K2 recognizes AccountantsWorld, Zoho and others in annual quality awards

The 19th annual K2 Quality Awards have been decided, and AccountantsWorld came away with top honors, winning the 2020 Prime Award. Also notable is Zoho’s win for its relatively young CPA program.

The Prime Award is a category added in 2015 to recognize overall excellence. The award is only given when a firm or company is a leader in almost all the categories listed below:

• Reasonable management goals and expectations;
• Long-term stability in the accounting market;
• Clear and honest communication with employees and market influencers;
• High-quality products;
• Top-shelf customer support;
• A significant commitment to product development and product improvement; and
• Great management vision and direction for both current and future plans.

"We are thrilled and honored to receive the 2020 Prime award from K2 Enterprises," said co-founder and CEO of AccountantsWorld Chandra Bhansali in a statement. "Even in these difficult and uncertain times, AccountantsWorld has made a promise to businesses: if you bring your expertise and drive to excel, we will augment it with the best software solutions, training, resources and support. That commitment, which we've labeled our 2020 Promise, is an extension of our ongoing mission to help accountants better their practices. I could not be more proud of our team."

Cohn, Michael

AccountantsWorld published its 2020 Promise initiative this year in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Its stated goal is to empower accountants to make their accounting practice more relevant, more rewarding, and more profitable.

"AccountantsWorld has innovated with client accounting services and payroll services for accounting firms for twenty years," said Brian Tankersley, director of strategic relationships for K2 Enterprises. "AccountantsWorld has made their product more usable and feature-rich year after year. I can think of no other company which has focused so much on software-as-a-service and support for the accounting profession for so long."

While AccountantsWorld has shown quality through the longevity of its products, and Zoho won the award for its relatively young CPA Program, the K2 seal of approval gives it a nice boost in visibility. The leader of the program, Val Steed, just joined the company last year.

Steed believes K2 sees immense value in how serious Zoho is about security and sees longevity in the CPA program, which was founded last October, because of it. “Zoho is really all about privacy, from the founder down,” Steed said. “We’ve cut relationships with tracing bots, Google Ad words, etc. We’re huge on the General Data Protection Regulation, and we absolutely won’t let anyone get to our client data.”

Steed also mentioned that Zoho’s software is completely cloud based, and there is no “baggage” of a legacy product. This, combined with its laser-focus on security, gives accountant users a “real chance at longevity with Zoho.”

Zoho also hosts all its software entirely on its own infrastructure — in other words, it does not depend on the major web service providers to host its platforms. Readers who remember the outage of Amazon Web Services in 2017, which took down a significant portion of the global web, will appreciate what this means.

“The creators of technology solutions continue to step up their game,” Randy Johnston, shareholder and vice president at K2 Enterprises, said in a statement. “The pace of innovation is accelerating.”

Other notable awards recognized CPA.com's new .cpa domain offering, as well as Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting's CCH Answer Connect product for PPP loan assistance, which won in the tax technology category.

A full list of the award winners is below: