We are sharing a sneak peek of a few top freelance accounting candidates available this week with Accountingfly.

To gain full access to our entire list of on-demand candidates, join the Freelance Recruiting network to find the perfect fit for your organization risk-free.

Attention tax pros!

Looking for freelance opportunities during busy season? Accountingfly has 60+ clients seeking SMB public accounting experience. Join their network today!

Top Freelance Accounting Candidates of this week:

Are you looking to hire a freelancer?

Accountingfly attracts a network of remote freelance candidates at various experience levels looking for seasonal opportunities. Let us connect you to experienced accountants to fill the temporary needs of your team. Want to learn more about our freelance placement services? Drop your information here, and we’ll reach out to schedule a call to see how Accountingfly can work for you.

Our recruiting services are exclusively available for clients and candidates in the United States.

About the Author:

Liz Branch is the COO of Accountingfly.  Don’t hesitate to reach out to liz@accountingfly.com.

The post Top Remote Accounting Freelancers: February 3, 2024 appeared first on Going Concern.

However, all is not lost! There are proven strategies that can guide your project management toward efficiency and success—although, it took some serious digging for us to find them. We’ve scoured the archives of time-tested accounting wisdom to share with you these 10 valuable insights.

Legend has it…

As we explored the accounting myths of old, we stumbled onto an ancient tome—the EAAP (Eternally Accepted Accounting Principles.) It was there we discovered this relevant tale:

In the days before project management, Accountant was overwrought with anguish. His team scrambled from one task to another, missing deadlines with abandon. Accountant’s clients grew impatient, lashing out with mighty tirades of passive-aggressive rage.

Left with no other options, Accountant chose to scale the cliffs of Mount § 509(a). According to legend, reaching the peak would provide great wisdom—but it was a journey from which no CPA had ever returned.

Accountant climbed for 65 hours over seven days, comforted only by his state’s generous laws on overtime pay. As Accountant reached the mountain’s peak, the Mage of Numbers appeared, and spoke in a booming voice:

“You have conquered the mountain! To reward your tenacity and willingness to work on weekends, I now pass on to you the secrets of project management for accounting firms. Listen well, for I shall only speak them once.”

And Accountant, who had long forsaken cardio as was thus totally spent, replied, “Could you maybe just put them in an email?”

Read on to discover the 10 principles Accountant learned that day. Along the way, we’ll offer commentary from Going Concern and our friends at Firm360 to provide further insight.

1. Preparation is key

Let’s get this straight: winging it is fine for karaoke night, not for managing multiple accounting projects. Plan it, map it, put it on a spreadsheet—or better yet, use proper project management software. Just don’t go in blind.

2. Respect your deadlines

Or else they will come back to haunt you, like a restless spirit demanding a tax refund. Treat deadlines with the utmost importance; they’re foundational to project success and healthy client relationships.

3. Maintain project integrity

You know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men? We don’t, either, but scope creep can be a real problem. So do everything you can to keep your scope intact. Anything extra gets billed, discussed, and properly managed.

4. Stay true to your projections

Be realistic with your project estimates. Claiming you can do a full-scale audit in a week is not optimism; it’s an invitation for apocalypse.

5. Value your team

Your team is your most valuable resource, so treat them more like your TI-86 and less like those plastic blue solar calculators with faded displays they handed out in school. Proper communication and clear task allocation are essential to making your team feel valued and motivated.

6. Remember the weekend

All work and no play makes Jack a disgruntled accountant. Treat work/life balance seriously, and ensure your team always has time for a weekend mimosa or two.

7. Prioritize projects effectively

Before you drool over a new project, make sure your current ones are manageable. “Project FOMO” can lead to bad decisions, stressed teams, and unhappy clients.

8. Equip your team with the right tools

In the sage words of Clay Lehman, Head of Product at Firm360: “Managing projects without the proper technology is like letting a horse direct traffic. No one can get where they need to go except by sheer luck or coincidence, and it’s only a matter of time before a nasty pileup occurs.”

9. Monitor your progress

“Set it and forget it” did wonders for Ron Popeil, but it’s a terrible project management strategy. Across all your projects, you should monitor progress, measure results, and optimize processes based on the insights you uncover.

10. Learn from mistakes

We’re all human—and if you’re not, how are you reading this and will you come to our next party?—so mistakes are inevitable. When things go south, be sure to learn, adapt, and determine what steps you can take to avoid making the same error again.

Unlock efficiency with Firm360

Firm360 makes following these principles easier than solving the $100 clue on Celebrity Baby Jeopardy (“What is ‘goo’?”). With robust project management features designed specifically for accounting firms, Firm360 allows you to know what your team is working on and track their efficiency with ease.

Firm360 also simplifies handing off tasks between team members, seamlessly integrates with email from Office365 and Google, and sets you on course to never miss a client deadline again.

Best of all, Firm360 removes the need to endlessly pivot between project management software and other tools. It’s a true all-in-one platform, combining client management, project management, document management, time and billing, and advanced reporting into a single solution.

Say goodbye to chaos and hello to managed success by trying Firm360 today.

Learn more >

About Firm360
If your accounting firm has ever wanted a magic wand that can turn a project management mess into a paradise of productivity, Firm360 is the ‘abra cadabra’ you’ve been waiting for. Designed by accountants, for accountants, it offers everything from project management to document management and even time and billing capabilities. Try Firm360—and leap into the future of accounting today.

The post 10 Essential Project Management Principles for Accounting Firms appeared first on Going Concern.

If your accounting firm still relies heavily on email for client communication and document management, you’re not in the fast lane—you’re on the road to ruin. Let’s expose email for the silent assassin it is by running down the six ways email is secretly destroying your accounting firm.

1. Email threads tie your accounting firm in knots

Check your inbox. How many email threads do you have that resemble an entire season of a soap opera? If you’re like most people, you’ve got multiple sub-threads, people added in midway, and enough “Re: Re: Re: Re:” to populate the Psycho shower scene soundtrack ten times over.

Navigating those threads for one crucial piece of information is about as fun as untangling Christmas lights. Except it’s not Christmas. It’s April 15th, and your client is waiting.

2. File management is a fiasco

Sure, digging through hundreds of emails to find that one PDF your client sent you three months ago sounds exhilarating. It’s like a treasure hunt, except the treasure is a file named “Final_version_7.pdf,” and it’s buried under heaps of spam and calendar invites.

3. Email traps you in the ninth circle of versioning hell

Received an updated file via email while working on the original? Great! Now you’ve got two versions and zero clue which changes were made when. Your spreadsheet now has more conflicting versions than the tales of high school football glory your Cousin Earl tells every Thanksgiving.

4. Accountability is a circus

Tiffany changed the deadline to next Thursday but forgot to copy Rob, who was supposed to send the files to Joan but sent them to Lisa, who is out on vacation for the next two weeks but forgot to set her OOO auto-responder. So Tiffany doesn’t know that Rob sent the files, who doesn’t know when they’re due, and everything sucks.

Sound familiar? Email makes it hard to keep track of who sent what when—and virtually impossible to determine accountability when things go wrong. It’s a total circus, but swap the trapeze artists and clowns for miscommunication and time delays.

5. Security shmashmurity

If you’re sending sensitive documents through email, you’re doing it wrong. It’s actually hard to imagine a less secure way to communicate with your teammates and clients. Even using carrier pigeons would be safer, as birds have yet to master identity fraud.

6. Zero compatibility with modern workflows

Clay Lehman, Head of Product at Firm360, puts it succinctly: “When accounting firms rely on email to communicate with clients and manage documents, it’s like using a walkie-talkie in the era of smartphones. Sure, it technically works, but you’re not playing the same game as everyone else.”

Bring your accounting firm into the modern era

If you’re still using email as your primary tool for client communication and document management, it’s time for an intervention.

Solutions like Firm360 offer a powerful alternative to email—centralizing your communication, document management, and project management into an all-in-one platform that delivers advanced security email can only dream of.

Step into the 21st century with a comprehensive solution that can keep up with the dynamic needs of modern accounting. Get started with Firm360 today.

Learn more >

About Firm360
Feeling the pinch from email inefficiencies? Get with the times and upgrade to Firm360. Developed by accountants who’ve walked miles in your shoes, our platform provides project management, document management, time and billing capabilities, and even a portal for client communications. With Firm360, you can ditch email debacles and leap into the future of accounting. Are you in?

The post 6 Ways Email is Secretly Destroying Your Accounting Firm appeared first on Going Concern.

We’re not suggesting you slam on the brakes or hit the slo-mo button on growing your firm, however. Instead, you should identify your unscalable practices, and then replace them with flexible, sustainable strategies that grow with your business.

Going Concern is all about helping people (the word our staff psychologist used was “enabling,” but close enough,) so we’ve made the first part easy for you by drafting a “Dear John” style letter you can use to break up with those nasty unscalable habits. Simply copy and paste the content below, print it out on some nice letterhead, invent a way to send letters to abstract concepts, apply appropriate postage, and—BOOM—your accounting firm will be growing sustainably in no time!

It’s not you, it’s me (but really it’s you)

Dear Unscalable Accounting Firm Practices,

Look, we’ve had some good times, okay? But there are some issues I simply can’t ignore any longer.

Let’s start with this: your processes are inconsistent. I won’t deny that the spontaneity and unpredictability were exciting at first. My business license may have read “sole prop,” but it was only when I partnered with you that I truly felt incorporated.

It’s time to face facts, however. A lack of standardized processes is preventing the firm from remaining healthy as it grows. Every time we prepare a statement, conduct an audit, perform a cost analysis—anything—it’s like we’re doing it for the first time. That leaves my team (particularly the newer hires) unsure of what to do. And it creates repetitive and unnecessary work. Even worse, having no standards leads to random decisions based on gut instincts instead of best practices and real data.

Maybe if it were just you and me, we could find a way to make it work—but we have to consider the whole team. And, quite frankly, you and my staff go together like orange juice and toothpaste.

Time was, the staff would cheer each time we landed a new client. Now, when we sign a new customer, they sob and panic and update their LinkedIn profiles. And it’s all because you’re so hesitant to adopt new technology! That stubbornness is forcing the staff to spend 60 hours a week on work that could easily be done in 30—maybe even less.

Our firm also needs automation, but when I asked you about it, you rambled for 15 minutes about alien robots that can turn into cars and something called “energon.”

Your inconsistency has also scattered our documents across Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack threads, email attachments, and who knows where else? I would say that locating the documents we need is like finding a needle in a haystack, but that would be an insult to needles, haystacks, hay, and the general concept of finding things.

Even if I could forgive everything else, the damage you’ve done to our client relationships would still be enough to bring our journey to an end. It’s gotten so bad that they question whether we can meet deadlines or even respond to their queries. You’re not just burning bridges—you’re napalming them.

With a heavy heart and a massive sense of relief, it’s time to say goodbye.

Sincerely,
An Overworked, Stressed-Out-Yet-Hopeful Accounting Firm Owner

Unlocking scalable practices for your accounting firm

There you have it, folks—the break-up letter that every fast-growing accounting firm needs to send to its unscalable practices. A little harsh? Maybe. Necessary? Absolutely.

Now that you’ve done the hard work of identifying those bad habits and kicking them to the curb, it’s time to move on and find your accounting firm’s true soul mate: practices that not only scale as your organization grows, but also help your firm grow even faster

By adopting standardized processes for tax returns, audits, and even client onboarding and communications, you can enable your staff to work more efficiently, complete projects faster, and enjoy a healthier work/life balance.

Finding the right accounting firm technology

One of the best ways to adopt scalable business practices is through technology. Project management software can help your staff stay on task, efficiently collaborate, easily hand off work between team members, and prevent them from missing deadlines.

Clay Lehman, Head of Product at Firm360, put it like this: “Project management shouldn’t be another project to manage. For accounting firms, software that enables seamless collaboration is just as essential as decimal points and caffeine.”

With document management solutions, you can unite all your documents into a single tool—no more wasting time digging through multiple systems to find what you need.

Along the way, technology can help automate many of the manual and repetitive tasks that hold your firm back—giving you more time to focus on delivering great results for your clients.

According to Lehman, “Client dissatisfaction is the silent killer of accounting firms. Modern practices need modern solutions to keep clients in the loop and satisfied.”

The best way to achieve all of the above is with a single platform that combines project management, document management, and automation into a single tool. That’s exactly what you’ll get with Firm360—plus time and billing features, a client portal that enables easier communication and more efficient movement of documents, and an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly interface your entire team will love.

Reach out to Firm360 to unite your accounting firm with the kind of scalable business practices you can bring home to Mom. Instead of growing your firm out of business, you’ll make your practice more efficient, your staff less frazzled, and your clients much happier.

Learn more >

About Firm360
Developed by accountants who actually know what it’s like to drown in paperwork, Firm360 offers an all-in-one platform that combines project management, document management, and time and billing capabilities. Say goodbye to lost billing, unorganized filing cabinets, and unhappy clients, and enter a new era of efficiency and peace of mind for your firm.

The post Don’t Grow Your Accounting Firm Out of Business! Break Up With These Unscalable Practices Now appeared first on Going Concern.

Remember your first job? Not your first real job, the one you took in high school before you were saddled with student loans, rent, and monthly bills. If you graduated in the last 10-15 years, it was no more than $15, likely closer to $7.25.

When you grow up and score your first internship, $25 an hour is a lot of money (p.s. It’s closer to $50 nowadays, thank you accountant shortage). And there’s overtime! Then comes your full-time offer. If you graduated in the last two decades it was probably around $50,000. Maybe $60,000. Maybe much more if you just graduated but we’re not going to get into that because the class of 2019 is still angry about it.

Did you ever stop to do the math on what you’re making by the hour? It was easy to do when you were getting paid $7.25 an hour for afterschool shifts but in the real world it gets murkier, especially accounting for busy season. If you do well, you’ll get a nice bonus at the end of the year, but if you do twice as well, don’t expect twice the bonus. It just doesn’t work that way, which is probably part of the reason why the old-timers are so bitter. There’s little incentive for you to go above and beyond because the only thing you get at the end is overworked.

In the process of writing this article, we asked ChatGPT to help out on the math of yearly accounting salary versus hours worked because it’s better at math than anyone on the Going Concern payroll (which is not saying much). Prompting it to crunch the numbers on a public accountant making $60,000 a year with 50-60 hour weeks, it hilariously assumed that hours in excess of 40 come with overtime. Oh, if only.

On the next prompt it did much better, factually anyway. It assumed no vacations.

