QuickBooks Online certifications; new ways to find needles in haystacks; and other new software, hardware, books and services for accountants.
Uncross your fingers
Crush, Crush Pro and related apps
Crush — $84 a year per user; Crush Pro — $225 per year
The vast expansion of data over the past couple of decades has also meant a vast expansion in the kinds of errors that always accompany data, ranging from simple typos on up to major discrepancies. At the same time, the sheer quantity of data makes it near-impossible for people to find all those errors. Faced with this, most of us cross our fingers and hope; CFO Doug Schiller built an entirely new cloud-based platform called CrushErrors.com that can quickly and easily find the errors, discrepancies, duplications, combinations and other flaws that data is heir to, so you can eradicate them. There is a basic version and a more powerful version of this fairly revolutionary product, as well as a host of apps that leverage CrushErrors.com to solve very unique problems, like checking for missing numbers in a sequence, performing bank reconciliations for specific banks and specific accounting software, or hunting for ghost customers or vendors. There’s also a tool for building apps for unique challenges that may pop up in your data. Well worth a look, because the future is all about more data — and that means more errors.
Passing is passe
CPA Master apps
Higher Learning Technologies
Why merely pass the CPA Exam, when you can master it? HLT’s new mobile study aids for the four sections of the exam — CPA REG Mastery, CPA FAR Mastery, CPA AUD Mastery and CPA BEC Mastery — can set you or your firm’s exam candidates in the right direction, with over 750 practice questions for each section, more than a thousand definitions for each, ways to figure out the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, and built-in timers. They’re available for both iOS and Android devices.
Dog or expert?
QuickBooks Certified User Exam for QBO
Certiport
If we’ve learned anything from New Yorker cartoons, it’s that on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Similarly, nobody knows you’re proficient in QuickBooks — but they can, if you take Certiport’s QuickBooks Certified User Exam, which independently proves your skills. And now they’ve added an exam for QuickBooks Online, so you can demonstrate your online proficiency, too. Certified dog exams, we assume, are in the works.
Actions speak louder
The Relationship Engine: Connecting with the People Who Power Your Business
Amacom Books; $24.95
“This is a relationship business.” How many times have you heard that? The fact is that most people, however professional they may be in other areas, tend to leave their business relationships to chance, meaning well but rarely approaching them in a systematic fashion. This book offers five principles for building strong connections, and adds capability-building exercises, self-assessments and more.
Beyond the Beatles
Product taxability tool
CPA.com and Vertex SMB
Per the Fab Four, the government will tax your feet, your street, your seat and your heat, as well as the pennies on your eyes, but beyond that, you and your clients are on your own. When it comes to figuring out which of your clients’ products are taxable in which jurisdictions, this new tool from CPA.com and Vertex SMB should help, by automating the process so that you don’t need to constantly play “Revolver” over and over again. You still can, of course — it just won’t be a practice aid.
A long way, baby
Marijuana Licensing Reference Guide: 2017 Edition
Cannabiz Media; print or PDF — $395; both — $495
Here’s a phrase you never thought you’d hear associated with weed: “important reference work.” And yet that’s where we are in 2016, with marijuana on its way to becoming a big business — one with extremely complex regulatory and compliance issues. For those accountants who are exploring those issues, and their clients, this guide will be worth a look, as it covers the rules and regs surrounding this growing industry, with 27 state snapshot reports, a host of data, and deep dives into areas like taxes and licensing fees, reciprocity among states, marketing and product regulations, and more.
New and improved!
Tenenz Inc. has launched TaxVid, a tax-themed client video service that provides one- to three-minute summaries of common tax topics, branded with the user firm’s logo and contact information. … Audit and data extraction provider Validis now allows users to gather data from QuickBooks Online. … Online recurring billing and invoicing solution provider Chargebee is now certified as integrating with cloud accounting software platform Xero. … Bill.com has launched Bill.com Connect, which aims to give banks a digital payments solution for their small and midsized business clients.
