The 2023 Top New Products

ByChris Gaetano, Daniel Hood, Danielle Lee

February 10, 2023 9:00 AM

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

Time stands still for no one, not even accountants, and this year's selections for the Top New Products of 2023 reflect this. In just a short time, we have seen major changes to the nature of the accounting profession, which have necessitated new solutions to capitalize on these opportunities.

As this year's selection shows, this comes in the form of new business models that allow firms to do more with less; new educational opportunities for growing fields like ESG and CAS; new ways to provide actionable business advice through data visualization and performance analytics; new tools that provide big-firm capabilities in small-firm packages; and new tools to address the tax and compliance issues surrounding digital assets and cryptocurrencies.

Some are based on cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Some provide new ways of thinking about old processes. And some leverage the power of data to produce real business insights for both clients and one's own firm. But what they all have in common is a forward-looking mindset that aims to successfully meet the challenges that come with periods of rapid change. These are not tools aiming to preserve the past, but to create the future.

Audit resources

AuditClub

Employers everywhere complain about the tight labor market, but the problem is even worse in accounting, where the demand for highly skilled labor is skyrocketing in tandem with client demand for both new and traditional services. Now, firms can turn to AuditClub — at least if they're looking to staff audit engagements. Billing itself as "auditors as a service," it is a licensed accountancy corporation registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board that provides members with access to a range of audit personnel — including experienced chief auditors and crew — on a fractional basis. If you're looking for help in audit and attest, quality control, regulatory matters, or training, the company offers three levels of monthly access — AuditClub pass, AuditClub pluspass and AuditClub maxpass.

Audit tools

Thomson Reuters Checkpoint Engage Single Audit

No one actually likes doing single audits for clients who receive federal grants — you have to navigate a pile of complicated rules that constantly change, perform detailed calculations to determine which federal awards have to be audited, and go through mountains of federal guidance to find, compile and perform the necessary audit procedures. Accounting firms do about 40,000 of these audits per year. When considering the time, effort and expense behind each one, that can add up to a lot. Enter Thomson Reuters Checkpoint Engage Single Audit, a cloud-based application that automates the entire process. All those time-consuming, arduous tasks listed above? The computer does most of it, enabling auditors to comply with both their professional standards and federal single audit requirements while performing these audits from a single application. The program is embedded with all 2,000-plus pages of the Office of Management and Budget's Compliance Supplement, which allows users to simply enter their clients' federal award information and expenditures, and answer a few questions. The program then performs the complex calculations to determine which awards must be audited and prepares a compliance audit program containing the procedures that must be performed.

Business intelligence tools

Karbon Practice Intelligence

Accountants spend a lot of time advising business clients on processes, on payments, on tax strategy, on regulation, on the things that make them money and the things that are losing it. But why should the clients have all the fun?

Karbon Practice Intelligence, a new feature on the Karbon practice management collaboration platform, turns all the guidance and insight provided by accountants back to their firm in order to build and maintain successful practices. Leveraging the power of data, KPI provides statistical analysis and insights into a firm's key performance indicators (that acronym is no coincidence). Premodeled datasets for time, work, emails, contacts, budgets and billing information can be accessed directly or leveraged through one of the pre-built dashboards to get insights into the average number of days waiting on client records, the value of returns completed by each team member, how many returns were completed in the last six months, and how much work is ready to start, in progress, in review, or completed.

This analysis helps firm leaders make critical data-driven decisions without the need to spend hours consolidating and manipulating information. Further supporting this is access to the Snowflake data warehouse, which connects Karbon data with other data sources like a general ledger. And the insights provided by the solution allow firms to benchmark against other firms or segments.

CPE tools

Earmark and LumiQ

Some of this year's Top New Products reflect the many new areas that accountants have to learn about, from ESG reporting to the treatment of crypto assets and beyond. With so much to learn, the profession needs new approaches to continuing professional education, to help accountants leverage every new tool possible in the ongoing struggle to stay up to date in a world that changes every day.

Earmark and LumiQ take a similar approach to serving CPAs and others looking for CPE: They offer libraries of podcast episodes on topics of direct interest to accountants that qualify for credit, so you can further your education on your commute, during your workout … basically, just about any time your ears are free.

The two companies vary in their approach and topic preferences, but both have strong street cred: Earmark founder Blake Oliver is co-host of "The Cloud Accounting Podcast," the most popular podcast in the field, while LumiQ has established a long track record of providing podcast-based education to Canadian accountants before coming into the U.S. market in 2022.

Crypto and digital assets tools

Ledgible

It's hardly controversial to suggest that the world of cryptocurrency and other digital assets can be utterly baffling to even the most experienced of accountants. As the blockchain becomes increasingly integrated with the global economy, these challenges have only grown as regulatory scrutiny increases worldwide. While accounting for crypto will never be easy, per se, digital asset-focused platform Ledgible aims to make things slightly easier for professionals.

Users can connect with their client's portfolio, automatically calculate gains and losses, and properly report crypto transactions. The platform produces IRS Forms 8949 and 1099, Schedule D, and other reporting formats that are directly importable to filing systems with all major tax and accounting solutions. Ledgible is also integrated across major blockchains, cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets. In this respect, it serves to bridge the gap between traditional finance and accounting with the new realm of digital assets and decentralized finance.