If you work 50 hours per week: $60,000 ÷ 2,080 hours (52 weeks x 40 hours per week) = $28.85 per hour

If you work 60 hours per week: $60,000 ÷ 2,480 hours (52 weeks x 60 hours per week) = $24.19 per hour

Let’s be real, if you compare 60 hours a week during busy season to what a teenager makes bagging groceries, you are going to be a little angry (and also eager to update your résumé, we assume).

Then there’s career progression. In public accounting, early progression is rarely based on merit, but rather on the passage of time. Meet goals and hit the two year mark? Congratulations, you leveled up. The highest performers may see early promotions, most everyone shuffles up the ladder the same prescribed way. At the lower levels you are completely disconnected from the big picture at the top, a cog in the machine with little ownership of the firm’s success. And let’s say you do give 150%, impress the heck out of clients, and attract new business surely by virtue of your hardworking, shining efforts. At most you get an extra slice of pizza at the third pizza party of the quarter and more work. Yay.

OK so what’s the point of all of this besides more complaining? As you probably gathered from the big “sponsored by” at the beginning of this post, FloQast commissioned this article because they are looking for Business Development Representatives who bring past public accounting experience to the table. Why? Because despite its downsides, public accounting offers a unique learning experience and teaches you a wealth of skills that you’ll carry with you for a lifetime, skills in high demand especially at FloQast. They love prior public accounting experience – particularly audit! – because you have a unique understanding of the problems facing the people you’d be speaking to in the BDR role, people who are in the trenches just like you used to be (or currently are. We see that wandering eye of yours…).

Wouldn’t it be nice to feel like you’re helping and not just grinding away to buy partners’ summer homes? Here’s the best part: it pays. Seriously, go on Glassdoor. Google it. If you’re feeling lazy and would rather not, just compare these rankings at FloQast to the rankings of a large accounting firm we shall not name.

And just look at these happy people. LOOK AT THEM. They have all the camaraderie of the audit room without the pain of auditing.

Video evidence:

We know that many of you are currently looking to jump, particularly those of you who got disappointing news this promotion season and all of you who are about to receive unexpectedly bleak ratings in upcoming performance discussions. Although the headlines are still screaming “accountant shortage,” the reality is that firms are beginning to tighten their belts and aren’t as scared as they were a year ago about losing people. This shift is especially obvious in firms’ attitudes toward remote and hybrid work; for example, a firm that proudly announced its “hybrid forever” way of working not even two years ago has just issued soft mandates to its people to get back in the office. There’s never been a better time to think about exit opportunities. Is there ever a bad one?

If you still need convincing, here is a non-exhaustive list of the benefits you’ll get working at FloQast:

• Employee Choice Policy or Work From Home
  • FloQast maintains a flexible policy on how and where employees choose to work. Employees can work from home and also have the option to work in a FloQast office or maintain a hybrid work schedule.
• Vacation and Public Holidays
  • FloQast observes major public holidays and provides unlimited vacation time to US employees to allow them to rest, recharge, and spend time with their loved ones.
• Mental Health Days
  • FloQast provides Mental Health Days in addition to company holidays where the Company closes to allow employees to unplug, relax, and recharge.
• Stock Options
  • Long-term incentive that provides employees the opportunity to participate in the growth of the company by purchasing equity through granted stock options.
• Medical/Rx
  • FloQast offers a variety of Medical plans to fit the needs of our employees and their needs. FloQast pays 100% of the premium for employees and families for most plans.
  • Dental & Vision
  • FloQast offers a comprehensive Dental PPO plan that includes orthodontia benefits for children and adults. Premiums are 100% paid for by FloQast.
  • Choice of two vision plans where FloQast pays 100% of the premiums for the Base plan, and employees can buy up to the Choice plan.
• Carrot
  • Global Employees have access to Carrot – a family forming benefit that provides resources and experts to assist with fertility, adoption, surrogacy, and other family-forming journeys.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
  • Global Employees have access to a wide range of no-cost services to assist them with financial planning, legal assistance, and addressing mental health care & wellness needs.

So what do you have to lose? Certainly not money.

About FloQast     www.floqast.com
FloQast is the leader in accounting workflow automation created by accountants for accountants. By automating and modernizing everyday accounting workflows, FloQast enables accountants to work better together and perform their tasks with greater efficiency and accuracy. The cloud-based, AI-enhanced software is trusted by more than 2,000 accounting teams, including those at Snowflake, Kodiak, Instacart, Zoom, and The Golden State Warriors – and still growing! We aspire to forever elevate accounting and improve both the practice and perceptions of the profession.

Our values serve as a compass that guides our decisions and are considered non-negotiable, especially when it comes to hiring. Together with our employees, partners, and customers, we live these values every day.

Unwaveringly Authentic
Ambitious with Integrity
Empowered to Grow
Committed to Collaboration
Customer Obsessed in All Ways

Here’s Why You Should Apply:
Amazing Benefits – FloQast pays 100% of the premium for employees and families for most Medical, Dental, & Vision plans.

Competitive Compensation & Stock Options

FloQast is regularly rated as a Best Place to Work!
– Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces in 2023, 2022, and 2021
– Best Places to Work by LA Business Journal since 2017 (that’s 6 years!)
– Built In’s Best Place to Work in Los Angeles 4 years in a row!

Professional Growth & Community – We believe community extends through and beyond the office. We have Employee Resource Groups, community volunteer opportunities, social events, DEI initiatives, and reimbursements for professional development relevant to your role.

Work-Life Balance – We have unlimited PTO along with a generous parental leave policy. To top it off, we have Mental Health Days, where the company closes to allow employees to unplug, relax, and recharge (we know Zoom fatigue is a real thing!)

Employee Choice Policy – Employees can work from home and also have the option to work in a FloQast office or maintain a hybrid work schedule.

Our customers love us! See for yourself on G2 Crowd.

FloQast, Inc is committed to operating fair and unbiased recruitment procedures allowing all applicants an equal opportunity for employment, free from discrimination on the basis of religion, race, sex, age, sexual orientation, disability, color, ethnic or national origin, or any other classification as may be protected by applicable law. We aim to recruit the right people for the jobs we have to offer, and to assess applications on the basis of relevant skills, education, and experience. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We are an equal opportunity employer and strive to provide a professional and welcoming workplace for all employees.

The post Unlock Your Worth: Finding Better Pay and Camaraderie in the Accounting Industry appeared first on Going Concern.

Q: Edwards Engineering is a client of what tax consulting firm, a popular subject at Going Concern due to its ongoing problems across several areas?

A: Oh wait, it’s in the headline.

We can’t directly tie the $732,597 boo-boo to malfeasance by Alliantgroup, but the company did issue a press release claiming that the Tax Court “found that alliantgroup properly applied the law” and proclaiming the ruling a “historic win for taxpayers.” If Alliantgroup is taking credit for the positive outcomes of the case, shouldn’t they get the blame for the bad parts, too?

We’ll leave it for you to decide, but regardless, it’s certainly not a good look to have the Tax Court rule that your tax client went way too far with its tax deductions. As you dive into the details, the look only gets worse, as it appears that the overclaim stems from a misunderstanding of the law, an overly aggressive stance against its ambiguities, or a combination of both.

The case ultimately proves the value of hiring a firm with specific experience and a strong track record of successful client outcomes for §179D deductions.

We caught up with our buddy David Diaz, partner at Walker Reid Strategies, to help us better understand what happened with this case—and what we can learn from it.

Hey, back up! Beep, beep, beep! What is §179D?

Calm down, there’s no need to make Seinfeld references at us. For those of you who aren’t masters of the tax domain, here’s the yada yada yada on IRS Section 179D. Fusili Jerry.

Section 179D of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) is an engineered-based tax incentive available for the reduction of energy and power costs in commercial buildings. The §179D tax deduction specifically applies to commercial buildings that notably reduce their interior lighting energy costs, as well as their heating, cooling, and building envelope.

“Like most sections of the IRC, §179D is complicated,” Diaz said. “There’s a lot of confusion about who qualifies, and you typically need an advisor like Walker Reid to help certify everything and calculate your deduction.”

What happened in the Edwards Engineering §179D Tax Court case?

Edwards Engineering engaged Alliantgroup to conduct an Energy Efficient Commercial Building Tax Deduction Study for the work it performed in 2012 and 2013 on a Hines VA Medical Center in Illinois. Edwards Engineering then claimed a deduction of $1,037,237 under §179D for the 2013 tax year.

The IRS actually disallowed the deduction entirely by notices of deficiency dated July 12, 2018. The IRS listed several reasons for this, including:

• The property was not installed as part of a plan to achieve energy savings
• The computed energy savings were not derived from the property installed
• The certification and notice to the building owner required by §179D(d)(5) and (6) were deficient

The Tax Court wound up disagreeing with the IRS’s logic, technically ruling in favor of Edwards Engineering. This is the “victory” claimed by Alliantgroup in its press release. But the Tax Court also determined that Edwards had claimed far more than it should have, to the tune of over $700,000.

How did Edwards Engineering overstate its §179D deduction?

This bit gets complicated, but basically, Edwards Engineering used the square footage of the entire building in its deduction calculation, based on the position that costs of prior projects not performed by Edwards Engineering were also considered part of the EECBP costs. The max deduction in 2013 under §179D was $1.80 per square foot, so their logic looked like this:

$1.80/sq. ft. x 596,243 sq. ft. = $1,073,237 deduction

“I think this represents an aggressive stance on §179D, which put Edwards Engineering at risk of IRS penalties, tax repayment, and operational disruption,” Diaz said. “When dealing with complex tax code sections like §179D, you need a partner that balances maximizing incentives for clients and strictly adhering to the reasonable interpretation of tax law.”

The Tax Court ruled that Edwards Engineering could not deduct more than $304,640, which was the cost of EECBP placed in service during the 2013 tax year at Hines VA.

What can we learn from Edwards Engineering’s §179D overclaim?

At Going Concern, we learned about the karmic consequences of regularly taking pleasure in the misfortune of others when, just before completing this article, we received a letter from the cockroaches that live in our office basement declaring their intent to unionize.

As for the lessons tax professionals and anyone looking into §179D write-offs should learn, we’ll leave that to our resident expert, Mr. Diaz.

“Everyone wants the biggest possible deduction, but if the positions being taken create undue risk for your company, you’re doing far more harm than good,” Diaz said. “This case highlights the importance of engaging with reputable and knowledgeable firms, such as Walker Reid, to avoid the consequences of taking an overly aggressive stance on §179D or any section of the tax code.”

Diaz went on to tell us how the case also helped resolve three previously unclear areas in the interpretation of §179D. We nodded and pretended to understand as we wrote down his words verbatim, which we will now shamelessly present to you as our own:

The Edwards Engineering case helped clarify these uncertainties surrounding §179D:

All told, the case spells more bad news for the increasingly beleaguered Alliantgroup. It also illustrates a key principle of the legal system that we at Going Concern try to live by: Test cases are essential to interpreting and understanding the law…but, if possible, always let someone else be the test case.

David Diaz is a partner at Walker Reid Strategies, a licensed engineering firm specializing in §179D studies and §45L certifications, and is an expert in energy efficiency and tax services. You can find more information about him and his insights at www.walkerreid.com and through webinars. You can also reach him at ddiaz@walkerreid.com for more details.

The post $700,000+ Overclaim by Alliantgroup Client Shows Value of §179D Expertise appeared first on Going Concern.

1. Email threads,
2. Excel docs,
3. Handwritten scribbles on the back of a tear-soaked cocktail napkin from last night’s happy hour that ended with you making merciful pleas to a series of increasingly obscure deities and fictional wizards,
4. Etc.

The internet offers no shortage of guides and tips on overcoming your busy season woes. But nearly all of them miss a relatively simple step: Get the flow of documents between you and your clients under control with a document request management solution.

In our research for this article, a public accounting firm revealed that it spent up to 30% of its time collecting documents in a typical engagement. So there seems to be a ton of potential for time-savings and stress relief with a solution that keeps everything in one place as you request, track, and review large volumes of document requests.

No doubt, document request management can make the 2023 busy season less sucky for CPAs, accountants, and auditors—and even help you build smarter processes that deliver long-term busy season relief. We thought of several hundred reasons why, but our editors made us condense it down to these four:

1. It helps you stay calm under pressure

Ah, the busy season fire drill. We can picture it now:

The client takes three months to get you the documents you need—then demands immediate results. So you’re wading through the year’s worth of Excel docs and emails that flooded your inbox over the last two hours, trying to reconcile the mess while the partner is asking the manager who is asking you if anything is missing because he has a client meeting in 13 minutes. Tensions are high, and angry Teams messages PING your desktop and phone with greater frequency, but without a PING predictable cadence or rhythm PING that would allow you to PING PING tune them out, driving you PING ever closer PING PING PING PING to the edge PING PING PING of madness PING…

With a proper PBC (Provided by Client) request solution, however, a different picture comes into view—one where busy season fires can be extinguished with just a few clicks, coworkers and clients keep their cool, and, most importantly, your sanity remains intact.

“Instead of having to reconcile everything, you could open your dashboard on UpLink and see exactly what documents are missing, late, or have been uploaded for your review,” said Alex Maher, co-founder of UpLink, a leading document request management solution.

When problems do occur, document request management makes it much easier to discover what happened and validate it to the client.

“When you wait three months to get something from a client, and then they ask you to turn it around in a day…(UpLink) gives you ammunition to go back to the client so you can stand up for your staff,” said Alex Grant, co-founder of UpLink.

(And yes, two of the co-founders of UpLink are named Alex. Maher refers to Grant as “Grant” to avoid confusion. It’s kind of adorable.)

2. It gives you more time to build relationships

Conversations with clients can be painful endeavors, especially during busy season. But a document request management solution can give you the power to check off meeting agenda items in rapid succession, easily confirming what you have, identifying what you still need, and even receiving and uploading documents in real-time.

“When you get all the important meeting items out of the way in five minutes, that puts valuable time back in your day,” Grant said. “Sometimes those calls will end early, allowing you to move on to something else. But you can also use the 25 minutes left to develop that relationship.”

When you know your clients—who they are, what sports teams they like, which circle of hell they ascended from to make your life miserable, etc—you can serve them better, reduce friction, and gain some leeway for when mistakes do happen.

“Several of our customers have stories about clients staying on the call longer to talk about hobbies, interests, whatever,” Maher said. “That may not always be a good thing, but…it leads to more collaboration, more sharing the load…so clients want to get you things faster and are generally nicer.”

