Marketing

Automatic Data Processing's Small Business Services division released an online payroll system aimed at accountants who service small businesses.

It finally happened: The first Baby Boomer applied for Social Security this week. Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, a former teacher who was born at one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 1946, applied for Social Security benefits over the Internet, starting what is likely to be an avalanche of applications for retirement benefits.

Here's the situation: Your client needs to upgrade their accounting software from an out-of-the-box program to a more sophisticated, customized system. You know it and your client is avoiding it. What should you do?You might have to get a little creative.

"We were stretching our ranks much too thin and we simply couldn't hire people fast enough to keep up with such a rapid growth. I felt the substantial growth was causing us to get away from our culture to have a solid work/life balance. If we had kept letting market conditions run their course on our firm without taking action, we could have lost what made us great--our employees. So we slowed down this rapid escalation and staffed up to provide employees with a good work/life balance."

After the delivery truck pulled up, a guy got out and yelled, “Buddy. We have your copy of Office 2007 here. Should we leave it in the driveway? I don’t think it will fit in the door. Watch it. That thing weighs a ton.”

The October issue of our sister publication CPA Wealth Provider has some information which will shock most. It is a ranking of CPA firms with financial planning practices by assets under management. Eleven have over one billion dollars under management. Yes, I said one billion dollars each with Plante and Moran Financial Advisors leading the pack with $5.255 billion. There are 41 firms listed with $100+ million of assets under management.

Forensic accounting is hot for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that as a specialty it has become very lucrative. So much so, I know of firms that have stopped during traditional tax and accounting work. Also, accounting and auditing standards are increasingly delineating new obligations with regard to practitioners’ duty to protect against fraud.

Female business owners are increasingly more educated and more willing to take risks, according to a newly released survey.

Two upstate New York CPA firms are merging, with the Rochester-based firm of Bernardi & Russo joining forces with Buffalo-based Freed, Maxick & Battaglia.

Small businesses added 44,000 jobs in the United States in August, according to a new report, but large companies shed 6,000 jobs last month, bringing the total number of new jobs to 38,000.

CPA firms saw big gains in both income and fees last year, thanks to the demand for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance services, according to a newly released survey.

It’s nice to see that CPAs and their firms are doing very well. According to the just-released 2007 Rosenberg MAP Survey, firms with net fees over $2 million enjoyed annual net fee growth of 11.4 percent in 2006, compared to 9.7 percent in 2005. The average income for partners in these firms, according to the survey, is $350,000.

Three accounting firms are expanding their presence in California and Florida.

If you didn’t see the WebCPA news item last week or the write-up in the 08/17/07 AICPA News Update e-mail newsletter, I’m telling you about the subject of those two pieces now. It is the AICPA’s Professional Ethics Executive Committee’s exposure draft that proposes a new Interpretation 101-17, Networks and Network Firms, under Rule 101, Independence, of the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct. I suggest you read the exposure draft.

CPA firm WithumSmith+Brown has outgrown its current location in downtown New Brunswick and is moving to a new location around the corner.

Software developer Centage introduced a business performance management tool that displays financial and operational key performance indicators on a user’s desktop.

I am increasingly noticing more and more businesses providing unsatisfactory customer service, or, just as irritating, virtually no customer service. Often, at these same businesses, not surprisingly, supervision is also missing. These businesses don’t generate loyal customers, or for that matter many happy, repeat customers. Also, these disgruntled patrons usually don’t provide constructive feedback to the business owner because they are too angry or feel it would be a waste of time. The Ken Blanchard Companies, which helps improve companies’ performance, productivity, and bottom-line results, reports in a survey that customer loyalty ranks as the fourth-most important management challenge to address, and is predicted to be more important by 2010. In the same study, customer relationship skills are cited as the second most important employee development skill, ranking just behind managerial skills.

Gina Gwozdz realized just how valuable blogging can be when, as a sole practitioner vying for clients with three other CPA firms in the small town of Bullard, Texas, she started looking to expand her reach beyond writing articles and columns in her local newspaper.Research led her to find a blogging community within the accounting and tax profession, and there she discovered that she could jumpstart her new practice by taking the plunge. She decided to go online and start Gina's Tax Articles at http://glgcpa.blogspot.com.

Accounting firm Friedman, Cohen, Taubman & Co. LLC has hooked up with Engineered Tax Services to provide cost segregation services to clients who own or invest in commercial and residential rental properties.

Just recently, I was reading an online article in the East Bay Business Times, a California business-to-business newspaper, and I noticed a very effective ad for the San Ramon Valley Conference Center. It linked me to www.sanramonvalleyconferencecenter.com, the Web site for the conference site, where I was able to take a virtual tour of the facilities.