Current Affairs

I’m Back, Peeps!

I was going through my e-mail this morning, and saw that one of my favorite blogs, Jr. Deputy Accountant (Rated R), was back online after an extended absence.  This made me realize that I had left you, the gentle reader of this blog hanging.  Well, hang no more.  I’m back.

I’ve been very busy over the last few months, and won’t bore you with all of the details.  Some of the stuff I’ve been working on includes:

  • Analyzing the data from the 2nd Annual CPA Firm Operations and Technology Survey, including crunching most of the data and writing most of the copy.  This year’s survey included over 600 firms of all sizes.  I expect it to come out sometime around the middle of March.  (Watch out people, I have data to back up my rants now)
  • Writing a feature article on how the world of electronic payments is changing for the Tennessee CPA Journal.  I expect the article to end up in a number of other state CPA newsletters before the year is over.
  • Attended the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with my friend and mentor, Randy Johnston.  (We plot world domination together as a hobby)
  • Wrote three conference sessions for K2 Enterprises – an update on CPA Firm Technology, an overview presentation related to remote access (including some stuff comparing VDI vs RDS), and a third session on electronic payments.

I’ve also worked on too many writing and consulting projects to mention over the last few months.  2015 is picking up nicely, and I’m making the rounds to software vendors slowly this spring.  I’ve already been to Toronto, Atlanta, and have upcoming trips to San Francisco, Dallas, Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Seattle, and many other cities before teaching season kicks off in early May.

If you’re looking for my quick takes on tech news, just follow me on Twitter (@BFTCPA).

 

Writing

Writing

I write for a number of accounting industry publications.  Some of my past work includes the following articles:

AccountingWeb

CPA Practice Advisor

State CPA Society Publications 

 

 

 

Web/Tech

K2 Enterprises Announces 2014 K2 Quality Awards

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 1, 2014 – K2 Enterprises has released their annual technology awards for 2014.  “It was quite interesting this year as there were no unanimous winners.  There were votes for many solutions.  We did have some repeat winners this year but no unanimous winners” said Val Steed, CEO K2 Enterprises.  K2 has been providing the K2 Quality Awards now for thirteen years. “The products represented by K2 quality awards are among the best of class available today. Our instructors and attendees recognize the merits of the offering and the benefits that users enjoy.” said Randy Johnston, Executive V.P. “Anyone who can sway over our team members really deserves the recognition.  Congratulations to all.” added Brian Tankersley, Director of Strategic Relationships.

K2 Enterprises Annual Quality Awards are determined by a voting poll of the K2 Enterprises instructor team. The polling members of this team are Randy Johnston, Will Fleenor, Val Steed, Brian Tankersley, Tommy Stephens, Bob Spencer, Lawrence (Mac) McClelland, and John Keegan.

2014 Categories and Winners:

•Best Overall Mobile Strategy –  Sage North America

•Best New Mobile App – Intuit

•Reseller Program – ADP

•CPA Program – QuickBooks Pro Advisor – Intuit

•Reseller Channel – Open Systems

•New Product –  AdvanceFlow – Thomson Reuters

•New Module – Point of Sale – Open Systems

•Management Strategy –  Biznet

•Technical Support – eFileCabinet

•Customer Satisfaction – BillQuick

•Ease of Use – Wave Accounting

•Marketing Communications – Avalara

•Overall Quality – Doc.It

•Tax Technology – UltraTax – Thomson Reuters

•Audit Technology – Engagement – Wolters Kluwer

•Business Intelligence Solution – Power BI Suite – Microsoft

•Workflow Solution – XCM Workflow – XCM Solutions

•Small Business Accounting Solution – QuickBooks Online

•Small CPA Firm Solution – Office Tools Professional

•Entry-Level Accounting Upgrade Solution – CYMA

•Top Hosting Provider – Cloud9 Real Time

•Social Media – Jennifer Warawa – Sage North America

•Cloud Power Solution – AccountantsWorld

•Cloud Ease of Use – Sage One – Sage North America

•Cloud Top Shelf Award – Office 365 – Microsoft

•Cloud New Product – Microsoft Online – Microsoft

•Cloud Portal – ShareFile – Citrix

K2 Enterprises is a Hammond, Louisiana based organization that provides continuing professional education services to the accounting profession and marketing consulting services to technology providers in the accounting market. K2 Enterprises delivers approximately 900 educational programs to over 40,000 professional accountants on an annual basis throughout the United States and Canada.