3. It helps you empathize with clients

Clients can be mean during busy season. But it’s important to remember that clients…(extra long pause for emphasis)…are still human beings.

They’re under intense pressure from their bosses and colleagues to achieve results within tight timeframes. And while that’s no excuse to take out their frustrations on you, you can still defuse a lot of problems with a few simple expressions of human empathy.

One way to get there is to remind yourself that, as the auditor, you have the power in these situations.

“It may not seem like it, but a lot of times, clients are afraid of you,” Maher said. “When they come at you with bad behavior—bullying, finger-pointing—that may be their misguided way of dealing with that fear.”

That’s where solutions like document request management can play an important role. It’s a tool that empowers you to demonstrate exactly what you need from the client, why you can’t move forward without it, when it was delivered vs when it was promised, etc. And that enables you to use your power in a confident way.

“When you have that confidence, you can stand your ground but also be more empathetic,” Grant said. “You can say, ‘I understand your frustrations, but we are about to run up against the holidays, and I don’t want you to stress when you’re trying to enjoy your family.’ So you’re better able to push them forward while still being nice about it.”

4. It can help you make your clients look good

While they may not always deserve it, making your clients look good is generally in your best interests. Document request management makes it easy to provide specific metrics to clients that validate their hard work (even if their efforts can’t reasonably be called “hard” or “work”), strengthening your goodwill with them.

“With good telemetry into your whole request system, you can find slivers of gold even in a sea of you-know-what,” Grant said. “You get insights to say things like, ‘Wow, Bill got us stuff 30 percent faster this year!’ Instead of, ‘We got behind again because Bill is too slow.’ Hyping up your contacts like that can encourage them to be more proactive with you in the future.”

Why use UpLink for document request management?

Now that we’ve empirically, indisputably, and oh-so-humbly proved that document request management makes busy season less sucky for CPAs, accountants, and auditors, there’s only one question left to answer: Which document request management solution is right for you?

Hell, we don’t know. What does this look like, Consumer Reports? But, according to a public accounting associate we spoke to:

“Most of the tools out there are not that great and feel outdated. UpLink has a really modern interface, and it’s dead simple for clients to use.”

And, from an accounting manager at a large energy company:

“I wish all my auditors would use (UpLink), because version control around updating Excel request lists is terrible.”

Also, Team Alex gave us the deets on several features UpLink has that its competitors don’t, ultimately making UpLink easier to use and more effective:

• • Excel integration. Bulk create and edit the PBC using Excel
  • In-app preview: Review documents without needing to download them
  • Mobile-friendly interface: Take UpLink with you and access a single source of truth across your devices
  • Custom attributes: Tag requests with specific values that are important on your engagement, such as priority, control number, department, etc.

Special offer: Readers of Going Concern can try UpLink risk-free with a complimentary free trial: either two months or 5 engagements free, your choice. Sign up before the end of February and you’ll get a six-month window to activate your trial whenever you’re ready.

Sign up for a free trial of UpLink >

The post 4 Ways PBC Management Makes Busy Season Less Sucky appeared first on Going Concern.

The grief is understandable, although we’re not sure how “good” it is. The FASB—along with its younger-but-still-well-adjusted sister, the Government Accounting Standards Board, or GASB—has been rolling out major changes to lease accounting standards since 2016. Many of these new rules are already in place, with others scheduled to go into effect soon.

Specifically, accounting and finance professionals are expressing grief over the impact of these new standards on their balance sheets. Once a relatively simple endeavor, determining whether a lease qualifies as an asset or liability has mutated into a kafkaesque odyssey across labyrinthine regulations, and efforts to implement the resulting changes have been marred by traps and pitfalls.

Navigating your grief over lease accounting changes

According to a random episode of 30 Rock, there are five stages of grief². And—despite the near-total lack of empirical evidence that the five-stages (aka Kübler-Ross) model of grief is real or helpful in any way³—we’re not going to risk arguing with Alec Baldwin at this particular time.

Instead, because it’s fun and should make for a good article, we’ll plow ahead with the unfounded assumption that grief over the new lease accounting standards unfolds in a Kübler-Ross kind of way. Let’s explore the five stages of lease accounting grief—and, more importantly, examine expert advice on how you can navigate and overcome them.

Stage 1 of lease accounting grief:

Denial (of how much work you’ll need to do)

Underestimating (or outright denying) the amount of work required to implement the new lease accounting standards is an understandable temptation—but it’s also a dangerous one.

According to Deloitte, organizations must “radically transform how they account for leases,” with the changes causing a “ripple effect on business processes, from contracts to internal controls to debt agreements with banks.”⁴ And an EY report revealed that nearly half of surveyed companies anticipate spending $1-5 million to implement the new lease accounting standards.⁵

To move past denial, you first need to understand the various regulations, their impact, and their deadlines:

ASC 842, aka Topic 842

• Summary: Requires most operating leases to be recorded on the balance sheet.
• Deadline: Public companies had to comply in 2019. For private companies, see the table below.

GASB 87, aka Statement No. 87

• Summary: Requires state and local government organizations to capitalize most leases on the balance sheet.
• Deadline: Applies to fiscal years beginning after June 15, 2021.

GASB 96, Subscription-Based Information Technology Arrangements (SBITAs)

• Summary: Requires government entities to recognize a right-to-use subscription asset and corresponding subscription liability for such contracts with a specified term.
• Deadline: Applies to fiscal years beginning after June 15, 2022.

And here are some more actions you can take to overcome lease accounting denial and procrastination, courtesy of the experts at EZLease:

• Build time into your project to identify and load leases.
• Consider choosing technology that has a short implementation timeline.
• For ongoing compliance, keep the auditor’s “provided by client” list in mind throughout each financial period to avoid the last-minute rush.

Stage 2 of lease accounting grief:

Anger (over discovering you don’t know everything you lease)

Simply identifying everything your company leases can be challenging. In most cases, the real estate team knows what buildings are being leased. But what about all the other leases, for things like photocopiers, office furniture, laptops, servers, forklifts, trucks, cars, or even aircraft?

A study by EZLease found that private companies had the most difficulty finding and analyzing their equipment leases, followed by real estate leases, embedded leases, and international leases.⁶

When we can’t find what we need to start a project, it definitely makes us angry—like the time we really needed a Phillips-head screwdriver, but all we could find was the court citation from repeatedly breaking into the hardware store across the street.

So, while anger is a reasonable response to being unable to find your leases, you can do plenty of things to restore calm. This handy Quick Start Guide, for instance, provides some concrete steps you can take to locate all your lease data and load it into a centralized database.

Stage 3 of lease accounting grief:

Bargaining (with makeshift solutions that only make things worse)

With actual grief, the bargaining stage involves pledging to reform one’s life in exchange for avoidance or reversal of the initial grief-inducing circumstances. The lease accounting equivalent to this would be something akin to an attitude of, “If I can just survive the first audit under the new standards, I swear I’ll get my lease data organized for real next time.”

But this approach will only cause further problems down the road (which we’ll examine more in the next section.) Instead, the first audit should lay the groundwork for future success. By taking the time upfront to establish complete and accurate lease data, document policy requirements, and implement the right technologies and solutions, you can create a scalable, workable strategy that will make subsequent audits far less painful.

Accounting and finance professionals who spend too long in Stage One (denial) may have particular trouble with this stage, wherein panic over rapidly approaching deadlines leads to short-term fixes or patchwork solutions made from legacy processes and outdated or improper tools.

Spreadsheets, for example, may seem “good enough” to allow you to survive your first audit. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are missing essential functions needed to achieve and maintain compliance, especially when lease counts go above 10.

Here are some other actions you can take to move beyond the bargaining stage (again courtesy of EZLease):

• Work with your auditors ahead of time to understand what they require for the new standards.
• Use technology to ensure your work is repeatable from period to period to make ongoing audits easier.

Stage 4 of lease accounting grief:

Depression (over realizing the long-term impact of quick fixes)

You may be able to avoid this stage if you follow our advice re: bargaining and put the proper lease accounting solutions in place from the start. For many of you, however, that advice is like the $1-off VHS rental Blockbuster coupons we gave our employees as “holiday bonuses” on January 16th—too little, too late.

If you took a triage, duct-tape-style approach to achieve compliance with new lease accounting standards for your first audit, you might already be feeling the sting of the resulting complications. These could include challenges with scalability, version control, collaboration, data integrity, and audit trails. It all adds up to untold amounts of redundant or unnecessary work that—while maybe not “depressing”—is more than enough to give your average accounting or finance exec the lease accounting blues.

As the lawyers in our numerous libel, slander, and felony jaywalking court cases keep reminding us, however, it’s never too late to do things the right way. Which brings us to…

Stage 5 of lease accounting grief:

Acceptance (that your approach needs to change)

At long last, there’s acceptance—the calm, stable relief that makes the fight through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression all worth it. (Or it would be, if the Kübler-Ross model was, you know, real. But you’ve humored this labored metaphor all the way to the end, so we think you deserve some degree of resolution.)

Ultimately, overcoming your grief over the new FASB and GASB standards means accepting that you’ll need to rethink how you handle lease accounting. It means acknowledging that change is required—and that the right way forward may include forgoing legacy processes and solutions in favor of new technology and/or services.

The good news is, the right lease accounting software can help you implement the new standards with minimal cost, risk, and negative impact. But if you decide to go this route, be sure to do your homework.

Qualities to look for when researching lease accounting software include:

• • Fast setup
  • Quick, easy, bulk loading of lease data
  • Automated data validation for all related standards
  • Easy lease modification and validation of changes
  • “Push-button” accounting and disclosure reporting features
  • Proven experience with firms of your size
  • Training and onboarding support

Alternatively, you can outsource some or all of your lease accounting needs through managed services. This is a good option for if you are:

• Not staffed to set up or manage lease accounting and/or software
• Just starting to manage leases and have a large, complex portfolio
• Running out of time
• Looking for lease abstraction, attestation, policy decisions, and memos

Get (and stay) ahead of lease accounting compliance

By implementing the right business processes, controls, technology, and services, you can stay on top of lease accounting compliance—and achieve sustainable results that allow you to shift focus back to your core mission and customers.

Hundreds of companies of all sizes, with hundreds of thousands of real estate and equipment leases, trust EZLease for their lease accounting needs. Backed by decades of expertise, EZLease helps entities from solo CPAs to Fortune 500 enterprises—carrying anywhere from just a few to over 50,000 leases—achieve and maintain compliance.

You can try EZLease for free for 15 days and return it risk-free after 30 days if you aren’t satisfied. Even better: If you have fewer than 10 leases, EZLease offers a free tier via its Essentials Plan.

Sign up for a free trial now to discover how EZLease can get you compliant with ASC 842, GASB 87, GASB 96, and/or IFRS 16 in just hours—and learn why EZLease is the simplest, highest-rated lease accounting software.

Try EZLease for free >

¹Lugo, Denise, “FASB Proposes to Clarify Lease Accounting Rules for Subsidiaries Controlled by the Same Parent Company,” Thomson Reuters, December 2, 2022.
² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIKx9mk5VMU
³ Stroebe M, Schut H, Boerner K, “Cautioning Health-Care Professionals,” Omega (Westport), March 2017.
⁴“Flashpoint: Changes to Lease Accounting Standards,” Deloitte, 2016.
⁵Cohn, Michael, “Lease Accounting Changes Expected to Cost Millions,” Accounting Today, December 4, 2018.
⁶“6 Steps to Finding and Loading Lease Data: EZ Lease Quick Start Guide,” EZLease, 2021.

The post Overcoming the Five Stages of Lease Accounting Grief appeared first on Going Concern.

With all this excitement, comes a bit of uncertainty of course. Will the economy get better? Will the job market normalize? Will I ever be able to figure out the unnecessarily complicated visual menu on my car’s information center so I can open the stupid glove box? Asking the important questions.

If you own an accounting firm or small practice, you’ve no doubt asked yourself in the last year how you can make the most of these exciting, if uncertain, times. What will profits look like a year from now? Will you be able to hire talent? Should you be on TikTok? Again with the questions, some less important than others.

We can’t advise you if you should get on TikTik or not but what we can tell you is this: There is no better time than the present to think about how modernizing processes with profitability in mind can help you navigate the months and years ahead. “Profitability” doesn’t have to be a dirty word. We thought about putting a list of words that are dirty here to prove how not dirty it is but the sponsors of this article weren’t cool with that (understandably).

The following are five suggestions for maximizing profitability in uncertain times. We were going to give you ten but we decided to maximize the efficiency of this post. Ain’t nobody got time for ten items.

Let new technologies work for you

There’s a technological revolution happening in the accounting profession as we speak and there has never been a more exciting time to be an accountant. Your accounting professors probably told you that back in college but it’s actually true now.

Future-ready firms at the forefront of this movement are hauling giant cartoon bags of money to the bank every other day, that’s how profitable they are. OK, that’s a slight exaggeration. Getting all your clients in the cloud and automating a few manual tasks won’t fulfill your fantasies of swimming through a pool of cash a la Scrooge McDuck. But it will increase profitability because your time is money and the time you’re spending on repetitive, manual tasks is money you’re leaving on the table.

Are there tasks you are currently doing manually that you don’t need to be? And if so, what’s stopping you from getting it off your plate?

Here’s a real-world example: Every day, you’re spending hours on sending payments or reconciling incoming payments, precious time that could be better spent elsewhere. Let’s be real, no one enjoys doing this. Good news! There are online tools to manage accounts payable and receivable (AP and AR) for you. Melio, for example, allows you to manage and schedule business payments for your own business or your clients. It comes with no monthly fees and offers free ACH transactions and incoming payments. We encourage you to take it out for a spin and start saving time and money as early as now.

Take off some hats

If you’re running a firm, you’re no doubt wearing many hats. Juggling all these tasks at once on top of the actual service you provide is not only exhausting, it’s unsustainable. You. Are. Tired. We know. We see you, #TaxTwitter.

Are you doing all of your own social media, advertising, appointment-setting, and client-hounding? Do you hate it? Bet you do. The only person who enjoys this is that one weirdo up there ^^ whose favorite part of the day is reconciling payments.

Here’s what you do: Take some of that off your plate and pay someone else to do it. Now, you’re probably wondering how paying for something will make your practice more profitable in the long run and that is a reasonable thing to wonder. But outsourcing some of these things to experts whose job it is to do them not only frees you up to do the important stuff, it can improve your brand, which means more clients. Your clients don’t DIY their taxes, why are you DIYing marketing?

