Accounting Technology articles from April 2006

Accounting Technology archives from April 2006

How Smart is Business Intelligence?(Column)
April 1, 2006... A little more than four years ago, a columnist on Web CPA speculated, "So what should we make of BI?" BI is business intelligence, and certainly one of those terms that can be abused and often has been in the software world. Business...

Want Ads.
April 1, 2006... With regulatory issues and demand for accounting software contributing to a high demand for skills, how are firms addressing the need to find and keep talent? Carly Lombardo looks at the search for talent in "Ramping Up." Lombardo also...

Need Insights?
April 1, 2006... Editor Robert Scott also writes "Consulting Insights," a free, twice-monthly electronic newsletter that addresses issues concerning the consulting and reselling market. It's insight with an attitude. If you want to subscribe, you can do so at...

Show Calendar.
April 1, 2006... April 23-25 Information Technology Alliance Spring Members Meeting Four Seasons Hotel, Chicago www.italliance.com May 8-11 Sage Software Insights Conference Gaylord Opryland Nashville, Tenn. www.sagesoftware.com May...

Street Talk: Reader Views.(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... What have been the difficulties you have had to overcome in installing a document management system in your own company or at client sites? Actually, the installation has gone very well. We put two 19-in. monitors on every desk, a 50ppm...

Practice Development News.(Trey Industries raises funds from Cornell Capital Partners)(Compiere appointed LaVonne Reimer)(AccountMate Software given its President's Award to Figtree Consulting)
April 1, 2006... SAGE NAMES CHAIRMAN'S CLUB Sage Software has named 14 resellers of its family of software products to the Chairman's Club for 2006, a new level of recognition for top VARs. The selection included accounting software resellers Blytheco...

Accounting News.(Microsoft Business Solutions has change the name of its website)(Sage Software appointed Karl Grass)(AccountMate Software corp. promoted Donna DeRosa)
April 1, 2006... MBS SITE RENAMED The name of the Web site for Microsoft Business Solutions has been changed to reflect the name of the company's Dynamics product line. No official announcement was made, according to a Microsoft spokesperson. However,...

Tax & Financial Planning News.
April 1, 2006... WK POSTS STRONG QUARTER Wolters Kluwer, the parent of CCH, closed out 2005 with a 31 percent increase of EBITA for the fourth quarter ended December 31 on a 12 percent rise of revenue. Net income rose to about $178.2 million from $136...

Ramping Up: Recruiting talent for CPA firms and accounting resellers isn't getting any easier.(Company overview)
April 1, 2006... IT'S A TIGHT JOB MARKET. So why does Altara, a Microsoft reseller with a staff of 100, think it will have great success in hiring another 20 people with a broad range of skills? For one, in February, the Bernardsville, N.J.-based reseller...

Staffing a New Firm.(Xcelerated Systems Inc.)
April 1, 2006... Xcelerate was formed in January 2006, and with its formation came the need for more staff. So it doesn't hurt the reseller of Sage Accpac that its primary vendor is helping with the development of sales personnel. Xcelerate, with offices...

Salary Outlook? On the Way Up.
April 1, 2006... It probably comes as no surprise to many hiring managers that Robert Half Technology predicted that the average starting salary for IT professionals would rise by 3 percent this year. That prediction came with the fall release of the Robert...

The VAR 100 2006: Consolidation Was the Name of the Game in 2005.
April 1, 2006... The small get bigger. The bigger get even bigger. Everyone in the accounting software reselling business is getting bigger or probably not staying in the field. It's a lesson demonstrated by the fact that the threshold for making...

Counting the VAR 100.(value added resellers)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Accounting Technology's selection of the VAR 100 list is based solely on the amount of revenue for each organization. Because virtually all accounting software VARs are privately owned, the numbers reported are provided by the resellers....

The Name's Not the Same.(Software industry changes name of their products line ups)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... One of the biggest changes that is reflected in this year's VAR 100 chart was the name changes that affected the products they sell. The major changes occurred with Sage Software, which was known as Best Software until a year ago, and...

VAR 100.(Value added resellers )
April 1, 2006... (part 1 of 2) Rank Company 1 Tectura, Tempe, Ariz. 2 Columbus IT Partner, Copenhagen 3 ePartners, Seattle 4 RSM McGladrey, Bloomington, Minn. 5 Iteration2, Irvine, Calif. 6 CBiz...

The Return of Payroll: As accountants re-enter the business the Web becomes more important.
April 1, 2006... Over the past five years, the reality television show American Idol has soared in popularity, gaining more viewers with each episode. For millions of households, incorporating this show in their weekly viewing has become a must. Similarly,...

One-Stop Tax Research: Tax research users are looking for greater alignment between software and content.
April 1, 2006... What's the best approach to tax research? Go with a one-stop shop? Or maybe it's like going to the doctor, you often need a second opinion? It can be like that when practitioners choose tax research services. Despite the effort of some...

Beyond Traditional Tax Research.
April 1, 2006... "In today's global environment, companies want more than the traditional tax research consisting of rates and product taxability," says Mehrdad Talaifar, Sabrix's vice president of Business Consulting. When it comes to tax research, the...

Addressing Research Needs.
April 1, 2006... LexisNexis provides a wide variety of tax research tools. But it found its users wanted to not only have it all, but to be able to find it without searching every service individually. So last month, it introduced the LexisNexis Tax Center...

