NEW PRODUCTS
SOFTWARE
Farm vs. firm
CCH Community
CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business
http://community.cchgroup.com
We doubt many farmers go on Facebook to
play FarmVille, the social networking site’s
oddly addictive game about managing a virtual farm. On the other hand, we’ll bet that
plenty of accountants, auditors and tax pros
join CCH Community, the software and research provider’s new social networking site.
It offers plenty of blogs, discussion forums,
information resources and networking opportunities for the profession, as well as updates on CCH products and offerings, and
ways to connect with the company. Think of it
as FirmVille — only it’s not a game, it’s keeping up with the trends and information that
are crucial to your firm’s ongoing success.
Arm garters online
Digits Calculator for iPad and iPhone
Joshua Distler and Shift
www.shift-apps.com
In our headlong rush into the digital future,
we often overlook some of the more useful aspects of the old physical ways of doing things.
For instance, it’s easier to add
a giant column of figures on
a computer or calculator
than on an old-fashioned,
tape-equipped adding machine — but then you have
no tape to check when errors
crop up. The Digits Calculator for the iPhone and now
for the iPad elegantly solves
this by giving you a digital
tape for double-checking,
and goes one better by letting you make corrections
and edits directly to the tape,
and then automatically updating the total. You can also
label items in the tape with
comments, e-mail the figures
for use elsewhere, and share
and back up tape files through
i Tunes. It just goes to show there’s some value
in the old ways. Next up: the green eyeshade
app, and digital arm garters.
Payables leakage
Lavante Recovery
Lavante
www.lavante.com
In any large system, a certain amount of re-
sources will, unavoidably, be wasted. Super-
markets call it spoilage, manufacturers call
it breakage, and retailers call it shrinkage;
in accounts payable, it’s called staff incom-
petence or supplier fraud. Recovery audits
can reduce the amount of money wasted
by large companies’ AP failures, but they’re
time-consuming and complicated. Lavante
Recovery automates the entire process to
make sure companies lose as little as pos-
sible. The on-demand solution makes it easy
to communicate with suppliers, collect their
accounts receivable data, discover credits
and return them to the company. It also
yields useful insights into suppliers, and can
help identify and correct systemic sources of
transaction errors.
New corporate tax tools
oNeSouRCe Property Tax 9. 4.02 and
Reporting for oNeSouRCe Indirect Tax
The Tax & Accounting business of Thomson
Reuters
http://onesource.thomsonreuters.com
Thomson Reuters continues to expand and
improve its onesource platform for corporate tax professionals, with new versions of
its property tax and indirect tax
reporting solutions. Property
Tax Version 9. 4.02 lets users
coordinate all their property
tax functions in one place,
with a Tax Manager interface
that provides instant updates
and easy access to all data,
new graphs and reporting
tools for tracking the valuation
and tax history of a property,
and more. The new reporting
for onesource Indirect Tax,
which is available as an add-on, includes customizable
views of data with the ability
to drill down into audit detail,
new analysis tools, a library of
common reports, and more.
More to lose
BullGuard Mobile Security 10
BullGuard
www.bullguard.com
It used to be that the most valuable thing you
could lose while out of the office was your
wallet, and if you’re like us, that never con-
tained more than three or four crumpled,
sweaty singles, a couple of pawn tickets, and
some maxed-out credit cards, which could
easily be cancelled if lost. Now, though, we’re
all carrying smart phones jam-packed with
valuable data, from personal details like bank
account numbers to client information like,
well, bank account numbers. Not only are
they vulnerable to loss, but using them to
surf the Web leaves them open to viruses and
spyware, which means that every time you
use yours on the bus or in a bar to download
Angry Birds, you’re running a wide range of
appalling risks.
on the wall
Ringo Mounting System
Vogel’s
www.ipadonthewall.com
As with all things Apple, the iPad isn’t just
a useful tool — it’s something of a work of
art. With that in mind, it seems perfectly
natural that people would want to display
them through something like Vogel’s RingO
mounting systems, which let you mount
iPads (and some other tablet computers)
on the wall, in your car, on your desk or just
about anywhere else you want to add an aesthetic touch. You could create a gallery of
your favorite digital adding machine tapes
(see above), or of highly confidential client
data (see below). Or you could use it to get a
little hands-free work done, like when you’re
eating lunch at your desk. You wouldn’t want
to sully a beautiful iPad with your greasy
hands, would you?
Always adapting
Adaptive Planning Spring 2011,
and Sales Planning & Analysis and
Multi-entity Planning & Analysis
Adaptive Planning
www.adaptiveplanning.com
On-demand business performance management solution provider Adaptive Planning
announced the release of its Spring 2011 version, as well as two new solutions, Sales Planning & Analysis and Multi-Entity Planning &
Analysis. The Spring 2011 release includes
the new multiple instance capability, which
allows complex businesses to maintain and
coordinate multiple levels of modeling, preserving the autonomy of independent organizations while offering greater control for
headquarters. It also offers a new Hosted
Connector, to make it easier to integrate
with other cloud-based systems like Sales-
force.com and Intacct, as well as enhancements to its already-deep integration with
NetSuite. In addition, channel partners can
now white-label Adaptive Planning for their
customers.
The new Sales Planning & Analysis solution
lets sales and management teams streamline
and enhance revenue forecasting and sales
expense planning, improve pipeline and
sales analysis, and integrate sales and financial plans. Multi-Entity Planning & Analysis,
meanwhile, is aimed at helping larger companies coordinate planning, reporting and
analysis among their divisions and business
units, to decrease reporting times and simplify administration.
New and improved!
The latest release of Thomson Reuters’ Software as a Service for CS Professional Suite
lets users access their applications and data
through the iPad. ... Concur has added a
number of features to its Concur Breeze mobile expense-tracking solution, including the
ability to capture car mileage, track spending on business guests, itemize hotel costs,
personalize expense reports, track ancillary
airline fees, and more. ... Maxwell Systems
has released Version 2. 6 of its ProContrac-torMX construction business management
software.