For those of you already doing this, great! You’re a clever one, aren’t you? Think of some other things you could outsource or improve. Maybe your website could use a facelift. Perhaps you could hire a freelance writer to produce regular newsletters informing your clients of important tax deadlines and changes.

You get the idea. Improve your image, improve your appeal, improve your profitability. It’s like the underpants gnome meme but without the ambiguous “???” step. And it’s a win-win for you because it frees you up to focus on more important things than scheduling tweets.

Referrals

While we’re on the topic of marketing, referrals are an excellent way to get the word out without a whole lot of effort on your part. You’re already doing the hard part, that is, providing excellent service to your clients. Now let clients return the favor. They are probably already talking about you when a friend asks them “hey, I need an accountant do you know anyone?”

Plant the seed in clients’ minds that you appreciate referrals, and maybe give them a few extra business cards to hand out if needed. You can offer an incentive if you want, such as a discount on services, but often just nicely asking for referrals is incentive enough. If they’re happy with you–and they must be if you have an ongoing relationship–then they’ll surely spread your name around. Not in that “omg did you see what she wore?” way we spread things around in high school, I mean telling their friends they know someone who does an awesome job.

Reduce expenses

Alright, so just two items ago this article said “hire someone to do your social media” and reducing expenses sounds like the exact opposite of that because you’ll have to pay this person, but hear us out.

Let’s use streaming services as an example of smart thriftiness. Many people don’t subscribe to all the streaming services at once because who can watch all that TV in a month. No, they rotate. Netflix one month, HBO the next. Are you doing that at your business too? Did you pay for a yearly Adobe subscription two years ago for those three flyers you create a year and forgot about it? That’s a lot of money to throw away for something you aren’t using.

Think about things that you’re paying for that you don’t need to be. Imagine all the office water deliveries that were paid for from 2020-2021 that were never used, for example.

Periodically go through your subscriptions and purchases to figure out where a few pennies can be pinched, focusing, of course, on the things that you aren’t actually using and don’t need. Like that monthly subscription of coffee that’s been stacking up in the break room for two years.

On this subject, think about ways technology can work for you to help reduce expenses. If you’re spending $70 a month on bank transfer fees, for example, consider using Melio to send payments for free.

Raise fees

As you’ve probably noticed by now, we started the list with some fun stuff and now we’re working our way down to more sensitive topics. Chances are you’ve considered raising fees, but you just don’t know how to have those difficult conversations with your customers. You certainly don’t want to do it, especially with long-time clients who might leave to find someone cheaper.

Thing is, your peers are already raising their fees. If they haven’t already, they’re thinking about it or are in the process of initiating the discussion with clients.

It’s an uncomfortable conversation to have for sure but it’s not like you’re doing it for the fun of it. Everyone understands that costs are going up. Have those difficult conversations. The results may surprise you.

Fire clients

Well, we’ve reached the bottom of the list, and fittingly so since saying goodbye to paying clients is probably the last thing on your list, too. If you successfully deployed item #4 then, congratulations, some of your clients probably took care of this one themselves.

Much like eliminating unnecessary expenses, sometimes you need to think about eliminating unnecessary clients. Don’t tell them they are unnecessary, obviously, clients hate that. You can always go with the old “it’s not you, it’s me” that daters have used since the dawn of time. We all know it really is them, but they don’t have to know that.

We bet when you read the line “fire clients” at least a few immediately came to mind. You’ve known for some time that you should sever these relationships, you just didn’t know how or thought maybe with a sufficient amount of coaching these jerks might one day turn into lovely, promptly-paying people with whom you are honored to work. Yeah no.

When you eliminate the most difficult of clients it frees you up to give more of your limited time and energy to the delightful ones. Not to mention it gives you more of those precious, finite resources for yourself and your practice. Aren’t you worth it?

We’ve reached the end of the list and hopefully given you some things to think about and take action on. We know some of these topics can be difficult to mull over, which is all the more reason to take an inventory of your processes (audit pun not intended) and ask yourself if what you’re doing now is really working for you. The sooner you put these profitability ideas to action, the sooner you can get back to the fun stuff.

About Melio
Melio is a business-to-business (B2B) online payment tool specifically built with small businesses in mind. It requires no subscription and allows you to send and receive business payments for free, only charging for fast and premium options. Sign up to start paying all of your clients’ business bills with Melio.

The post Five Ways to Incorporate Profitability Into Your Practice appeared first on Going Concern.

Welcome to part two of our series on the IRS Section 179D tax deduction. We explained how the §179D tax deduction works and who qualifies for it in part one. For this entry, we’ll take a look at the future of our plucky lil’ write-off friend, focusing mainly on the effects of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (hint: those effects have nothing to do with inflation.)

How will the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 affect §179D?

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 spells out specific changes to §179D. The most substantial of these are:

1. The minimum requirements for qualifying for some deduction under §179D
2. The maximum possible write-off

Let’s start with #1, because it only took us three tries to pass kindergarten, and we’re pretty sure that one comes before two. Originally, to qualify for §179D, you would need to reduce the energy usage of your HVAC, lighting, and/or building envelope systems down to at least half that of a “standard” building (as defined by ASHRAE).

Starting in 2023, the barrier to entry will be lower—from a percentage standpoint, at least. You can start qualifying for §179D with a 25% reduction in power use, and your deduction scales higher with every point you shave on the way toward a 50% reduction. However, your energy savings will be measured against a more recent version of the ASHRAE standard. So, in some cases, qualifying for §179D will actually be more difficult.

“This makes a lot more sense, as we can look at the overall energy cost savings of the building rather than being limited to partial deductions for individual categories, like HVAC, lighting, and building envelope,” said David Diaz, partner at Walker Reid Strategies. “A lot more buildings should qualify, and the scaling deductions will incentivize them to keep making improvements, even if they never ultimately reach 50%.”

The law also introduces new prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements that further determine the size of the deduction. If these requirements are met, you qualify for a larger deduction. If not, it’ll be like when we received a box of unsharpened pencils for “honorable mention” at the Accounting News Websites That Start With ‘G’ Awards—at least you got something, but you can’t help but feel like you could’ve done better.

We could try to explain this further, but why not let a table do the work instead?

It’s that number in the top right that has people the most excited, which brings us to the second item on our list: an increase in the maximum possible deduction, from today’s $1.88 / sq ft to $5.00 / sq ft. That’s roughly a 166% increase, which can add up to some serious savings for owners of large or multiple qualifying buildings.

So, if you want those big savings, all you have to do is:

1. Bring energy usage down to 50% of a standard building;
2. Meet the new prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements;
3. Satisfy a dozen or so other requirements that we don’t have the space to get into here.

“Qualifying for §179D and maximizing your deduction are still going to be challenging,” Diaz said. “You’ll need to work with a partner like Walker Reid to sort through tax code and the changes, figure out the best way forward, and get certified.”

Additional changes to §179D

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 spells out further changes to §179D—but they’re complicated, confusing, and not nearly as exciting as the bump from $1.88 to $5.00.

So, in the spirit of finishing this article so we can get back to playing video games, we’re going to put those changes into a bulleted list and let you figure out the rest. (Just kidding—we’ve been playing video games this entire time.)

• • Tax-exempt building owners may now allocate §179D deductions to designers of energy-efficient commercial buildings (EECB). The rules for allocating §179D to designers are expected to mirror existing ones.
  • There is a new qualifying methodology for analyzing energy use intensity for retrofits.
  • Buildings can get recertified if additional energy improvements are made every three years for privately-owned buildings and every four years for government/tax-exempt owned buildings.
  • Real estate investment trusts (REITs) will now be able to use §179D in calculating profits.

How should you prepare for changes to §179D?

Like any change to the tax code, preparation is key. And the best way to prepare for these new standards is to go ahead and qualify for §179D in its current iteration—and do whatever you can to maximize your deduction now.

“It will take some time to get guidance on exactly how the changes will be applied and how they will affect projects being placed in 2023 and beyond,” Diaz said. “So we highly recommend that you get ahead of the game by starting on §179D now—and Walker Reid can help you do that.”

As the implications of these changes become more widely understood, you should see the emergence of taxpayer-created initiatives designed to take full advantage of §179D. But, again, the prevailing guidance is to start qualifying for §179D now, then take advantage of these programs as they start to pop up.

What will be the long-term effects of changes to §179D?

This is an easy one: A series of apocalyptic plagues that make The Ten Commandments look like a laundry soap commercial.

We’re kidding (we think). We have no clue what to expect from the changes to §179D. But our friends over at Walker Reid have a few ideas.

With all the uncertainty surrounding the law, the Walker Reid team stresses that its thoughts should be considered more like educated guesses than actual predictions. But, since we lost our copy of Responsible Journalism and You years ago, we’re going to print them anyway.

“You may not see a ton of projects qualifying at the full $5.00/sq ft right away, but we think there will be lots of deductions in the $3-4 range,” Diaz said. “We also think you’ll see a major boost in government projects with deductions allocated to designers.”

While this was a perfectly fine answer, we pressed Diaz further, asking him what he thought §179D might look like 20 years from now. Diaz said this was the equivalent of requesting a Tarot reading, but he gave us an answer anyway—in exchange for our promise never to call him again at 3 AM, or ever.

“The need for more energy-efficient infrastructure in response to climate change isn’t going anywhere,” Diaz said. “So I believe the incentives will continue to strengthen and further expand. And with ESG (environmental, social, and governance) taking a seat at the table, CPAs will be brought along for the ride.”

No matter how these changes unfold or what effects they have, Diaz says the most important thing is to work with a trustworthy, proven partner with plenty of §179D experience.

“We are excited to be the go-to partner for building owners, designers, and CPA firms on energy tax incentives and ESG consulting,” Diaz said.

Read part one of our series on understanding the §179D tax deduction here.

ABOUT WALKER STRATEGIES
With over $1 billion in total certified §179D deductions and §45L tax credits, Walker Reid Strategies has experience with proven results. We are a licensed professional engineering firm that specializes in performing §179D studies and §45L certifications. We have refined our processes to maximize financial benefits while reducing our clients’ internal costs and efforts.

The post Understanding the §179D Tax Deduction for Humans, Part 2 appeared first on Going Concern.

That’s not to say the traditional path is bad and the sole reason why people are bypassing it these days. Quite the opposite, actually. No matter what you read on social media and certain accounting blogs (*cough*), there is no experience like putting in a few years at a public accounting firm. Yes, you will be tested. Yes, you will sacrifice. And yes, the pay leaves something to be desired, at least for those early years. In exchange, you will see the man behind the curtain pulling the levers of business. You’ll be exposed to different kinds of clients, make connections that will last a lifetime, and, most of all, you’ll learn how to thrive in a people-centric, oftentimes (OK, almost always) stressful environment. If you can make it in public, you can make it anywhere. Well, except in public for any longer than you have to.

When you get to the point in your public accounting career that you’re ready to start thinking about exit opportunities, you no doubt think of industry, non-profit, or government, usually in that order. Thing is, something’s changed in recent years. Accounting students are going straight to data analytics fresh out of school, firms are hiring more non-accounting grads than ever, fewer and fewer accounting graduates are even pursuing the CPA exam. You are no longer bound by tradition. The road is wide open.

Over the years, we at Going Concern have written about all kinds of public accounting exit opportunities from corporate finance to startups to academia. One possibility that doesn’t get much lip service around here: sales.

Bear with us, we know it’s a bit out there of a suggestion. What if there were a way for you to utilize those awesome people skills you learned from interacting with clients and colleagues in public accounting and could apply them to making other people’s lives easier? People whose shoes you’ve been in so you understand their pain points better than anyone?

Is interacting with clients one of your favorite parts of public accounting? Are you a little competitive? Do you break the “introverted accountant” stereotype? Can you write a killer email? Then the opportunity we’re about to share might just be for you.

Our friends at FloQast are looking for current and former public accountants with a handful of specific skills because it takes a certain kind of person to thrive in this role. FloQast actually employs former auditors and accountants on every team within the company. You heard that right: They make it a priority to identify and train professionals with accounting backgrounds in order to influence operations, specifically on the sales side. If you’re the type who actually likes talking to clients, solving problems, and working in teams, perhaps you’re exactly who they are looking for. Does this sound like you?

• Demonstrated ability and desire to learn new concepts
• Eager to be coached
• Commitment to self-improvement and success
• Team player with a collaborative orientation
• Ability to remain organized and execute in a fast-paced environment
• Tenacious and committed to exceeding targets
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Competitive, ambitious and driven, with a self-starter attitude
• Interested in starting a sales career

About 90% of the team has past audit/accounting experience because it’s that experience that makes you uniquely qualified to understand the problems the people you’ll be talking to are having and how FloQast’s accounting workflow automation can solve those problems. Didn’t you ever sit around at your firm some days wishing a fairy godparent would appear out of thin air, wave their wand, and take a bit of the stress and tedium off your plate? Well, that’s what you’d be doing for others in this role. Cool, right? Sorry, the wand isn’t included.

“I just hit my two-year mark, and I realized that there hasn’t been a single day where I was dreading coming to work or just feeling unmotivated.”

— Former auditor who hasn’t felt the Sunday Scaries in 104 consecutive weeks since joining FloQast

Add to that you’ll be working for a high-growth tech company which sounds impressive on a Bumble LinkedIn profile. It’s a unique experience on the technology side that will sharpen your already awesome communication skills so there’s that, too. Still not sure? Check out what these three auditors have to say about their transition into tech [PDF warning]. Just a heads up: FOMO might strike fast when you’re reading about people who used to do what you do having a way better time at work than you are right now.

“FloQast invests so much time and effort into proper training, and having other accountants who’ve been through it already available to help you. When you’re surrounded by motivated, intelligent people who all want to see you succeed, it’s almost impossible to fail.”

— Brandon Malekie, CPA, Inside Sales Manager, FloQast

Why You Should Apply

Customer success is a priority at FloQast and their 500+ 5-star reviews on G2 Crowd don’t lie. Just check out all these glowing endorsements from customers whose lives are made better because FloQast is in them.

Do you ever go on Glassdoor for fun to see what horrible things people are saying about the accounting firms they work for? No? Just us? OK well you won’t find many negatives on FloQast’s Glassdoor page. 95% of reviewers say they would refer FloQast as an employer to a friend. Like this guy who actually has time to go to the gym now that he works for FloQast. Imagine: you could finally work on your quads!

“My overall well-being has improved significantly, I have more time (and money) to spend with my family and friends, and I love my job and LOVE talking about what I do. Both my mental and physical health have improved drastically.”

— Guy who has time to go to the gym now that he doesn’t work in public

Go on, check out their Glassdoor reviews yourself.

