SOFTWARE
Genealogy
NetBasis
Net Worth Services Inc.
www.netbasis.com
We spend millions learning where our ancestors came from and how our families got
where they are — all of which the Internal
Revenue Service could not care less about. It
does care, however, about where your stocks
and other securities investments came from
and how they got where they are. They’ve
been focusing on this area of cost-basis reporting more stringently in recent years, and
while recent legislation requires brokers to
start reporting cost-basis information for
securities bought after the beginning of this
year, for anything before that, investors (and
their tax preparers) are on their own.
NetBasis, which offers professional-level
cost-basis services to brokerages, accounting
firms and other large entities, is now offering
its cost-basis research tools to the individual
investor, so that for a small fee they can enter
all their buys and sells for a particular security
and receive a complete report on their adjusted cost basis, gain or loss, sale proceeds,
a list of corporate actions, and whether the
security came in through Ellis Island.
Inside the box
Business-in-a-Box
Biztree Inc.
www.biztree.com
You know that box you’re always supposed
to think outside of? Sure, it’s dull and boring,
but it also has some useful things in it, like
standards, time-tested best practices, legal
precedents and the accumulated wisdom of
the ages, so sometimes it pays to think inside
it. One useful box to think inside is Business-in-a-Box, document-writing template software that contains more than 1,500 business
and legal document templates for things like
contracts, business plans, proposals and
spreadsheets written by legal and business
professionals that you can easily apply to
your own business. It comes in eight languages (including Spanish, French, Chinese and
Arabic), integrates with MS Office, and has
an auto-fill function to make it easy for you
to stay inside the box. Because you know who
doesn’t think outside the box? Bankruptcy
courts and federal marshals.
Send products and books for consideration
to Daniel Hood at daniel.hood@sourceme-
dia.com, or 1 State Street Plaza, 26th Floor,
New York, N. Y., 10004.
They do the work
Retirement CFA
Emerging Information Systems Inc.
www.eisi.com
As we all know, the point of the Web is to
relieve you of the burden of working, or to
ease the pain of having to work. In the case
of EISI’s new Retirement Consumer Facing
Application for its Profiles Professional financial planning software, it’s the former:
It’s a retirement calculator that sits on your
Web site, where it generates leads by letting
prospects go through a series of questions
and interactive slider bars to see financial
projections and explore planning strategies.
They get a report and encouragement to
contact you; you get their contact info. And
should they sign up with you, you don’t have
to re-enter all the data they put in the calculator, as you can import it directly into Profiles
Professional. All you have to do is let referral
sources and prospects know the site is there,
and they do all the work for you — except, of
course, for the part where you do the actual
financial planning.
Forces behind IFRS
IFRS Partner on Checkpoint
The Tax & Accounting business of
Thomson Reuters
http://ria.thomsonreuters.com
In the end, it might not be the Securities and
Exchange Commission that inflicts IFRS on
U.S. accountants, but their clients: So many
are operating or working with partners overseas that you may end up being exposed to
IFRS whether the SEC likes it or not. Fortunately, Thomson Reuters has partnered with
Issues Central to add the latter’s IFRS Partner
software to the former’s Checkpoint research
platform. IFRS Partner offers all sorts of conversion aids to make the switch to IFRS easier,
including tools for project planning, scoping
GAAP-to-IFRS differences, drafting new accounting policies, creating draft IFRS financial statements, and much more. So whoever
pushes you into IFRS, you’ll be ready.
Apps you might want
FreshBooks Add-on Store
FreshBooks
www.freshbooks.com
Apple likes to remind us that there’s an app
for “that,” but they leave unspoken the ques-
tion of why you would want to do “that” in
the first place. That’s not an issue with the
add-ons available in the new Add-on Store
from online invoicing solution provider
FreshBooks. The third-party apps available
there all extend the company’s invoicing
functionality for accountants and small busi-
nesses, with offerings such as the Peachtree
Connector, ReportAway! for BlackBerry,
Constant Contact Export, and more, some
of which are free.
Many more ways to pay
Sage Mobile Payments
Sage Payment Solutions
www.sagepayments.com
For small
businesses, there
can never
be enough
ways to get
paid. Sage
Payment
Solutions
is doing its
best to help,
by releasing
Sage Mobile Payments,
which lets businesses accept credit and debit cards on over 400 types
of mobile phones and computer devices. It’s
Payment Card Industry-compliant and available with an optional card-reading device,
and all data is encrypted from one end of the
service to another. Starting at as low as $10.95
a month, and with no incremental mobile
processing or transaction fees, it promises
to make it a lot easier — and less expensive
— to get paid.
A better Vault
SmartVault Version 3. 3
SmartVault
www.smartvault.com
SmartVault has released Version 3. 3 of its
document storage and sharing solution, with
a number of enhancements that make it both
more secure and easier to use. The new User
Activity Logs (available for Professional Plan
users only) provide an audit trail to see what
documents were uploaded, downloaded
or deleted, and which were changed and
when, while the new Copy Link Feature lets
you easily create a link to any file or folder
in SmartVault to store on your desktop, or
embed in a file or e-mail. There are also over
a dozen enhancements to existing features,
including making it easier to personalize
e-mail messages when sharing documents
or folders.
Look out, Charlie
CCHPayroll Talk on Twitter
CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business
http://twitter.com/cchpayrolltalk
Hard as it may be to believe, Twitter isn’t just
for teens to record their miserable adolescence in real-time, or for celebrities looking to
chronicle their latest meltdown. It also offers
opportunities for staying up to date on things
that actually matter. Case in point: CCH’s new
Twitter feed on payroll, which offers professionals with an interest in the subject instant
updates on both federal and state
payroll compliance regs, as
well as peer feedback and
interactive exchanges on
current industry issues.
And while we don’t expect
CCHPayroll Talk to amass 2
million followers quite as
quickly as Charlie Sheen, at
least CCH’s tweets will be in
English, and won’t make
you doubt the nature of
reality.
If it’s not fixed ...
BNA Fixed Assets Version 2011.0
BNA Software
www.bnasoftware.com/fixedassets
Your fixed assets may be fixed, but many of
the rules that govern their accounting treatment are not — as proved by legislation last
year that extended some depreciation rules
and changed others. Version 2011.11 of BNA
Software’s BNA Fixed Assets asset management solution has been updated to handle
all 12 of the major tax law changes introduced
last year, including the extensions to and increase in first-year-depreciation, the updated
luxury vehicle limitations, and the updated
Section 179 amounts.
New and improved!
Stonefield Software has released a new version of its Stonefield Query for Sage Accpac,
with a dashboard wizard, new comparison
options, drill-down capabilities for charts
and graphs, and more. ... Lyquidity
announced that its Comply XL spreadsheet
management solution now supports rights-protected and encrypted files. ... Maxwell
Systems has released Version 2. 5 of its Pro-ContractorMX construction management
solution, with mobile data access, document
management capabilities, payroll e-filing
and more.
