If there's one constant in leading an accounting firm, it's change.

Business cycles ebb and flow. How well your professionals and your firm perform depends largely on how well you and your leadership team manage change. It's amazing how fast change occurs. Therefore, it's not simply how you're managing the change occurring today but how well you're preparing for the changes – challenges – that will occur in the weeks, months and years ahead.

 

It was just a year or so ago that we were cautioning you about the complacency that comes with more financial success that you'd ever experienced. Even though the economy was erratic, firms were experiencing double-digit growth and partners enjoying their highest compensation. Today, however, the economy is sickly, though probably not headed toward depression as the daily media cries, and it presents new challenges. These are, of course, short-term challenges (e.g., clients cutting back on what they perceive as discretionary services, Big 4 firms turning back their attention to serving smaller companies, etc.) because the circumstances will change again in the next few years.

 

Where there are challenges there are solutions and opportunities. In considering how best to help you find solutions to your practice challenges and see opportunities amongst the chaos, BOWMAN'S asked several of our profession's best thinkers to forecast your challenges ahead and suggest innovative solutions. As often as possible, they used an innovative format that allowed them to grab a topic of their choice, look at the big trend, tell us the unconventional wisdom, expose the misplaced assumption and the make the bold prediction.

 

We extend a personal thanks to August Aquila, Larry Bodine, Jean Caragher, Gale Crosley, Chris Frederiksen, Bob Gallagher, Charles Hylan, Roman Kepczyk, Allan Koltin, Bruce Marcus, Bob Martin, Jay Nisberg, Jeff Pawlow and Marc Rosenberg for helping make this a truly special issue. Below is CPA Firm Technology Guru Roman H. Kepczyk's commentary; for the complete issue please contact Art Bowman at Bowman Communications (awbowman@bowmancomm.com) and ask about BOWMAN FirstAlert.

Roman Kepczyk on Webification

The Big Trend
More and more applications will be hosted on the Web and firms will switch
to them when they become more stable, more secure and more cost effective
than running them in-house. This has happened with firm payroll, banking,
research, tax applications such as CCH Global FX and Thomson GoTaxRS
and document management programs such as Acct1st and Thomson
GoFileRoom.

The Unconventional Wisdom
The concern that data stored on the Internet is less secure than data in our
own firms; the reality is that many of these web-based providers have security teams monitoring the infrastructure 7/24 and have enterprise class tools to do so. Firms also feel that running applications in-house give them “control” of its use but will find that increasingly complex networks and operating environments are making it much harder for vendors to provide timely support, whereas web-based applications create a much more stable
environment as the vendor can control the applications and other IT variables
on their sites.

The Misplaced Assumption
Most firms’ internal IT teams have little to no security training and don’t have
the time to keep up with security issues on their network (let alone the latest
network and application standards). These same firms often have weak
passwords that control access to digital data and many still maintain paper file
rooms where there is virtually no protection of these files from people that
have access to the firm after hours.

The Watch List
The obvious providers are CCH (WoltersKluwer) and Thomson with their
enterprise suites as they already have the client base and experience with
hosting applications on the web, even though most of these applications are
very similar to the in-house applications but are running on top of Citrix (and
have not been optimized for the web).

The Bold Prediction
A third provider will evolve with a web-based suite that takes advantage of
the latest Web 2.0 technologies requiring no applications or data to reside
within the firm’s servers or the user’s computer. While it is most likely that it
will come from a vendor that Intuit acquires and integrates with QuickBooks,
it will run with a web-based productivity suite such as GoogleApps that will
deliver a very efficient set of word processing, spreadsheet, email, contacts
and calendars, that can be accessed from anyplace at any time with a secure authentication tool. Microsoft will respond with their WinMin versions of the next Office Suite that will not be capable of integrating with any of the
existing accounting firm applications, requiring major re-writes. As new
nimble firms transition to this new web suite the firms resisting this change
will linger on with their existing tools and Office 2007 well beyond the
projected Office 2007 termination date.

Roman H. Kepczyk, CPA.CITP is President of InfoTech Partners North America, Inc. and works exclusively with CPA firms to implement today’s digital best practices to optimize firm productivity.  This article was reprinted with permission from the Bowman's First Alert.

InfoTech Partners North America, Inc.
13656 South 37th Place
Phoenix, AZ 85044-4531
Phone: (480) 706-1728
Fax/Voicemail: (480) 718-8880
Email: roman@itpna.com
Web Site: www.itpna.com

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