Barry Picker has a clear idea about what workflow products are supposed to accomplish in his firm's tax office. "The goal is to do as little possible with the keyboard when you are working with a tax return," says Picker, a partner in a nine-person firm Picker, Weinberg, and Auerbach, CPAs based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
That hasn't been the way the firm operated. It had scanned source documents. But from there, the return bounced around the office, which is what using 1040 Scan from SurePrep is designed to change.
"I will do initial review when it comes back-give it to somebody else to do a mathematical review-that is somebody will add the 1099s and compare to the returns," Picker explains. "We are trying to change that going forward."
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The main thing that we wanted was the Schedule D input. We have clients that have a lot of transactions," says Picker. "Anything that would make that part of the data entry easier was something to look forward to."
Picker's firm began using 1040 Scan on 2006 extension returns and then used it on 200 individual returns for the 2007 tax year. Next year, Picker plans to extend that to fiduciary returns.
HKMP Plays with the Heavy Weights
Large firms have different needs just by virtue of being large and serving larger clients. And accounting firm HKMP, based in Manhattan, N.Y., plays the work flow game with a different set of tools.
On the other hand, there's a lot of things alike, says managing partner Ron Kranzler.
"The process is pretty much the same throughout every firm, but each firm has its nuances," he says. "The beauty of what we are doing with best of breed is you will be able to tweak the nuances."
In this case, the tools are Interwoven's document management system and Metastorm's workflow product, which is technically a business process management application that has features going beyond the workflow needs of smaller firms.
These systems generally won't be used by firms employing fewer than 50 people and, given the cost, are more likely to be seen in 100-person organizations. And they are more modifiable.
"The big firms are always going to modify and change," says Kranzler.
But the big firms also have the same goals of eliminating the need for professionals to perform manual tasks, and have them instead programmed by the professionals and automated. The product, Metastorm BPM, offers workflow features, but also has modeling, rules management, process intelligence and process analysis capabilities. The company bills the application as providing the ability to make near real-time process changes and improvements, along with providing real-time monitoring and reporting.
While Kranzler says the advantage of HKMP's approach is the ability to integrate products, he says the entire workflow/document management process becoming more integrated.
"My gut feeling is that by late 2008, early 2009, you are going to see some workflows that will go from cradle to grave that will encompass everything in an accountant's management package from accepting a client to scheduling the work to putting personnel on the job to meeting milestones on the job, finalizing and issuing the audit report, flipping the data into the tax department or tax return, taking the data and rolling it into next year," he says.
It's a fairly simple change, but far reaching, on the individual returns.
"When we do the personal tax return, we don't have to print the W-2 just to scan it back in," says Picker. "If we can get an Excel spreadsheet on gains and losses, we can input that into Lacerte without having to scan a brokerage statement in."
The importance that workflow has assumed in the tax and accounting market was shown by the fact that Mike Sabbatis, CEO of CCH, made a presentation about workflow at the Sept. 25 Investor's Day of CCH's parent company, Wolters Kluwer.
Sabbatis says CCH studies how tax professionals work in designing its tools.
That meant looking at "What do they do a couple of minutes before they use our product and a couple of minutes after they use our product, they start to put the tax file together," he says.
And while CCH doesn't market its own workflow product because it partners with XCM Solutions, such applications have become an important enough part of the business that it has a workflow division, headed by sales manager James Koch.
"A few years ago, when we went out and talked about workflow, there was a lot of talk about 'What is workflow?' Now it's a central part of most presentations we do," says Koch. "There are very few tools that an accounting firm can buy today that can have the same impact."
Ironically, two major workflow applications were designed as a fall-back position. They come from companies that were pushing overseas outsourced preparation of tax returns. When outsourcing stalled, the two pioneers, SurePrep and Xpitax, developed workflow applications.