Tax Research Vendors.(Directory)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... BNA Washington, D.C. (800) 372-1033 www.bnatax.com CCH Riverswood, Ill. (800) TELL-CCH www.cch.com KLEINROCK PUBLISHING Rockville, Md. (800) 890-1503 www.kleinrock.com LEXISNEXIS Dayton, Ohio ...

Reading the Distribution Code: Barcoding helps distributors move out of the manual age of inventory counting.
April 1, 2006... Distributors need some high-tech solutions to some very low-tech problems, such as drivers and warehouse workers who drop the handheld devices that read the barcodes on the inventory that they are trying to track and feed into their accounting...

Webbed Distribution?(Netsuite Development Corp. )(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... The Internet holds a lot of promise for improving the operations of distributors. One of the main ones is the ability to provide different views of the products and prices to each customer. "Distributors are looking for growth," says Joe...

Radio Beacon: RFID Ripples Through.(radio frequency identification)
April 1, 2006... While the requirement to include radio frequency identification tags in shipments affects only customers of big retailers such as Wal-Mart, the impact will spread to the suppliers' suppliers, says Dale Jeffries, president of Radio Beacon. ...

Distribution Software Vendors.(Directory)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... EVEREST SOFTWARE Dulles, Va. (800) 382-0725 www.everestsoftwareinc.com INTUIT Mountain View, Calif. (866) 379-6635 www.intuit.com MICROSOFT DYNAMICS Fargo, N.D. (800) 642-7676 www.microsoft.com/dynamics ...

New Products.(Business management software and accounting software)
April 1, 2006... HYPEROFFICE HyperOffice now offers portal customization to give users the ability to display relevant information via both intranet and extranet views. The system provides links to attached documents, tasks, to-do lists, and contacts....

Red Wing: Caring for Customers.(Red Wing Software)(Company overview)
April 1, 2006... Taking care of customers is not only good for the users of Red Wing Software's accounting application, it's a paying proposition for the vendor's software resellers. VARs are now eligible for 30 percent margins when a customer renews...

Advertisers' Index April 2006.
April 1, 2006... Ad Appears Advertiser on page Blackbaud 23 CCH C4 Creative Solutions C2 Dell 1 First Research 19 Microsoft ...

Joel Lanz: Guarding Data.
April 1, 2006... Not too long ago, a $1 billion bank hired both a CPA firm and a risk management firm to conduct a security audit, performing penetration tests to determine where the weak links were in the bank's computer systems. Taking an extra step, the...

Inside the Top 100.
April 1, 2006... It's difficult to present the 19th edition of our Top 100 Firms project without reflecting just how much has changed since the inauguration of this massive undertaking back in 1987. Ronald Reagan was winding up his second term as the...

Towering over the profession: SOX is at the root of Top 100 Firms' strong growth - but for how long?(Sarbanes-Oxley Act )
April 1, 2006... Every year, trees lay down a new growth ring beneath their bark. Saw a tree in half, and the concentric pattern of rings thus exposed will tell you what each year was like: The wider the ring, the better the year - more rainfall, more sunshine,...

2006 Top 100 Firms Databank.(Statistical table)
April 1, 2006... OVERVIEW Firms over % Firms over % Firms under % Total Top % $1 bn chg. $100 mn chg. $100 mn chg. 100 Firms chg. Revenue (in $ mn) $30,550.33 14.62 $4,247.79 16.82...

Beyond the Top 100: Firms to Watch.
April 1, 2006... At its trailing edge, the Top 100 roster is porous, and from year to year some firms slip out, while others vault ahead. With so many firms showing white-hot growth, this year's cut-off of $24 million left out some firms that nonetheless had...

Still dealing with SOX and staffing.(Sarbanes-Oxley Act )
April 1, 2006... For the second year in a row, most of the Top 100 firms again pointed to the industry-wide trickle-down effects of Sarbanes-Oxley, and the corresponding staffing issues, as having the biggest impact on their businesses. In yet another year...

For top firms, it's back to basics.
April 1, 2006... In addition to a second year of growth in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance work - which has fast become a hot service area for CPA firms - it's the staple services that most of the country's top firms list as their primary and ongoing areas of growth....

T100 Execs Divided: Is SOX Doing Its Job?
April 1, 2006... As the Sarbanes-Oxley Act approaches its fourth anniversary, members of the T100 roster remain somewhat divided in their views on whether the landmark legislation has fulfilled its mission of investor protection and increased transparency of...

Strong economy helps regional firms.
April 1, 2006... The economy's continued growth at the national and regional levels drove continued expansion of the nation's Top 100 regional firms to near-record levels. Nationwide, the Top 100 recorded an average revenue growth of 15.02 percent,...

The Top 100 Local Firms by Region.(Statistical table)
April 1, 2006... (excluding the Big Four and national firms) Revenue Headquarters ($mn) % chg. CENTRAL MIDWEST (17 firms) Crowe Group South Bend,...

The 2006 Accounting Today Top 100 Firms.
April 1, 2006... Rank Revenue Personnel Fee Split Year $ % % Professionals % Total % (in percent) 06 05 Firm Headquarters Chief executive end mn. chg. Offices Partners chg. chg. emps. chg. A&A...

2006 Firm Highlights.(Capron & Associates acquires Aronson & Co)
April 1, 2006... * Amper, Politziner & Mattia: Relocated Flemington, N.J., office to larger space in Bridgewater, N.J. Expanded Manhattan office. Expanded life sciences practice. * Anchin, Block & Anchin: Merged in Yohalem Gilman in January 2005. Added two...