Congratulations! the April 15, 2009 tax deadline is history and its time to take a breath before figuring out what the focus will be for the next few months. While most of you have been slaving away this busy season, we have been busy "sharpening our saw" by going on the road to meet with the profession's leading vendors and consultants, as well as a few economists along the way to help us direct you, our clients.  You'll be reading about the information we gleaned over the next few months, but we wanted to give you a quick summary of some of our experiences on the road to shed some light on how we will be helping clients this year!

Management Summit
The year started out great at The Growth Partnership's annual leadership conference in Las Vegas where over 100 Partners from the top firms in the country converge.  You can read the summary of the conference sessions here.  QUICK FLASH: To give partners more time to implement solutions before busy season, they will be moving the conference to the Venetian October 29-30, 2009, this year!

Thomson Reuters (Creative Solutions/RIA)
We went on the road in March with industry consultant/CPA Tom Davis and CPA Firm Integrator Trey James of Xcentric.  Thomson has long had a very strong portal strategy for bringing application and data to the web and they continue to build on their web-based solutions which we will talk more about at the upcoming AICPA Practitioners/TECH.

Myself and Tom Davis at Thomson Reuters.

CCH/WoltersKluwer
The Consultant's road trip continued to CCH HQ in Riverwoods, IL, with Trey, Tom and I meeting with teams to discuss the future of ProFx Practice, Tax, and Intelliconnect, which will be making a big splash this summer.

Trey James at CCH/Wolters Kluwer.

Illinois, Indiana, and Texas Controllers Conference
We were fortunate to be asked to speak to three of the largest CPA societies on technology, which allowed us to attend sessions from three leading economists and their view of the future.  The good news is that we found a lot to be optimistic about during these tough times.  One believed that we were already past the worst, but it would not be official for a few months as the recession indicators look backwards six months.  Another said that the bottom would be this quarter, so organizations should gear up for growth early next year.  The dissenting economist was a real estate specialist and said it would take until 2010 to see the turnaround.  As CPAs we should focus on listening to the first two guys!

New Horizon Group (NHG)
Sixteen members of the NHG met in Washington DC this month to discuss the current economic climate and share information on optimizing CPA firm performance.  August Aquila facilitated the two day meeting which was hosted by Jim Meztler at the AICPA's D.C. Office where the AICPA Staff updated NHG members on current legislative issues impacting the accounting profession.

Jim Metzler, Don & Peg Scholl, Gale Crosley, August Aquila and Jeff Pawlow at a presentation of the new iShade accounting portal which you will read more about this summer!

New Horizon Group Members (L to R) Charles Hylan, Rita Keller, Rich Rinehart, Marc Rosenberg and Stephen Weinstein enjoy dinner at the Sofitel Washington, D.C.

Master consultants Steve Ericksen (L) and Dr. Bob Martin (R). Not pictured were Allan Koltin, Jennifer Wilson, and Chris Frederiksen that also attended the Washington New Horizon Group meeting.