And of course, the part you scrolled this far down to read about, comp and benefits:

FloQast offers competitive compensation, stock options, full benefits, and a positive and supportive work environment.

FloQast is regularly rated as one of the best places to work:

• Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces in 2021
• Best Places to Work by LA Business Journal since 2017
• Built In’s ​​Best Place to Work in Los Angeles since 2018

Ready to receive this sign from the universe and seriously consider your next opportunity? Read on to learn a little more about FloQast and get a link to apply. Tell them GC sent you!

About FloQast www.floqast.com
Recognized as one of the Most Innovative Finance Companies of 2022 by Fast Company, FloQast is the leader in accounting workflow automation created by accountants for accountants. The cloud-based, AI-enhanced software is trusted by more than 2,000 accounting teams, including those at Snowflake, Twilio, Instacart, Zoom, and The Golden State Warriors. In July 2021, FloQast raised a $110 million Series D at a $1.2 billion valuation — and still growing!

What We Do
By automating common accounting workflows and helping to streamline and make them more efficient, FloQast is the place where accounting teams want to work so they can focus on what matters most, even when that’s just logging off on time. Whether automating reconciliations, documentation requests, or streamlining recurring accounting processes, such as the month-end close, financial reporting, or payroll, FloQast enhances the way accounting teams already work to help them operate more efficiently. Learn more at FloQast.com.

Don’t meet every single requirement listed on the job ad? We encourage you to consider applying anyway! You may be the right candidate for this role or for other open roles.

Apply for this unique opportunity as a Business Development Representative (Audit/Accounting Experience) at FloQast here.

The post Here’s Your Sign From the Universe to Find a Better Opportunity appeared first on Going Concern.

If you listen closely, you can hear it: The IRS Section 179D tax deduction is suddenly generating a lot of buzz.

The provision, which provides incentives in the form of tax deductions to commercial building owners and designers of government-owned buildings who meet specific energy efficiency requirements, has proven popular since going into effect in 2006. But the recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (which is totally about reducing inflation and nothing else) changed the game, increasing the maximum deduction from $1.88 to $5.00 per sq ft. Now every builder, designer, architect, engineer, and contractor wants to know how to get a piece of those sweet, sweet write-offs.

In the first of this two-part series, we’ll attempt to explain §179D in plain English—who qualifies, how to qualify, and how to calculate the total deduction. Look for part two soon, which will explore the effects of the Inflation Reduction Act on §179D in greater detail—and offer expert guidance on taking advantage of the changes.

What is IRS Section 179D?

Section 179D of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) is an engineered-based tax incentive available for the reduction of energy and power costs in commercial buildings.

The §179D tax deduction specifically applies to commercial buildings that notably reduce their interior lighting energy costs, as well as their heating, cooling, and building envelope. Currently, the maximum tax deduction is $1.88 per sq ft, and buildings can also qualify for a partial deduction for the efficiency of their individual HVAC, building envelope, and lighting systems.

“Like most sections of the IRC, §179D is complicated,” said David Diaz, partner at Walker Reid Strategies. “There’s a lot of confusion about who qualifies, and you typically need an advisor like Walker Reid to help certify everything and calculate your deduction.”

Who qualifies for tax deductions under IRS Section 179D?

Certainly not anyone at Going Concern, as our office is a Herbert Hoover-era shack powered only by burning garbage and the tears of overworked CPAs.

For real, though, the deduction broadly applies to two groups of people:

1. Property owners who install “energy efficient commercial building property” (EECBP)
2. Designers who install EECBP on or in a government-owned building

Practically every word in those two statements requires further explanation, and we’ll do our best to provide more clarity in layman’s terms. However, if you really want the full scoop on §179D—or find out if you or one of your clients qualifies—we suggest you contact the experts at Walker Reid.

What is an EECBP?

Among other qualifiers, the IRS defines an EECBP as property:

“…which is certified in accordance with subsection (d)(6) as being installed as part of a plan designed to reduce the total annual energy and power costs with respect to the interior lighting systems, heating, cooling, ventilation, and hot water systems of the building by 50 percent or more in comparison to a reference building which meets the minimum requirements of Standard 90.1–2001 using methods of calculation under subsection (d)(2).”

We’ll talk more about subsections (d)(6) and (d)(2) in just a bit.

The IRC goes on to explain that “Standard 90.1-2001,” i.e. the specs of the hypothetical building used for comparison against a potential EECBP, is determined by The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) AND the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES). Perhaps one day, the two will merge to form ASHRAEIES (or, likely, an even more unwieldy acronym), but until then, we suppose you’ll have to deal with both.

Standard 90.1 has been updated for projects placed in service in 2017 or later, however. And, starting in 2023, you’ll need to go by whatever standard was in place four years prior to when the building was placed in service. Simple, right?

How does a plan or building get certified as an EECBP?

Here’s where things get really fun. Subsection (d)(6) of §179D lays out the rules for certification. But the text pretty much amounts to saying, “buildings that meet the requirements for certification can be certified.”

Thankfully, our friends at Walker Reid were able to provide us with some better clarification:

EECBP certification requirements

• • The energy and power costs savings calculations must be performed with Dept. of Energy approved software
  • Field inspections must be performed after the energy efficient property has been placed into service in accordance with NREL Guidelines
  • Certifications and inspections must be completed by a qualified engineer or contractor in the jurisdiction of the qualifying building
  • The taxpayer shall maintain the certification in their records to establish the entitlement to and amount of the deduction claimed

“§179D isn’t something you can pursue on your own,” Diaz said. “You need qualified, independent people to perform inspections and get you certified.”

And, when looking for a §179D certification partner, nothing is more important than trust and engineering expertise.

“You need someone who only has your best interests in mind,” Diaz said. “We’ve helped property owners and designers achieve over $1 billion in §179D and §45L tax credits. It’s why Walker Reid exists. We’ll be honest and straightforward with you at every step, but we’ll also help you maximize your savings.”

How do you calculate the total deduction for §179D?

Again, the IRC doesn’t offer a lot of help here. Subsection (d)(2) basically says that “the method of calculation will be described by the people responsible for describing the method of calculation.”

We mentioned previously that the building has to meet or exceed a 50% savings in energy and power costs compared to a theoretical baseline building. As long as those standards are met, and they’ve been properly certified, and the calculations have been performed with software approved by the Department of Energy, the building owner should qualify for the full $1.88 per sq ft deduction. Probably.

For buildings that don’t meet the full requirements, §179D also provides deductions for partially qualifying systems:

• $0.60/SF for HVAC systems meeting 15% savings
• $0.60/SF for lighting systems meeting 25% savings
• $0.60/SF for building envelope systems meeting 10% savings

The deductions are actually a bit higher now, as they’ve been adjusted for inflation. THANKS A LOT…um…whomever we’re blaming/crediting for inflation these days. Kanye, maybe?

“There are so many exceptions and qualifiers to the rules, you really need a certified partner to help you add it all up,” Diaz said. “Your standard CPA or tax accountant is almost certainly going to miss something, or worse, claim more than you should.”

How can a designer claim deductions through §179D?

Many run-on sentences and poor attempts at humor ago, we told you that two types of taxpayers could qualify for §179D. The “property owners” one seems self-explanatory, although it probably isn’t. But what the heck is a “designer who installs EECBP on or in a government-owned building?”

Apparently, a lot of people have the same question. In 2018, the IRS released a memo explaining how one qualifies as a designer under §179D. It even provides eight hypothetical scenarios, then details why the taxpayer would or wouldn’t qualify under those conditions. A helpful document from the IRS? Miracles do happen, and not just on ice.

Reading the full document (or, better yet, reaching out to our friends at Walker Reid) will explain it better than we can. But we’ll grab a few choice sections for the TL;DR crowd.

The memo defines a “designer” as:

“…a person that creates the technical specifications for installation of energy efficient commercial building property…for example, an architect, engineer, contractor, environmental consultant or energy services provider…A person that merely installs, repairs, or maintains the property is not a designer.”

And the memo ultimately draws two conclusions:

“(1) A taxpayer can qualify as a Designer of energy efficient commercial building property under § 179D(d)(4) if the taxpayer created technical specifications for construction contract documents for the design of the energy efficient commercial building property.

(2) If a building owner could have qualified for the maximum § 179D deduction of $1.80 per square foot for the installation of certain energy efficient commercial building property, then the government building owner has discretion to allocate the full $1.80 per square foot deduction to the primary Designer of one system of such property or to allocate the $1.80 per square foot deduction among several Designers.”

So, wait…who gets §179D again?

We don’t know, okay? Give us some slack, we’re breathing nothing but garbage fumes here. But, thankfully, the good people at Walker Reid know the rules of §179D inside and out.

“The answers to ‘Who gets §179D?’ and ‘How much do they get?’ are extremely nuanced, and they’re constantly in flux,” Diaz said. “That’s why our work at Walker Reid is so important. We’ll help you understand everything, stay ahead of the changes, and get the biggest deduction—all while performing the inspection and certification you need to qualify.”

In part two of this series, we examine the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 on §179D in greater detail.

ABOUT WALKER STRATEGIES
With over $1 billion in total certified §179D deductions and §45L tax credits, Walker Reid Strategies has experience with proven results. We are a licensed professional engineering firm that specializes in performing §179D studies and §45L certifications. We have refined our processes to maximize financial benefits while reducing our clients’ internal costs and efforts.

The post Understanding the §179D Tax Deduction for Humans, Part 1 appeared first on Going Concern.

What if clients thought of you as that friend? What if when something happens with your client’s business you are the first one they think of to call? What if you could give them advice before things happen? No, we’re not encouraging you to dabble in astrology. We’re talking about harnessing data to give clients a fuller picture of their financial condition.

You have likely heard that the hot thing at firms these days is client advisory. CAS or “client advisory services” is defined by the AICPA as a practice where firms advise clients across a spectrum of financial and accounting related decisions with the goal of delivering higher value and deepening the trusted advisor relationship.

“Businesses [are] seeking advice and assurance on a broad range of areas beyond financial statements.”

At the recent ENGAGE 2022 event in Las Vegas, AICPA President and CEO Barry Melancon, CPA, CGMA, said the profession is at a defining moment, with businesses seeking advice and assurance on a broad range of areas beyond financial statements, from sustainability to integrated tax planning to the transformation of the finance function. At the root of this shift to a full suite of services for clients is the technology making it possible. “Technology is raising the role of the management accountant to be a more strategic role,” said AICPA Chair Anoop Mehta, CPA, CGMA.

So how do accountants send the signal to their clients that their door is open and they are a valuable resource not only for making sure tax deadlines are met but also for guiding clients through turbulent times like these and offering actionable insight into their businesses?

“Are you having substantive conversations with your clients? If you are being reactive in your interactions with clients, something needs to change.”

Ask yourself this: are you having substantive conversations with your clients? If you are being reactive in your interactions with clients – that is to say avoiding client calls, only hearing from clients once a year when it’s time to file, and responding to frequent complaints rather than anticipating your clients’ needs – something needs to change. If this is the extent of your relationship with clients, your door is not open. It’s only slightly ajar and clients don’t feel as though they can walk through it to discuss their needs with you.

Making Client Advisory Services a focus of your practice can open that door. Embracing CAS moves away from those occasional discussions about deadlines and filings and opens the door for substantive, proactive conversations with your clients. You build income statements and balance sheets with professional looking graphs that give clients insight into the meaning behind their financial data and through this you give your clients the benefit of a trusted advisor on their side to help them make sense of their business. This, in turn, drives the success of their business (and yours). Clients start to see you not as the professional who pesters them for receipts and sends them a bill but as an ally, like that friend of yours who is always there to listen when you need them most.

Alright, so you’re all in on CAS. We don’t have to convince you why it’s a good idea. You jump into Quickbooks to see what data there is to glean and oh no, all you’ve got is less-than-beautiful data to export into Excel and you know immediately this is of no use to your clients. Nothing has ever stood in the way of productive client conversations and deteriorated a client relationship more than passing five versions of an Excel file back and forth between the two of you. That’s not a conversation, it’s a terrible game of .xlsx ping pong.

“With FP&A platforms financial statements take minutes – not hours – to create and the result is attractive as well as useful.”

Enter FP&A platforms. These innovative solutions connect to cloud accounting platforms like Quickbooks and Xero, payroll systems, and even non-financial data sources like Salesforce and you can import data from spreadsheets, too. Now those financial statements take minutes – not hours – to create and the result is attractive as well as useful. With these tools, you can easily graph trends in income, net assets, and budget vs. actual that are ten times more meaningful and informative to your client than any spreadsheet could be (apologies to the Excel fans out there, you know we’re right).

There are a lot of FP&A platforms out there to choose from, but one that’s leading the pack is Jirav. In addition to reporting, dashboards, and lots of accounting platform integrations that play nice with your clients’ data, it offers advanced capabilities for departmental budgeting and workforce planning.

It’s everything you need to transform your practice to one of trusted insight and advisory, something your clients need now more than ever in our stormy world.

The business environment is volatile and dynamic; supply chain disruptions, a remote workforce, rapid inflation, and rising energy costs are just a few concerns at the top of company leaders’ minds. What if you could help them sleep just a little more soundly with rich, practical data? It’s time to open that door.

Jirav delivers an all-in-one budgeting, forecasting and planning technology solution that empowers accounting firms of all sizes to grow by delivering smarter financials and faster insights. Jirav quickly integrates with your clients’ existing financial, HRIS, Payroll, CRM and other systems to seamlessly generate custom client dashboards and reports in minutes! Whether you’re just starting out on your financial planning and advisory journey or want to optimize your existing practice, Jirav is with you every step of the way. We’ll provide training, sales and marketing support, as well as key insights we’ve learned from working with over 300 accounting firms so you can take your client advisory services to new heights!

The post Spreadsheets Suck, Say Clients appeared first on Going Concern.

These shows appealed to those of us who enjoy a challenge (you know who you are), making us see the possibilities awaiting if only someone cared enough to put in the work.

If you’ve ever encountered sloppy recordkeeping in the workplace that somehow became your responsibility to organize, you might feel a bit like those house flippers taking a sledgehammer to moldy walls and rickety decks. Something needs to be done but there’s so much mess you aren’t sure where to start. And if the mess is really, really bad, the only thing you can do is strip it down to the foundation.

The challenge of cleaning up others’ messes can come from many sides: the disorganized client who never sends over the right file, the colleague who goes on vacation and leaves you an encyclopedia of spreadsheet files to dig through to find the one you need, the poorly named files cluttering up team Dropboxes everywhere. You know what we’re talking about. You’re probably thinking about a time you’ve been in this situation as you read this.