K2 team votes are influenced by end user feedback and experience from consulting and extensive teaching. Detailed biographies on each of the polled members can be found at http://www.k2e.com/team.

Contact: Caron Choate

Telephone: (888) 542-9390

Email:  caron@k2e.com

 

Accounting Software, Computer Applications, Mobile Productivity, Web/Tech

Recent Software Company M&A Activity

As readers of this blog know, the only constant in the accounting technology space is change itself.  With that in mind, I wanted to let you know about some recent acquisition announcements in the accounting space.

SAP to Acquire Concur– Enterprise software giant SAP announced after the market closed last Friday that they have an agreement in principle to acquire the outstanding shares of Bellevue, Washington based Concur Technologies.  Concur provides tools for managing the expense reimbursement process in small companies (with a SaaS offering) and with an on-premises expense management toolkit for enterprises.  (Source: @WSJ)

Sage to Acquire PayChoice  – Small and mid-sized business management company Sage has announced an agreement to purchase PayChoice, a provider of payroll and HR services for small businesses over a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.  Sage’s press release described PayChoice as follows:

Founded in 1990, PayChoice is headquartered in New Jersey with 260 employees and 16 offices across the US.  PayChoice provides full-service and self-service payroll and HR services to more than 100,000 SMBs in the US, through a direct sales force and third-party licensee channel.  PayChoice’s revenue for FY13 was US$38.9m.

PayChoice has developed a next generation, cloud-based payroll and reporting platform called ENCORE.  The platform, which was launched in September 2011, encompasses both mobile and web-based payroll applications, operating from a single codebase for both its direct and licensee clients.  ENCORE supports the needs of businesses with self-service solutions through to more complex full-service solutions on the same platform, supporting the needs of SMBs as they grow.

The release also disclosed that consideration for the purchase was approximately $157.8M (converted from GPB at a rate of 1:$1.628)

From the release:

“PayChoice is an excellent business, with a strong management team, attractive cloud platform and a proven business model based on supporting the needs of small and medium-sized businesses and licensees,” said Pascal Houillon, president and CEO, Sage North America.  “We are excited about the growth opportunity that the combination of Sage and PayChoice creates in this market and delighted to welcome the management and staff of PayChoice to Sage.”

Payroll and compliance with constantly changing employer regulations are two consistent challenges for SMBs.  This acquisition will enable Sage to provide intuitive payroll solutions as well as integrated ancillary services such as tax filing and direct deposit as part of the company’s core offerings, making it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to consolidate and review business data, manage relationships, and simplify day-to-day operations.

Infor Completes Acquisition of SalesLogix – Infor announced earlier this month that they have completed their acquisition of the assets of the SalesLogix CRM application from Swiftpage.  Readers may recall that Sage spun off both SalesLogix and Act! to Swiftpage in early 2013. as part of a series of deals which included spinning off Sage Non-Profit Solutions (now called Abila) to a private equity group run by KKR-Accel.

Consideration was not disclosed by either party, but Infor did mention that SalesLogix is used by 70,000 customers at 1,700 organizations who use SalesLogix.  300 of these companies use both SalesLogix as well as one of Infor’s solutions.  Infor plans to incorporate the product into Infor CloudSuite, a set of cloud applications which run on Amazon to meet the needs of specialized industries.

 

Current Affairs, Tax

State Sales Tax Holidays Infographic

A summary of the state Sales Tax holidays appears below, courtesy my friends at CCH/Wolters Kluwer.  Let’s be careful out there, people – shopping is NOT a contact sport.

