Firm Management

The nominees for the 2014 CPA Practice Advisor Tax & Accounting Technology Innovation Awards have been chosen. As the pinnacle of recognition for technology vendors serving the tax and accounting profession, the awards recognize exceptional product development, breakthrough technologies, state of the art design and implementation, and cutting edge concepts that help accounting professionals and their clients be more productive and profitable.

It is impossible to think too much about protecting your data. If you are the business owner, responsible for Information Technology or an IT professional, protecting data has to always be top of mind. Backup and recovery is not an area you can leave to chance. The January installment of this column spoke about alternative approaches and pitfalls of backup and recovery. The options are worthy of review if you are interested in backup and business continuity.

Is your firm leveraging technology as a strategic asset or is it viewed as simply a cost of doing business? Successful firms view it as an asset and build an IT leadership and governance model that helps harness the power of technology as an accelerator toward improved performance, profitability and growth. There are five aspects of IT governance that are differentiating the best from rest.

For the past several decades, the function of marketing has been focused on selling consumers about the benefits of a particular service or product. Most companies, accounting firms included, have tried to create “hype” about their wares using mass media to generate sales.

You may have heard it before, or you may have actually uttered these words, “Why did we wait so long to let an underperforming employee go?" In some firms today it may actually be called the underperforming epidemic or the underperformer drag, but no matter what words you are using to describe the problem, the results are the same - our firm suffers when the leaders do not take action.

Five years ago I embarked on an extraordinary journey by joining the editorial team of this magazine, known then as CPA Technology Advisor. Today, I share with you my final column as its executive editor.

The owners of Mattingly Zsebe, PA weren’t any different from most practitioners in terms of how they viewed marketing. In essence, “Marketing sucked…it didn’t work…it was a waste of time.” These were the sentiments of the partners, Bill Mattingly, CPA, and Dylan Zsebe, CPA, before they started their journey of understanding just a year ago.

What is at the top of your accounting firm's agenda when the sun rises on April 16? Is it all crash and burn? Do you have a pile of unanswered messages and unread articles to plow through?