And if you’re not, let’s give a real world example of a big mess. You’re assisting a client with an IRS audit – a daunting task even in the most ideal of circumstances like when it’s a Type A client who is meticulously organized – and upon requesting documents from your client you receive a stack of bankers boxes packed with paper receipts, printed invoices from who-knows-where, and hand-scribbled notes. Ah right, the IRS totally accepts random dollar figures written on the back of cocktail napkins as documentation. As the dolly of doom is wheeled into your office, the air escapes from the room and you hear the foreshadowing melody of horror movie music building somewhere in the distance. Perhaps the only thing worse than this scenario is when the client sends an Excel file in PDF.

Thing is, clients will always be disorganized. They aren’t thinking about how difficult it will be for their accountant to sort through this mess, all they know is that you need the receipts. What magic you do with them after they’re delivered is not clients’ concern.

And this is where you become the master of your own fate. Much like the reality show house flippers who choose prefab cabinets over custom made to save time and money, you can save future you so much time – and frustration – by nudging these clients toward digitization. Other than a small few clients who will never adapt to technology no matter how many pep talks you give them, most old school clients are receptive to digitization if you sell it as a timesaver for them (remember, they don’t care about you). Tell them they can save 45 minutes a year by not loading bankers boxes full of receipts into the car to shlep them to your office and hey, you might have a convert.

Once you’ve sold paper-based clients on digitization, it’s time to look at your own house (heh, home renovation pun, sorry). Are you making the most of available technology? Not just the nifty technological innovation that forces a pop-up reminder in Gmail when your email says “see attached” and you haven’t attached anything but organizational tools. Things like Trello to facilitate team communication on ongoing projects. Google Keep for quick checklists. Calendly to let people book meetings with you based on your schedule without the pesky back and forth in email comparing availability. And of course the biggest one: practice management tools that solve problems instead of causing them and consolidate the tedious minutiae of your practice in one place.

“For deadlines, you need a project management system that keeps track of those and automates as much of the recurrence as possible.”

“For deadlines, you need a project management system that keeps track of those and automates as much of the recurrence as possible,” says Brandon Gray, CPA and Founder of Firm360. Don’t be afraid to consider a personal assistant, too. Getting help from someone whose job it is to take things off your plate can free up so much more time to be used evangelizing digital records to dinosaur paper clients, among other things. “Game changer!” Brandon says.

“We were using 5 different systems to run our firm.”

Perhaps your problem is not a lack of technology to help organize your practice and your work life but rather that your firm adopted too many solutions which leads to a unique problem: the “solutions” are causing more problems. Piecemeal solutions are often not solutions at all but more work to just make them play nice together. It’s not only more work, it’s wasted time spent training staff on each solution and often it takes more steps than an all-in-one platform only to arrive at what might be a subpar result.

“One of the main challenges we faced in our firm was training someone to do the work, and then having to manage that workflow,” said one Firm360 client. “We were using 5 different systems to run our firm. Firm 360 consolidates that into one cloud based platform, everything is encompassed there and team members have to learn one platform now.” In flipper terms, imagine what happens when you have five different contractors working on five distinct parts of the house at the same time with minimal communication among them. You end up with…a mess. Which is exactly what you want to avoid.

Practice management is not something people get excited about (unlike dramatic home renovations in reality show form). But it’s necessary to grow your practice and perhaps most importantly to save your sanity. Those awful “before” homes would only look worse with fancy additions slapped on them, that’s why they are stripped down to the frame and beautifully rebuilt with cohesive design. That’s what an all-in-one practice management solution can do, and it scales as you grow unlike a beat-up house with a crumbling foundation. So grab that sledgehammer and get to fixing your mess.

This reminder to renovate your practice was brought to you by Firm360. Firm360 was built by accountants for accountants with the sole purpose of taking the stress out of running your firm. Their all-in-one, cloud-based practice management platform empowers you to easily manage your clients, projects, documents, time, and billing in one place. Hundreds of accountants rely on the Firm360 platform to run their firms and take the mess out of practice management. They can’t tear down your load-bearing walls but they would love to discuss how Firm360 could help you and your firm get out from under all that mess. Book a demo with them today! That’s demo as in demonstration, not demolition.

The post Is It Time to Renovate Your Practice? appeared first on Going Concern.

Using direct indexing for charitable gifting (and for other things, too) is sort of like leveling up in a role-playing game (RPG)—a metaphor we’ll try not to wring completely dry by the end of this piece. It allows investors to gradually improve aspects of their portfolios, gaining a figurative “+1” in factors like flexibility and control—without the need to grind for XP slaying hundreds of boars in the Enchanted Forest.

But before we dive into the specifics of direct indexing and charitable gifting, let’s address the question that’s probably on a lot of your minds (especially those of you who aren’t regular Going Concern readers—we’re looking at you, Steve): What is direct indexing?

We’ve covered the topic in two previous articles. In the first, we explored some fun ways CPAs can explain the tax advantages of direct indexing to their clients. Then, we talked about how CPAs can make direct indexing their estate planning secret weapon. 

If you’re unfamiliar with direct indexing, you might want to go back and read those articles, particularly the first one. But don’t worry, we’ll explain the term for you one more time, maybe because we’re nice or maybe because we get paid by the word—we’re not even sure anymore.

What is direct indexing, and why does it matter to CPAs?

In short: Direct indexing is an investment strategy in which the investor owns the individual securities that would normally make up a commingled fund (like a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund), rather than owning shares of the fund itself. So, for example, instead of owning shares of an S&P 500 Index fund, the investor would directly own shares in those individual companies. And, with direct indexing, the investor owns those shares in a separately managed account (SMA) instead of a mutual fund or ETF.

Direct indexing provides investors with greater flexibility and control, as they can buy, sell, and trade individual securities that would otherwise be trapped within the fund, while still enjoying the broad market exposure that’s critical to passive investing.

Returning to our RPG analogy, direct indexing tends to deliver the best results when multiple people are involved. Many RPGs require you to form a party before you can tackle the most difficult (and rewarding) quests. When building your party, you’ll want to find characters with strengths and abilities that complement each other, creating a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. 

Similarly, using direct indexing for charitable gifting (or for anything, really) is a challenge that shouldn’t be approached alone. The client’s financial advisor should take the lead, but CPAs like yourself can be important members of the party, too. By learning about these kinds of strategies, suggesting them to your clients and to financial advisors, and referring financial advisors to firms that are experienced in direct indexing, you can provide your clients with a more holistic level of support—and set your practice apart from less-knowledgeable competitors.

Before this article itself starts taking on a particularly annoying aspect of RPGs—an overly long, unskippable intro that takes forever to get to the point—let’s move on to our chosen topic. Here are three ways direct indexing can help investors level up their charitable gifting.

1. Direct indexing provides more control over charitable gifting

As we stated earlier, direct indexing gives your clients more flexibility and control over their investments and assets. It allows investors to gift individual stocks or bonds that might otherwise be trapped inside a mutual fund or ETF to the charities of their choice, which can provide compelling advantages, particularly with regard to taxes (more on this later).

Direct indexing can also help investors avoid awkward situations and conflicts of interest in charitable gifting. You wouldn’t want to, say, donate shares of a mutual fund that’s heavy in Big Oil to Greenpeace. With direct indexing, investors have the power to gift their assets more intelligently, preventing conflicts of interest and helping ensure that the right cause receives the right benefits.

(Of course, direct indexing could also allow mischievous investors to create these conflicts on purpose and with greater ease—like, for instance, forking a huge pile of Burger King shares over to the Ronald McDonald House. The charity would likely be thankful for the gift regardless, but that would be a -1 integrity kind of move.)

2. Direct indexing helps maximize the benefits of donating securities instead of cash

Deciding whether to donate cash or securities to a charity can be complicated, and it’s ultimately something investors will want to discuss with their advisors in detail. But for investors who do choose to donate securities, direct indexing can help them maximize the benefits.

To illustrate, let’s briefly head back into the world of gaming. In most RPGs, inventory management is a critical component of a winning strategy. You can’t carry around that +5 battle axe forever—especially if your character isn’t strong enough to lift it—and over time it will become a drag on your character’s performance. You could sell it, sure, but sometimes it’s smarter to give it away to another member of your party or guild who needs it, thus creating benefits for everyone involved.

The idea behind gifting securities in lieu of cash is similar, and direct indexing can make the effect even more powerful. If an investor chooses to gift highly appreciated assets (i.e., those that have substantially increased in value since the investor purchased them), both the investor and the charity can avoid tax liability. The investor offloads the asset without paying capital gains tax on it, while the charity gains a step-up in cost basis once the assets are transferred. 

On top of the benefits of gifting highly appreciated securities instead of cash, investors with a tax-managed direct indexing portfolio can realize additional benefits if they replenish their investment portfolio with cash that equals the value of gifted stocks. This manner of reinvesting results in a cost-basis increase that enhances the potential for eventual tax-loss harvesting, which should help reduce future tax payments. We’ll review a real-world example of this at the end of the article.

In either case, direct indexing provides investors with more flexibility and options for which securities they’ll gift and which they’ll retain. This can ultimately lead to better after-tax performance for the investor—and possibly for the charity, as well.

3. Combining direct indexing with CRTs reduces the taxable estate

We briefly covered charitable remainder trusts (CRTs) in our previous article on estate planning, but because they apply even more to this topic, we’ll dive a bit deeper this time. Using a combination of CRTs and direct indexing can help investors improve their financial security and increase support for their chosen charity—sort of like how some RPGs allow you to combine multiple magic spells to achieve a more potent or specific effect.

CRTs come in two forms: the charitable remainder unitrust (CRUT) and the charitable remainder annuity trust (CRAT). As before, we’re going to focus on CRUTs because they are better suited to a low-interest-rate environment (although, with the Fed’s recent half-point hike to its benchmark interest rate, it might be wise to look into CRATs as well.)

The general idea behind CRTs is that assets are placed into a trust that creates both a tax deduction and an income stream for the donor. At the trust’s completion, the remaining assets move out of the donor’s estate—reducing its size for tax purposes—and the chosen charity receives the remainder.

A CRUT itself is generally exempt from tax, just like an actual charity. However, unitrust distributions—the cash flow the trust provides to the investor—are subject to tax. The IRS uses characterization rules to determine the nature of distributions from the trust. The character of distributions received by CRT income beneficiaries is determined using a separate-tier system, which establishes an order for the distribution of four categories of income and corpus. 

We won’t get into what the four tiers are and how they work, but this paper on improving the tax management of charitable remainder unitrusts covers it quite well. You can begin to see how direct indexing could provide a lot of value here, though. Having the ability to select individual securities instead of shares of a commingled fund gives investors more flexibility and control over what goes into the CRUT and where the money goes when it comes out, potentially improving after-tax results for everyone involved.

Meet the direct indexing gurus at Parametric

Throughout this article series, we’ve been encouraging you to refer your financial advisor friends to Parametric to gain more advice and guidance on direct indexing. For Parametric, direct indexing is no game—it’s a potent investment strategy they’ve been perfecting for more than 30 years. Parametric can help clients improve their after-tax performance using direct indexing and other strategies across investing, estate planning, and—yep, you guessed it—charitable gifting. 

For you “show me” types, this case study shows how Parametric helped a client achieve better tax efficiency with her charitable gifting. Previously, she was selling stocks and donating the cash proceeds to a local food bank. Parametric helped her switch to a two-step process: 1) identify the most advantageous securities and donate them directly to the food bank, then 2) use cash to purchase stocks with a much higher cost basis to essentially “replace” the donated shares. The strategy increases the potential for tax-loss harvesting, which should help reduce her future tax payments.

With $415 billion in assets under its management, Parametric helps clients in North America and around the globe access efficient market exposures, solve implementation challenges, and design portfolios that respond to their evolving needs. 

Ready to learn more? Dive deeper into Parametric’s offerings and access additional resources on direct indexing and other topics now.

The post CPAs: 3 Ways Direct Indexing Can Help Your Clients Level Up Their Charitable Gifting appeared first on Going Concern.

There’s no better way to push into that great, uncharted, nebulously-described ‘future’ than to turn your attention to the people pioneering the space. To open your eyes and ears to the possibilities. To let those who came before you guide you confidently into this exciting future. And to have the difficult discussions that need to be had about how AI can address some of the profession’s most pressing problems.

Enter the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ Annual Meeting coming up on June 1.

The keynote speaker at this year’s meeting is Dr. Daniel Susskind, a fellow in economics at Oxford University and a senior research associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI. Daniel is co-author of the best-selling book, The Future of the Professions (2015), and the author of A World Without Work (2020). You may have seen his TED Talk on the future of work in which he addresses myths about the future of work and how “automation anxiety” is a completely rational response to the rapid adoption of technology happening so quickly many of us don’t know what exactly is happening. It’s OK if you’re anxious, but you really don’t have to be.

Machines can and will do even more as we move forward and it’s time for the profession to talk about how to use that technology to meet our needs. Even before we get to the AI-dominated future Dr. Susskind describes the profession is undergoing big change right now as firms and companies figure out how to use people and technology in new and exciting ways. There is also the ongoing issue of attracting talent to the profession, and ensuring the talent of the future accurately reflects the diversity of the businesses and communities they serve.

PICPA CEO Jennifer Cryder, CPA will give updates on the accounting profession and will be joined later by Charles Weinstein, CPA, Chief Executive Officer at Eisner Advisory Group LLC, for a discussion on alternative structures for accounting firms. Attendees can choose to attend in-person at The Hershey Hotel or may opt to attend virtually and will have opportunities to interact with key speakers. There is also bonus CPE to be had!

In case you haven’t gathered by now, the big theme for the event is the transformative change happening as we speak in accounting and how CPAs can embrace it. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss technology, transformation, and talent with accounting leaders from across the state and learn more about the exciting – albeit sometimes scary – change reshaping the way CPAs live and work in today’s fast-moving world. Have you been dying to figure out what the metaverse is but too embarrassed to ask? Well here’s your chance to get an answer to that and many more technology questions plaguing young and old alike.

Registration for the PICPA 125th Annual Meeting & Celebration is open now. Hurry, the event is less than 2 weeks away! You can learn more about available sessions, fun optional activities, CPE, and register for the event here. The webcast is available to all and free for PICPA members, $100 for non-members; the webcast includes the do-not-miss keynote from Daniel Susskind, Charles Weinstein, CPA discussing alternative structures for firms, and any other relevant sessions.

About Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants

Founded in 1897, the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants (PICPA) is the second-oldest CPA organization in the United States and the largest CPA association in Pennsylvania. The PICPA provides continuing education, networking, leadership and volunteer opportunities to CPAs across Pennsylvania and acts as the voice of the CPA profession through advocacy efforts in the state legislature. For more information, visit www.picpa.org.

The post Are You Future-Ready? Learn How to Get There at This PICPA Event appeared first on Going Concern.

As you’re certainly sick of hearing by now, however, today’s most successful CPAs are taking on more advisory functions, with one study projecting that accounting firms can increase their monthly client revenues by up to 50% if they offer strategic advisory services. 

So, as the roles of accountant, planner, and advisor continue to blur, your clients—particularly those with higher incomes—may soon look to you for estate planning expertise that goes beyond tax. Increasingly, you’ll need to collaborate with finance and legal teams to maximize returns and minimize burdens throughout the accumulation, preservation, and transfer of client wealth.

While we can’t give you a crash course on all things estate planning in the space of this article (what do we look like, your CPE vendor?), we can give you the scoop on an investment strategy that will set your estate planning services apart from the average CPA’s: direct indexing.

We covered the tax advantages of direct indexing—and some fun ways to talk to your clients about them—in a previous article. So check there for a more in-depth definition of the term and an explanation of the strategy’s larger tax benefits.

For this article, we’ll explore how direct indexing can enable and enhance a few particularly powerful estate planning strategies. You’ll want to work with or refer your clients to a financial advisory firm to truly put these techniques to work.

The more you know about innovative ways to save your clients money and help them build wealth, the more valuable your services will be to them. So read on, and discover how to make direct indexing your estate planning secret weapon.

The estate planning benefits of direct indexing

As we talked about in our previous article, direct indexing is a strategy wherein the investor directly owns the individual securities that would normally make up a benchmark or commingled fund, like a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF), within a separately managed account (SMA). This enables a great deal of flexibility, which can lead to a number of compelling advantages—while still providing the broad market exposure of traditional passive investment vehicles.

Direct indexing also unlocks greater flexibility for estate planning. Instead of granting blocks of shares in mutual funds or ETFs to heirs or a charity, your client can grant individual stocks or bonds. This is especially valuable for highly appreciated positions within the security (i.e., investments your client purchased for a much lower price than they are currently worth or projected to be worth upon the grantor’s death). Donating these investments directly gives heirs a step-up in cost basis once they’re transferred, reducing the amount of the estate that will ultimately be taxed.

And because direct indexing gives investors more flexibility over the types of securities they own and the types of companies they want to support, it can also help provide more control over how the estate is ultimately divided up. Direct indexing could, for example, help your client avoid leaving oil company stocks to an heir who is a prominent environmentalist (even though that might be hilarious) or donating an asset that could cause controversy or create undue complexity for the receiving charity.

From a high level, direct indexing’s benefit to estate planning is really quite simple—it can help investors improve their after-tax performance and minimize the burdens on their beneficiaries and heirs.

While just being able to communicate the estate planning benefits of direct indexing to your clients can put your CPA practice a step ahead, understanding advanced techniques like the ones we’ll describe in the next three sections is more like taking a leap forward. 

Combine direct indexing with GRATs for substantial estate tax savings

By combining direct indexing with grantor-retained annuity trusts (GRATs), your high-income clients can radically reduce the estate tax burden on their heirs—or even eliminate it entirely. GRATs are powerful wealth transfer tools that can be used to remove assets and their appreciation from the grantor’s estate. 

Additionally, GRATs serve as easy pun-fodder for bored financial writers looking to spice up their article headlines. Check out some of these real-life zingers we found via Google:

• “Grateful for GRATs”
• “Kiss My GRATs”
• “GRAT Expectations”
• “GRITs, GRATs, GRUTs, What?”

And our favorite, even though it isn’t a pun:

• “The Care and Feeding of GRATs”

To create a GRAT, a grantor establishes an irrevocable trust that exists for a set period. The grantor funds the GRAT with assets that have substantial growth potential—such as pre-IPO stocks or private equity holdings. The trust then pays the grantor a fixed annual amount (aka an annuity) for the life of the trust.

When the term of the trust ends, the beneficiaries receive the assets remaining in the GRAT, free of gift and estate tax.

Add direct indexing, and GRATs become even more powerful. With direct indexing, clients can fund their GRATs with high-growth-potential assets that might otherwise be trapped in an ETF or mutual fund. Direct indexing provides them—and, ultimately, their heirs—with more flexibility and control throughout the creation, term, and transfer of the GRAT.

Minimize post-retirement estate reduction with direct indexing for fixed-income investments

Retirement planning is a critical—and, far too often, overlooked—component of estate planning. Minimizing financial drain during the grantor’s retirement period helps keep the estate healthy, and planning ahead for the tax implications of a transition toward a fixed-income portfolio is crucial.

Direct indexing allows for greater flexibility and control throughout this process. As your clients work with their financial advisors to create bond ladders to deliver more consistent returns, direct indexing enables them to use money-saving techniques like tax-loss harvesting to greater effect. Your clients will be able to write off losses from individual bonds and apply them elsewhere, rather than having those losses trapped in a commingled fund.

Use CRTs to reduce the taxable estate

Wealthy investors often include charitable gifts in their wills. Using a combination of charitable remainder trusts (CRTs) and direct indexing can help maximize the benefit to their selected causes—while also providing an income tax deduction for a portion of the donated value.

CRTs come in two forms: the charitable remainder unitrust (CRUT) and the charitable remainder annuity trust (CRAT). However, CRUTs are better suited in a low-interest-rate environment to achieve the dual purposes of a CRT: financial security for the donor’s family and support for their chosen charity.

CRUTs, in addition to sounding like a Zoomer slang word we’d pretend to know the meaning of but then discreetly look up on Urban Dictionary, can get pretty complicated. So we won’t go into them too deeply. But the general idea is that assets are placed into a trust that creates both a tax deduction and an income stream for the donor. At the trust’s completion, the remaining assets move out of the donor’s estate, and the chosen charity receives the remainder.

As with GRATs and fixed-income portfolios, direct indexing offers greater flexibility in how the CRT is funded. Securities that would normally be locked in a commingled fund can be placed directly into the CRT, providing the investor with more control—and potentially delivering better results for donor and charity alike.

How CPAs can take estate planning to the next level

As we mentioned earlier, you’ll likely want to partner with a financial advisor or firm as you talk with your clients about these and other advanced estate planning practices. And if your clients and their advisors want to use direct indexing as part of an estate plan—and why wouldn’t they?—Parametric is the best place to send them for help.

With nearly 30 years of direct indexing experience, Parametric works with financial advisors to help clients access efficient market exposures, solve implementation challenges, and design portfolios that respond to their evolving needs. 

Ready to get started? Learn more about Parametric’s offerings and access additional resources on direct indexing and other topics. And check back with Going Concern soon for a deeper look at the charitable gifting benefits of direct indexing.

The post CPAs: Make Direct Indexing Your Estate Planning Secret Weapon appeared first on Going Concern.

As the world opens up again and we reacquaint ourselves with the gym, perhaps it’s time to consider if your finance department is in need of a fitness plan of its own. And no, not the kind of plan that has you up and lifting weights at 5 a.m., we’re talking about a digital transformation strategy.

The digital finance revolution has been underway in finance departments around the world for some time now. But like many of us turning to fitness and diet to shed the Quarantine 19 (that’s the cute term for the pandemic’s version of the Freshman 15), progress is slow. The reasons are numerous and varied, but here are just a few: legacy systems and an unhealthy attachment to them due to fear of change, manual processes, an overreliance on Excel (blasphemy, I know), too much data and not enough time to make sense of it, and changes to regulatory reporting and compliance requirements in virtually every industry.

Finance departments in organizations of all sizes have been outpaced by every other department in the organization when it comes to automation and digital transformation. Sales and marketing are a decade ahead — they’re doing CrossFit four days a week while finance is out of breath just from going to the mailbox to fetch the mail. Marketing, for example, is mixing AI with social media to reach the right audience with precision, and customer service has been using chatbots to offer their customers self-service options and lighten the load for their human agents.

While technology has greatly influenced the world and how business is conducted, finance teams still find themselves surrounded by piles of paper, manual processes, and quarterly binders with nicknames as though they are a part of the finance family. Just check out this 2020 survey from the Association of Accountants and Financial Professionals (IMA) and Deloitte. In it, 75% of respondents said their company’s accounting processes are either largely manual or still a considerable manual effort.

To some degree the reluctance to modernize finance is understandable. There is limited risk to a marketing team failing with new innovative technology; it’s not like a regulatory agency is going to come down on them because an Insta post didn’t get many likes. The risk is much higher where financial reporting is concerned, especially for public companies. However, this is a risk that at some point has to be taken. In order for organizations to remain competitive, they have to innovate and automate. For many organizations, the pandemic was the needed push.

In a podcast late last year, Allen Narkiewicz, national leader of financial services, Finance Transformation Practice at KPMG, explained how the pandemic exposed just how manual finance processes were.

“When COVID hit, it really highlighted how many manual workarounds there were within the finance and accounting processes at the banks,” he said. “Trying to go and solve these regulatory issues and questions that arose, linking them to your financials, reconciling all this data that might have been dispersed, not in one place, not linked through your systems, all of a sudden it was highlighting people not having job satisfaction. One of my clients — when we asked them what they wanted to stop doing — it was all of this work that could be digitized, you could automate these flows, you could have the lineage of data and have it linked.”

He continues with a story of a client whose finance department is using 50-year-old technology. And no, the client is not some mom-and-pop corner store with a paper ledger that the owner’s wife handles. It is an actual large client. “Right now, you know, one of the banks that I interact with, their ledger is actually about 50 years old. The ledger before their current ledger was pen and paper. It was literally a paper ledger. And so that’s what we’re dealing with. This is a bank that has, of course, had to have manual processes built around how that ledger has been installed, built, designed because we’re dealing with technology that’s 50 years old.”

Fifty. Years. Old. Reminder: Even Excel isn’t that old, it’s not even 40.

Alright so we’ve established that finance departments are the chubby kid in high school gym walking the entire mile on the day class has to run the track. Thankfully there are solutions for finance to get digitally fit. As you think about how to transform your finance department from flab to fit, keep these five things in mind:

Embrace composable architecture

According to Gartner, by 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation. “Composable business is a natural acceleration of the digital business that you live every day. It allows us to deliver the resilience and agility that these interesting times demand,” said Daryl Plummer, distinguished VP analyst, during the opening keynote at virtual Gartner Symposium IT/Xpo®. “We’re talking about the intentional use of ‘composability’ in a business context — architecting your business for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.”

A composable architecture offers agile, best of breed, automated finance management capabilities and processes enabling progressive modernization, finance innovation, and accelerated speed to value. And it can be adapted along the way (unlike 50-year-old ledgers around which clunky processes have to be built). Solutions must be vendor agnostic and integrate easily with source, target and complementary systems; your department needs to be able to “work out” even when you change gyms.

The finance user needs a custom “workout plan,” not a solution with someone else in mind

Finance solutions should be designed with the finance user in mind and should opt for solutions that include built-in finance IP to accelerate implementations and leverage finance best practices. Finance users should be empowered to configure rules in a non-code environment. Think being able to do perfect squats at home at your convenience instead of only exercising when there’s a trainer there to walk you through every step.

It’s cloud or nothing

Finance has been the slowest department to accept and adopt cloud solutions. Historically, they have been hesitant due to security concerns, with the loss of control and ability to customize the solution (SaaS solutions typically require more standardization), but that time has passed and finance needs to get on board with cloud solutions that offer much higher levels of scalability, automation, performance, and control.

As the pandemic taught us, organization-wide access is critical not only in finance but especially in finance. Now that we have experienced for ourselves trying to organize and access data 100% virtually, it’s time to take those lessons and make sure we never have to be without critical info again. The cloud offers a current, fully available solution that, despite its “newness” in the tech space, has proven itself to be invaluable.

Technology moves fast, and the finance architecture needs to be future-ready

The world is getting less predictable and finance teams need to respond to both business risks and opportunities. Any implemented solutions need to stand the test of time. They need to provide the building blocks, performance, and scalability to react with agility to market factors. Solutions need to natively embrace emerging technologies (AI, MI, blockchain, etc.).

As we learned in March 2020, there will be things completely outside of our control that can have sweeping effects on all aspects of life and business. The best CFO in the world can only control internal factors, and the tools to help these CFOs do their best work need to be responsive to real-time market data and events to allow finance departments necessary agility in changing conditions.

Data is your most valuable commodity and you need access to it at all times

In today’s internet-focused, always-connected world, data is widely considered to be among the world’s most valuable resources because of how much potential revenue and business value it can provide. Data affects all our lives in ways most of us can’t even imagine, and this data can be leveraged in spectacular ways by organizations.

Today’s CFO must have the ability to not only access real-time data but have full traceability of where that data came from and the ability to visualize it to surface trends and insights for the business. Using a data fabric approach to access multiple data sources reduces the duplication of data, storage costs, and complexity.

The finance transformation may not be an easy journey, but neither is getting fit. As with physical health, there are tools available to help finance departments make that difficult journey a little bit easier. And like all good fitness plans, the rewards reaped from investing in health are far-reaching and so worthwhile.

Transforming your finance department into an efficient, automated, high-performance powerhouse can seem daunting. Luckily Aptitude Software has been focused on the office of the CFO for decades and brings deep finance, accounting, and technology expertise. Aptitude has solutions to help you comply with challenging regulations, drive holistic revenue automation, and lead a successful finance transformation.

Curious to hear more about organizations that have improved their digital finance fitness? Listen to an on-demand webinar, Mistakes to avoid for a successful digital finance transformation and hear finance leaders share first-hand experiences from their transformation journeys. Or, peruse our Resource Library for other assets that can help you achieve your finance goals and ambitions.

The post Shape Up With This Five-Step Plan For Finance Department Fitness appeared first on Going Concern.

If your answer is “Pretend I need to go to the bathroom and hope I can get one of my advisor friends on the phone to explain it to me in time,” this article is for you. (If you’re reading this in the bathroom right now after searching “what is direct indexing tax benefits PLEASE HELP ME OH SEARCH ENGINE GODS and I promise never to Google myself again,” then this article is especially for you.)