2014BackToSchoolTaxHolidays

 

encryption truecrypt
Computer Applications, Mobile Productivity, Web/Tech

Shocker: TrueCrypt Discontinued, Official Page Says It Has Security Issues

Open source drive encryption tool Truecrypt announced that the product is discontinued on its main website today, and the official website has been replaced with directions for getting any encrypted data moved to Bitlocker-protected drives. The website says that “Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues”

Story from Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/05/truecrypt-is-not-secure-official-sourceforge-page-abruptly-warns/

Directions for Getting Data Out: http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/

Coming on the heels of the OpenSSL vulnerability, this may shake the confidence which businesses have in the reliability of open source software. Although the purchase price seems right for open source (free), the cost of unexpected announcements like this, the lack of professional management, and other issues with the practical maintenance and implementation of such products makes commercial software look better all of the time.

If you are using TrueCrypt as your hard disk encryption tool, we recommend that you transition to Windows Bitlocker, PGP Whole Disk Encryption, or another solution ASAP.

Update 6/4/2014

A group of developers has set up a website for a new “branch” of TrueCrypt development.  While this new group may do a great job, disk encryption is not a place where you should cut corners.  I’d stay away from TrueCrypt and go with commercial solutions – we need some answers on why the first group shut the project down and what the code audit has discovered before it gets back onto my “safe” list.  (I’m using Bitlocker in W81 Pro).

Update 3/30/2018

A branch off of the TrueCrypt code has been launched called VeraCrypt.  You can learn more about it at their website, https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

CES2014 Badge
Mobile Productivity, Travel, Web/Tech

#CES2014 Kickoff Event: #Drones #Cloud #POS #Wearables #FuelCells #HomeAutomation

WP_20140105_021 (1)

#CES2014 kicked off last night with the “CES Unveiled” event. I attended, and as it’s not my first trip to CES, it seemed like there was a good mix of evolution and revolution in the products on display.  Some of the major themes on display were as follows:

#Drones

WP_20140105_018

Even though I called #BS on the Amazon Prime Air publicity stunt a few weeks ago, drones are still going to be a big leap forward in 2014.  The drones on display at the event were very impressive, and I could see how they could be utilized in a number of scenarios for home and business use, including:

  • Imaging and agricultural yield management in a large field
  • Live traffic reporting from trouble spots around a city
  • Crowd management at an outdoor event
  • Real time overhead video at a football game
  • Surveillance by law enforcement
  • Overhead security camera for a large parking lot
  • Delivery of packages by Amazon

While I’m still not crazy about having millions of drones overhead, I think there are some practical uses of this technology.  Let’s just make sure that we get the NSA under control before we start using these things in earnest, OK?

If you are still not convinced about how far robotics and design have come in this area, I encourage you to watch Adam Savage’s video where he demos his robotic spider.  The capabilities which have been achieved in this space are amazing.

#Cloud #POS

First Data was exhibiting the Clover point of sale system, which is a tricked out Android tablet that’s used along with a cloud-based point of sale system to process transactions and manage retail stores.  (Clover was purchased by First Data in 4Q 2013)  While I spent a very short period of time at their table (which was very crowded), it looked very impressive, and I plan to visit them during the show.  The overview video from their press kit appears below.

An Intro to the Clover cloud-based point of sale system

#Wearables

It is clear that wearables will be a big topic of discussion at this years International CES, but I didn’t get a good barometer on how ready the products are for the real world. Everyone had their obligatory “Dick Tracy” bluetooth smartwatch which served as a second, smaller screen that pairs with your phone, but none of these have impressed me as “life changers” thus far. More on this later in the show.  There were a number of exhibitors at the event who were presenting their take on the next evolution in the FitBit exercise tracking devices.  Notably absent was Google Glass as well as other devices which use “heads up displays” to access information without using traditional screens.

WP_20140105_029

The most interesting wearable I saw was a pair of swim goggles with embedded heart monitoring.  This item was displayed in a showcase of award winners by CEA (pictured above), but was not available for testing at the event.

