be processed
through the system, including alternative investments, commercial real estate, Canadian
assets and liabilities, derivatives, letters of
credit, money market funds, mortgage debt
and pension plan assets. Fortunately, auditors can still complain about the terrible coffee at their clients’ offices.
Workers’ comp help
XactPay Web
The Hartford
If you’ve got clients who use QuickBooks for
payroll, The Hartford is offering a $50 referral fee for each one you refer to its XactPay
Web solution for workers’ comp premium
payments. Payments are broken down into
weekly installments and tied directly to payroll data, so they’re both more accurate and
less burdensome, and large upfront premiums are eliminated, with significant benefits
for your clients’ cash flow.
New and improved!
Audimation Services has released Smart-Exporter, which lets users extract data from
SAP for review and analysis. … Lyquidity has
released a 64-bit version of its ComplyXL
Enterprise spreadsheet control and management software. … Credenza Software
has released a new version of its Credenza
practice management software, with support for Outlook 2010 and the ability to work
with much larger work groups. … Epson has
released three new all-in-one printer/scan-ner/fax machines, the WorkForce 635, 633
and 630, all with 250-sheet input trays, extra-high-capacity ink cartridges, and 2,400-dpi
scanning.
