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ProConnection® Newsletter | May 2007 | Vol. VI, No. 4
ProConnection® Newsletter | May 2007 | Vol. VI, No. 4
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Just give us your preferences by answering 12 short questions.
Review Both Business and Personal Finances for the Big PictureWhat Really Counts? CPA Sandi Smith shows how to crunch the numbers for all your sources of revenue and expenses both for a financial checkup and to confirm you're really spending your time the way you want.
See how you stack up. We'll start by looking at Revenue.
Exclusive Report. Over one hundred of the top accounting firms in the United States and Canada participated in this survey from the Association of Accounting Firm Administrators (AAA). With results being made public for the first time, August Aquila shares how firms plan to deal with competitive pressures on pricing services, hiring good staff, and navigating the competitive landscape as more firms merge. Part I of II.
Learn from top administrators how to deal with these challenges.
Visit Rates Central. Rates continue to be an issue as confirmed in the AAA survey (see above item). All the more reason to check to see how rates at your accounting practice, bookkeeping, or consulting business compares to others based on size, region, population density, and more.
See how rates for QuickBooks, bookkeeping, and related services are behaving across the country.
Corporate Tax Preparers Could Face Much Higher Income Taxes. The Tax Court recently ruled that tax preparation businesses can be treated like corporate CPA offices and other Personal Service Corporations, subject to a tax rate of 35% on the first and every dollar earned.
More Negative Developments. There's other troubling news for tax preparers, corporate or otherwise. Don't hate us for being the messenger. Our tax specialists, Terry Myers and Dee DeScherer, are on your side. You need to know about these clouds on the horizon.
Dear Reader: Do you want us to emphasize or de-emphasize tax coverage?
Just let us know by answering 12 short questions.
Esther Friedberg Karp is a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in the United States — and in Canada. So we thought she was a natural to set out how you can best serve a client with business on both sides of the border. More and more, businesses in the United States are expanding.
Get your cross-border tips here.
We bring you the best tips we can find from your colleagues and peers.
Entering Year-to-Date Payroll Information in QuickBooks Payroll
Tips for Smoother Project Management
Tip on Sarbanes Oxley Compliance
Entering Gross Wages in After the Fact Payroll
Dealing with Multi-State Payroll
We saw our payroll group about to publish this tip, and realized you could use this too, especially since it links up to the last user tip above.
from Personable Inc.Link your source documents to your QuickBooks transactions with highly rated SourceLink 4.1. This useful tool has proven itself again and again in the marketplace, as it has been used by accounting professionals and their clients to stay organized.
Quick Tip: One CPA links invoices, bills, and other records directly to her clients' QuickBooks accounts. She never has to look for a source document.
See case studies and demonstrations.
Dear Reader: Do you want us to emphasize or de-emphasize QuickBooks coverage?
Let us customize your newsletter once you answer 12 short questions.
Featuring Joe Woodard. Learn secrets from the pro on how to help clients get the most out of QuickBooks and add value to your services.
Choose from two free live webcasts, taught by noted QuickBooks consultant Joe Woodard, on either June 1 or June 8.
Register now. Space is limited and you will need to reserve your slot.
Alert Your Clients. Effective May 31, 2007, in accordance with our QuickBooks Service Discontinuation Plan, Intuit will discontinue live support* and add-on service(s) available for some software products, specifically
Related services include QuickBooks Payroll, Bill Pay, Credit Card Download, Employee Organizer, Merchant Service, and more. See the complete list here.
We take this action to allow us to focus our resources on enhancing our products and providing support for more current versions, which are used by the vast majority of our customers. We believe the result is a better customer experience for hundreds of thousands of QuickBooks users.
* Live support includes any telephone support, data recovery and password removal services, and electronic support provided by a technical support representative.
For QuickBooks ProAdvisors and purchasers of a paid accountant technical support plan, please be advised that the Tucson technical support office is closed for the legal holiday Memorial Day, on Monday, May 28. We apologize for any inconvenience.
June 4 and 5. The Intuit Academy is going to be a big part of the California Accounting & Business Show next month. The Academy is Intuit's program of training sessions to help accounting professionals improve their end-to-end accounting and tax workflows, detect and correct client accounting errors, and build their practices.
Learn more about the California show. And see Intuit's schedule of trade shows to see when Intuit will be attending a trade show close to you.
Note: Intuit's presence at some shows includes the Intuit Academy and at other shows will consist of its booth and other displays.
Help Web Applications Exchange Data with QuickBooks and QuickBooks Point of Sale. A number of Web applications rely on Web Connector 1.5 to handle these chores, and Intuit wants to let you know it's been updated. This free software now provides easier configuration for testing, password management, support for shorter auto-run intervals, and built-in troubleshooting.
With a lively community and easy access to the answers to the basic questions of budding entrepreneurs, www.jumpup.com is a great place to send clients or prospective clients who need a lot of guidance to get their business going. You can keep the relationship for those entrepreneurs who are ready to engage your services, while helping them to get many basic questions answered if they are not quite ready to become a client.
Note: If you have an inquiry from a budding entrepreneur but determine that the prospect is not quite ready to become a client, sending them to JumpUp.com will let you be comfortable that they can get good information to help them refine their plans
How Do You Keep Your Clients Happy? We want to learn more about what techniques or tactics you use to keep on your clients' best side.
One Lucky Winner. Answer our short survey and be entered for a chance to win a powerful 8G iPod nano. Apple makes this heavy duty storage nano in black only. The winner can also opt for a 4G iPod nano in your choice of silver, aqua, light green, or the special red edition (subject to availability).
Take our survey for a chance to win an iPod nano.
How QuickBooks Changed My LifeQuickBooks ProAdvisor Writes Winning Essay. Lucky winner Lynn Mattice describes how starting her own QuickBooks practice made all the difference when she was a single Mom trying to make ends meet. Read her winning entry here.
And read how she spent her day with Intuit.
CPA and multi-Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Bryce Forney started helping clients work with QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions the first year it came out and hasn't stopped since.
"Once clients switch from QuickBooks Pro to QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, their accounting becomes more significant to them. So it's an opportunity for me to be of more value to clients and for clients to get more strategic information," he says.
Quick Tip on Selling Your Services: "Many CPA firms are selling the concept of tax planning," he says. "But the tax return is just a form based on the accounting, not the other way around. So I was able to connect with small business people and say, if I get your books right, your tax returns will be a much more reasonable task to tackle."
Read his full story here. (PDF Format, approx. 252KB)
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