#FuelCells

The Upp fuel cell, which will be distributed in the US by Brookstone (MSRP $199, available in Q1 2014) looked very interesting, and there were signs that this technology will be on display elsewhere at this year’s show.  I’m glad to see this technology finally reaching the market, and hope to be able to evaluate this product for a future post.

WP_20140105_023

A second fuel cell vendor named Brunton was on display in a glass case as a CEA award winner, but I was not able to speak with a company representative about this product’s capabilities and US distribution outlets.  I hope to see them during the show later this week.

#HomeAutomation

The Lowes Home Improvement Iris platform (via the Killer Bee) was announced, and is an interesting platform for managing connected devices in the home which I would love to review in my own home at some point (hint, hint, Lowe’s PR people).  (existing components and offerings are available online here).

The Arrayent Connect platform is a cloud-based framework for integrating connected home devices
from multiple ecosystems together.  This toolset appears to make it possible to connect enterprise applications, mobile applications, and analytical tools to devices which four major communication protocols (Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, AC900/868, and ZigBee).  The company’s offerings are targeted at manufacturers, systems integrators, and others who want to connect devices together from multiple manufacturers across multiple platforms without needing to write code.

Since Arrayent is selling their technology to go under the hood of products from Maytag, Whirlpool, I don’t expect you to hear much news about them in the coming months.  The company’s efforts are still important to solving the problem of communications and “data plumbing” between the wide range of connected devices we use every day.

In summary, I recommend that you stay tuned.  I’ll continue to separate the wheat from the chaff at this year’s harvest of new technologies and devices over the next few days, and will present many of these items in a webinar, “From CES to You: New Productivity Tools for 2014” on February 6 from 1P-3P ET.

 

Two Factor ID Token
Accounting Software, Auditing, Computer Applications, Internal Control, Mobile Productivity, Web/Tech

It’s Time for Two Factor Authentication, SaaS Vendors. NOW, not later.

You’ve heard about the security issues at a number of organizations in the last few weeks.  Thankfully, there haven’t been any breaches at software companies who serve professional accountants (except maybe for Evernote – although I don’t know that I would put HIPAA or taxpayer data in that service).  One of the important things that is coming out of this is that major software vendors like Evernote and Google are planning to implement a security approach called “Two Factor Authentication”.  While I won’t go into much detail on how it works (although there’s a good Wikipedia article here), the basics are as follows:

Security tokens, like the RSA SecurID above, have a formula which generates a new six digit code every minute that is used as a one time password.

There are three basic ways to validate someone’s identity

  • Something they know (username, password, PIN, etc.)
  • Something they have (cell phone, RSA token, USB key, etc.)
  • Something they are (biometric identification like fingerprinting, face identification, or iris scans).

Historically, we’ve used only one factor of authentication – a username and password – to access most online systems.  While this is adequate for some information types, the sophistication of phishing attacks and other techniques used by the “bad guys” requires a more sophisticated approach to security.  Two factor authentication normally requires users to validate their credentials to two servers – one which controls the username and password, and a second which validates that they have a particular device or item through a one time password.

I’ve used a number of two factor authentication devices in my career, including:

All of the devices worked well, and I still use some of them to authenticate to many services.

One important point is that the use of factors other than passwords (something you know) is not a panacea.  Use of any of the items listed above in lieu of a password doesn’t accomplish anything.  The real benefit comes from using these tools in ADDITION to a username and a password.  Even if a person with bad intent knew your username and password, they would be screened out by the second factor, whether it is biometrics (fingerprint, iris, or face) or a device you have (token, cell phone, smart card, USB key).  Just like high security installations have more than one layer of security, you want the same layers of security verifying that you are really you online.

The ugly reality of the accounting profession is that a significant breach would undermine the confidence that others have in the profession, and could send us back to the ‘90s with some technologies used in business today.  It’s hard enough to be a small business in our economy without having to deal with concerns about security of data.