Educational resources

AICPA Fundamentals of ESG Certificate and
AICPA CAS Core Learning

With all the new opportunities available to accountants, the American Institute of CPAs is keeping the profession skilled in these burgeoning areas with their myriad educational offerings and certifications. The institute covers two of the most high-growth of these fields with its AICPA Fundamentals of ESG Certificate and the AICPA CAS Core Learning course.

The ESG Certificate is a nine-hour course in the fundamental concepts and latest developments in the environmental, social and governance space. As stakeholder demand for ESG and sustainability metrics increases and standards begin to be enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the International Sustainability Standards Board, the opportunity for accountants to be well-versed in this area will be immense. (See our recent feature story.) The course helps accountants recognize the business case for implementing sustainable practices, identify their role in the area, and become familiar with current sustainability reporting frameworks and reporting requirements.

And while that educational offering sets accountants up for the very near future of changing requirements, CAS Core Learning delves into what many firms have already reported as their highest-growth service line, client advisory services. The online course offers foundational technical content in the key topics of strategic, risk and business performance management, financial strategy and reporting, digital finance, and other topics driving this white-hot advisory service.

Financial planning tools

Asset-Map Signals+

Nearly every accountant has experienced getting too deep into the weeds with data and losing focus amid all the tiny details. Asset Map Signals+ is a way for professionals to visualize data in a more big-picture way that can provide better insights into long-term financial planning. Asset-Map is grounded by the belief that a holistic view of a household's financial picture can empower people to easily make smart financial decisions.

The new Signals function allows users to diagnose and communicate any household's preparedness to handle six common financial disruption events in seconds, acting as a check-engine light for financial wellness and offering accountants, tax professionals and financial planners an opportunity to present a clear picture of clients' financial issues, bridge knowledge gaps, and validate solutions. This all takes place on the Asset-Map platform, which visually organizes all of a household's finances in a clear graphical layout, allowing advisors to apply their professional insight.

Human capital management tools

Paychex Retention Insights

With endless tools available to help accounting firms be the best advisors to their clients, Paychex Retention Insights stands out as a solution that can also help accountants help themselves as they deal with the biggest challenge the profession currently faces: staffing. While firms can certainly use Paychex's proprietary predictive analytics model, which evaluates an individual employee's risk of leaving their job, to advise clients, it's a great tool for accounting leadership to analyze how to best hold on to their most valuable resource.

Paychex Retention Insights offers that insight by incorporating 31 unique factors to predict an employee's risk of leaving their job, providing a live and interactive report identifying risk factors that can help predict the possibility of resignation. Paychex's machine-learning model assigns a risk group and summarizes specific risk factors contributing to the score, which include wages, length of service, commute, overtime and more. The scores are produced from data from millions of employees pooled to provide employee-level scores relevant to various industries. The analytics are a vital window into organizations' workforces, empowering leaders to best prioritize their ever-important retention efforts.

Payments tools

Ledge

In this age of Venmo and Cash App and a veritable galaxy of other payment solutions, it can be difficult to imagine there was ever a time when digital payments weren't the norm. But here and now, digital payments are not only normal, they're mainstream to the point where almost 90% of people use at least one form of digital payments, and 62% use at least two.

While this has solved a lot of problems, it has created a few new ones, including the fact that a lot of these digital payment stacks don't really communicate with each other. Ledge brings all these disparate digital payment systems together for the benefit of both in-house finance professionals and external auditors. Acting as a sort of command center for different applications, Ledge automates the process of reconciling payment data across sources, enables real-time accounting, and provides a centralized view of payment information.

Tax tools

Avalara Transfer Pricing for Accountants

With increased regulatory scrutiny, the already-complex international tax arena has become even more complicated. A major factor in this has been transfer-pricing reports, which are now required by over 100 countries, as a way to meet compliance and better manage audit risk. Producing and maintaining these reports, however, can often be an arduous task, especially for smaller companies that may not have the resources or staff expertise to offer this as a value-added service.

Avalara Transfer Pricing for Accountants aims to simplify the process by enabling accounting firms without specialized in-house teams or expertise to prepare fully compliant transfer-pricing reports for clients that meet both U.S. regulations and OECD guidelines. The solution uses predetermined benchmarks of covered transactions paired with an online self-guided questionnaire. Once an accountant identifies their client's intercompany transactions in the covered transactions, and the predetermined benchmark fits their client's results for the relevant fiscal year, they need only complete the questionnaire. Following Avalara's review, a complete transfer pricing report is then ready to download.

Honorable mentions

It's a little more than a baker's dozen, but our editors wanted to highlight a few extra products as Honorable Mentions for 2023: First off is the Botkeeper Operating System, from the AI-driven bookkeeping provider of the same name, which aims to give CAS practices a turnkey solution for managing client work. And then we have two products from Thomson Reuters: Its Live APIs, which allow accounting firms and other third parties to integrate into TR's tax products with their own systems in real time, and its Checkpoint Edge Advisory Maps, which offer step-by-step guidance for delivering advisory services across a range of engagement types — just the sort of things that firms looking to boost their advisory services need.