It’s time for two factor authentication with online services, people.  Ask your vendors about their support for it, and look for opportunities to protect your data with these types of authentication regimes.  It’s time for this technology – we can’t wait for some practitioner to lose their house over an online information breach to deal with this significant issue.

 

Xero
Accounting Software, Computer Applications, CPA Practice Advisor, GAAP Accounting, Tax, Web/Tech

Xero to Simplify Accountants Work by Building Out Export Capabilities

Online accounting software publisher Xero announced today that they have created a direct interface to two applications commonly used to work on business tax data – Intuit’s Lacerte Tax and ProSystem fx Engagement. This is the Company’s first foray into exporting data from Xero into U.S. tax and accounting applications, although the local versions of Xero for Australia and New Zealand have already created integrations with acquired products like Spotlight Workpapers which automate work for accounting professionals.

Xero’s US President, Jamie Sutherland, said, “We know our accounting and bookkeeping partners who prepare tax returns are looking to get data from Xero into tax software this tax season. We worked hard to create an easy export from Xero to Lacerte Tax and CCH ProSystem fx Engagement. Accounting and tax professionals will spend less time worrying about getting the data and writing up tax forms and more time advising and guiding clients on tax issues.” “We recognized that ProSystems fx and Lacerte Tax are the major players in the tax space but we’ll be looking at other tax software as their SaaS solutions come to market to make the accounting and tax workflow even more seamless.”

Xero partner and accountant Steve Chaney, CPA, owner of Chaney and Associates, a Roseville, California accounting and consulting firm is excited about the new feature and its immediate impact on his practice this tax season. Chaney said, “When you are managing tax filings for hundreds of clients, these efficiency gains add up and go straight to the bottom line.” Chaney’s firm was established in 2002, serves clients in six states, and positions itself as a leader in the effective use of new technologies by accounting firms.

Online accounting software Xero has a strategy of reducing and eliminating data entry for accountants and clients where possible by importing transactions from financial institutions and using user-defined rules to assign accounts to the transactions. Last month, the Company announced an integration with time tracking and invoicing application Harvest, and in 2012, the company launched a proprietary tool (the Xero Practice Manager) for its US accounting partners.

 

Computer Applications, Mobile Productivity, Tablets, Travel, Web/Tech

Finding Your Apple or Android Device

While I was at CES last week, I quickly wrote up my success in locating, tracking, and retrieving my cell phone from one of a company’s 400 taxis in Las Vegas.  (The article is here).  Although it cost me $100 in reward money to get my Windows Phone back, the money it took was nothing compared to the $550 it would have cost to replace the phone.  At the end of that post, I promised to revisit this topic and let users know how to locate, track, and recover their iOS and Android devices.  While the tracking in iOS and Android takes a little more work (you have to use iCloud on iOS/MacOS X, and it requires a third party app on Android), it is possible to locate your device on these popular operating systems.

Disclaimer: Do NOT use these tools to track your employees or significant other, as it’s extremely creepy, and tracking employees may be illegal and/or a violation of your terms of service with the carrier and/or manufacturer.

Apple Devices (iOS and MacOS)

While the previous post was focused on locating your Windows Phone, it is relatively simple to implement location tracking on Apple devices.  To track the location of your device requires you to do the following:

1. You must register your device in iCloud.

2. You can then track your device when it connects online in iCloud when you go online.  An example of me tracking my MacBook Air is in the image below.

FindMy iPhone

3. If required, the device can be locked, wiped, and reset from the iCloud console.

Note: It is a violation of the End User License Agreement to track business devices with iCloud.  Don’t do it – it’s creepy, and you WILL be found out by the target.

Android Devices (Prey Project)

There are a number of different tools for tracking Android devices; some of the more popular tools include The Prey Project , LookOut Mobile Security (requires a subscription), and Where’s My Droid (Lifehacker 2010 post here).

Tracking your device using the Prey Project is shown in the image below, which is a location report from my Nexus 10 tablet.  I have a personal subscription to this tool. which is $5/month for device tracking on up to three devices.  Lifehacker has a good article on how to use this tool.

PreyProject Nexus 10