The finance world is all aflutter over direct indexing and, among other benefits, its ability to allow investors to harvest more losses for tax purposes. Taxes can represent a larger drag on your higher-net-worth clients’ portfolios than fees or trading costs—so if your clients haven’t asked about direct indexing yet, they may very well soon. 

Let’s unpack what CPAs should know about direct indexing from a tax perspective—and explore some unique and effective methods for explaining it to your clients. 

What should CPAs know about direct indexing?

According to Investopedia, direct indexing is: “… an index investing strategy that involves directly purchasing the components of an index at the appropriate weights … (that) can provide greater autonomy, control, and tax advantages to certain investors over owning an index mutual fund or an index exchange-traded fund (index ETF).”

(We suppose you could stop reading here and just plan to repeat this definition to your clients verbatim as they stare blankly at you in response, but we recommend you give it some context.)

Before we dive in too deeply, it’s important to understand that direct indexing involves passive investments—and what that means. Passive investments are meant to gradually build wealth without the need for frequent trading. They include things like mutual funds and ETFs, which package underlying securities into a single vehicle accessible to investors.

Direct indexing takes this idea in a different direction. Instead of owning shares in a commingled fund, your clients own the individual securities in the portfolio directly, in a separately managed account (SMA).

Your clients get the same kind of broad market exposure as a mutual fund or ETF, but with the flexibility to customize their portfolios for a number of compelling advantages. These include the ability to:

• Actively and systematically harvest capital losses from individual securities for tax purposes—and do it all year round, not just at tax time.
• Adjust holdings to screen out industries or companies your clients find objectionable.
• Avoid redundant or risk-concentrating holdings in clients’ portfolios.
• Achieve more flexibility around charitable giving and estate planning.

For this article, we’re going to stay focused on the tax side of direct indexing, but check back for future blogs on some of these other benefits.

Now that we’ve defined the term, let’s go over some methods for talking to your clients about the tax advantages of direct indexing.

Method #1: Use a metaphor (any metaphor)

With commingled assets like mutual funds and ETFs, the losses of individual securities are trapped inside the fund, with your clients unable to use them for tax purposes. But with direct indexing, your clients can harvest those losses—potentially recovering up to 2% of annual after-tax excess returns. 

We know what you’re thinking: “What a perfectly worded explanation of the tax benefits of direct indexing! I can stop reading now.” And we thank you for the praise. However, we at Going Concern feel that any explanation is made better by an overly complicated metaphor. And any explanation is made even even better by an overly complicated metaphor we don’t have to write ourselves. 

So if your clients need a metaphor to help them understand the tax benefits of direct indexing, you’re going to have to put the work in. Fill in the blanks below to create an analogy that should be anywhere from adequate to awesome:

Made with Madlib Maker

Method #2: Show them this chart and wait for the gasps

Another way to demonstrate the potential tax benefits of direct indexing is to show your clients how many of the individual investments within a mutual fund or ETF were money-losers over a particular time period. This will get their wheels turning about the losses they’re potentially leaving on the table.

Obviously, you don’t want to get too specific—that’s for their advisors to handle. But a chart like this one can help demonstrate the principle:Despite the S&P 500 having an incredible year in 2021, with total gains of nearly 29%, 72 names in the index showed a loss. Further, 91% of the stocks in the S&P 500 had a maximum drawdown of more than 10% at some point during the year.

If your clients were index fund investors last year, they wouldn’t have been able to use those losses to offset capital gains elsewhere in their holdings because they were locked in the fund.

With direct indexing, however, your clients could put those losses to work through tax-loss harvesting. If your client is the type who’s interested in the nitty-gritty details of investing and taxes, they may want to know how that process works. Lucky for you, that’s the focus of our next method.

Method #3: Explain the process of tax-loss harvesting

For clients who like to track every dime and decimal, you may need to explain tax-loss harvesting in a bit more detail. Here’s how you can do just that:

Losses are inevitable in any portfolio. But with direct indexing, your clients’ SMA portfolio managers can harvest their losses on individual securities that would normally be trapped in a fund. 

Your clients can bank those losses to use in the current or a future tax year. Then the manager can reinvest the sale proceeds in a similar security (while taking care to avoid IRS wash-sale rules) to preserve your clients’ exposure and risk-return profile.

Essentially, the manager sells a basket of securities at a loss and simultaneously replaces it with a different basket of (hopefully higher-performing) securities.

Your clients may have further questions (or even objections) about tax-loss harvesting, especially if they’ve read articles like this one. Be sure to tell them that, while tax-loss harvesting can lead to great benefits for some investors, it’s not for everyone. If your clients are curious whether tax-loss harvesting is right for them, you can direct them to this quiz—or take it with them. 

Method #4: Go beyond tax-loss harvesting

If your client hits you with the dreaded “tell me more,” we suggest you send them to our friends over at Parametric. They’re the masters of direct indexing and powerful, innovative tax management solutions, including tax-loss harvesting and: 

• Tax-efficient transitions: Balancing capital gains against an acceptable percentage of tracking error to the desired benchmark exposure.
• Gain-realization deferral: Evaluating which securities to sell now and which to hold on to, with the expectation of future loss harvesting at the opportune time.
• Holding-period management: Determining the optimum time to hold a security, with an eye toward differing tax rates for short- and long-term gains.
• Yield consideration: Advising on the treatment of dividend income.
• Tax-lot consideration: Identifying ideal tax lots to trade.
• Wash-sale avoidance: Helping investors navigate IRS wash-sale rules.
• Charitable gifting: Selecting highly appreciated stocks to gift to a tax-exempt charitable organization, donor-advised fund, or family members in lower tax brackets.

“Talk to your CPA about the tax benefits of direct indexing”

Hopefully, you now feel fully empowered to talk to clients at all levels of sophistication and interest about the tax benefits of direct indexing. Check back soon to learn about the impact of direct indexing on estate planning and charitable giving, and discover more resources here.

The post 4 Ways CPAs Can Explain the Tax Benefits of Direct Indexing to Clients appeared first on Going Concern.

According to the KPMG 2021 CEO Outlook Pulse Survey, 14% of the 500 CEOs who were polled earlier this year said tax risk poses the greatest threat to their organization’s growth over the next three years—which was behind only cybersecurity risk at 18%.

In its report, KPMG said: “This focus on tax is markedly higher than recent years, with only 5% of CEOs identifying it as a top risk in 2018, less than 1% in 2019, and only 4% highlighting this as a risk area of primary concern in 2020. For years, KPMG tax leaders have posited that this is an issue that needs to be higher up on the executive team’s radar. Now, it’s decidedly there.”

Not only does a company’s management and tax executives have to worry about an already complex tax environment all over the world, including new tax policies and possible changes to country tax rates, but also a glut of tax liabilities arising from cross-border regulations and the rise in new unilateral rules. Laurie Hatten-Boyd, principal at KPMG, provides some insight on accounts payable tax compliance and the changing rules of cross-border payments to suppliers in this executive summary report.

Supplier tax compliance is also a biggie

One important area of corporate tax compliance that doesn’t get a lot of attention from the press revolves around payments to suppliers—especially foreign suppliers. But there’s an accounts payable automated solution on the market that can make chief executives sleep more soundly when it comes to supplier tax compliance. That solution is from Tipalti.

Founded in 2010, Tipalti provides a global mass payments platform to more than 1,500 customers—and you’re probably familiar with the names of some of the company’s clients: GoDaddy, Vimeo, Twitch, Roblox, ZipRecruiter, National Geographic, Roku, and Zumba.

Embedded into its A/P automated solution is a KPMG-certified tax compliance module that keeps the ghouls at the IRS off of Tipalti’s customers’ backs.

“Tipalti solves the highly complex and manual process of collecting supplier tax and banking information,” said Matthew Merrill, manager of partner and industry marketing for Tipalti. “We do this through digital capture from the very beginning during supplier onboarding. This accomplishes two things: it ensures that the correct tax information is collected upfront, which is easier said than done without a solution like this; and the information is validated before the first payment is even processed.”

While its competitors have targeted large conglomerates as customers, Tipalti works with companies of all sizes, and it works particularly well with fast-growing companies in the middle market. 

“What we’re trying to do is attract those established or growing middle-market companies that maybe are still using paper checks and are on old legacy payment systems. We integrate really well with NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, and Sage Intacct, but we’ve made a lot of updates to our solution to make sure that we are able to integrate with any enterprise resource planning system,” Merrill said. “We’re also trying to get exposure within the CPA community. We have an alliance team that will work with accounting firms that serve that market. We have found that accounting firms that recommend Tipalti to their scaling clients end up making their own jobs easier when it comes to tax compliance and end-of-year reporting.”

Besides KPMG, another CPA firm that has partnered with Tipalti is Naperville, IL-based Sikich LLP. Colleen McCaughey, director of client services at Sikich, said Tipalti is an important companion to the firm’s outsourcing and technology consulting services.

“Our partnership helps us to scale our clients, while also helping them avoid the typical pain points of increased payables complexity that comes with scale. It’s a no-brainer to work with Tipalti,” she added.

Tipalti is also looking to work with CPA firms that have middle-market clients that are becoming more complex—maybe they added a subsidiary or they expanded globally and have to make more global payments. Tipalti is set up to scale with them, Merrill said.

Tax form wizardry

As companies grow and expand their reach, their need for suppliers and vendors also increases—and paying suppliers both home and abroad is no picnic. Another thing that’s no picnic? Keeping track of all of the suppliers’ tax status forms.

For US-based suppliers, you’ve got Form W-9, Request for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification, that needs to be requested. And for foreign-based suppliers, there are two: Form W-8BEN, Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding and Reporting (Individuals) or, for non-individuals, Form W-8BEN-E, Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding and Reporting (Entities).

After the proper tax status form has been received, the company can then determine if the supplier should receive a Form 1099-MISC, Miscellaneous Income, or a Form 1042-S, Foreign Person’s U.S. Source Income Subject to Withholding, and whether any US tax withholdings should occur at the time of payment.

Without an automated payments platform like Tipalti that reduces the risks of financial fraud and keeps track of all of these supplier tax forms, things can get messy in a hurry.

“We make year-end filing a breeze by helping with W-8 and W-9 collection, as well as 1099 and 1042-S preparation reports. Our platform helps them prepare the end-of-the-year tax forms, and every payment already has a W-8 or W-9 attached to it,” Merrill said. 

Tipalti users can’t make payments to suppliers until the supplier’s tax information—such as value-added tax (VAT) ID or US taxpayer identification number (TIN), business structure, and country/address—is registered in the Tipalti portal. Based on that information, the module’s embedded tax form wizard helps the supplier choose the correct tax form. And the forms are available on the platform 24/7.

“Once that tax form is selected, Tipalti will digitize the tax form and run it through our 1,000-plus rules engine to ensure the proper data has been provided. At year-end, Tipalti generates 1099 and 1042-S tax prep reports, and we’ll even calculate the necessary withholdings for our customers, as well, to protect them from IRS penalties,” Merrill said. “For non-US taxpayers, Tipalti collects local and VAT tax IDs in 49 other countries. Those go through over 3,000 validation rules to ensure accuracy.”

As a licensed money transmitter that operates in 196 countries with 120 currencies, Tipalti is able to offer suppliers a choice of payment method (country and currency), and suppliers are kept up to date on the status of their invoices and their payments.

“This really keeps suppliers happy,” he added.

Because the process of onboarding suppliers’ tax info is a piece of cake, it’ll free up your time to spend on other basic A/P tasks like invoicing. Tipalti can help with that, too.

“For invoice processing, we have invoice capture with Optical Character Recognition technology, as well as built-in machine learning and managed services, which cuts out any manual re-keying of invoice details from the process and ensures a touchless invoice processing experience,” Merrill said.

The numbers don’t lie

Companies seem to really like this Tipalti product quite a bit. A 98% customer satisfaction rating and a 99% client retention rate is pretty good, right? And Tipalti is one of only 24 companies in America that has made both the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies lists for the last three straight years.

So if your middle-market company is still in the Dark Ages of using manual accounts payable processes, it’s not too late to automate A/P like a 21st-century company would.

Get started with Tipalti >

The post Get Your Precious ZZZZs and Let An Automated A/P Solution Handle Supplier Tax Compliance appeared first on Going Concern.

As we connect more and more to “The Internet of Things,” you’d think we’d have more free time and less pressure on our shoulders. Yet we’re more stressed than ever. It seems like for every task we’ve automated, there’s some other inconvenience desperately trying to steal our attention: a flood of social media notifications, endless sales emails, the nagging smart home device telling you the coffee’s running low. The list goes on.

We’re saving so much time, yet somehow, we seem to have less of it than ever.

A 2013 Oxford study called The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? estimated that bookkeepers had a 97.6% chance of being automated in the next 20 years. If you’re a tax preparer reading this and thinking, “Phew, at least I’ll be safe,” don’t zen out just yet — the study gave tax preparers a 98.7% chance of being replaced by automated services.

Here’s the good news: Eight years after that study came out, we’re beginning to see automation take hold of the accounting industry, and so far there haven’t been any signs of an entirely robotic intern class at public accounting firms. The “robot panic” of the early ’10s has been replaced with an eagerness to explore and adopt technology that can take some things off accountants’ very full plates.

Take for example audit confirmations. It seems downright primitive to think of having to physically mail out confirmations now that they can be sent electronically. This change didn’t make auditors obsolete, it just freed them up to do more important things. Although many aspects of the profession can — and perhaps should — be automated, there will always be a need for professional judgment and client relationship management that haven’t been outsourced to technology yet. No doubt AI researchers are working on that one.

This brings us to the subject of your own life. While chances are high that your firm or business has already begun automating certain tasks that used to require several people to accomplish, many professionals forget about automating their own lives. And no, I don’t mean teaching your smart home how to turn off the lights. So what are some ways to do that?

Give yourself permission to take the “easy” way out

It’s 2021, we don’t even have to get off the couch to sort out dinner. And as glorious as that can be, no one over the age of 22 should be living off takeout. But there are other ways that busy working adults can save some time attending to the necessary tasks in life like feeding ourselves and keeping our living spaces tidy. Hire a cleaning service to swing by once a week. Or sign up for a meal delivery service to save yourself a trip to the grocery store. Reclaim your weekend and hire someone else to handle the lawn.

When it comes to your day-to-day tasks, why not use an automated bill pay system to set up scheduled accounts payable on behalf of your clients? The work still gets done, but it releases you from the burden of manual bill pay. Feel a twinge of guilt in taking the “easy” way out? There’s no need. That’s what technology is for! Use it.

Multitasking can be your friend

Some people think multitasking is the bane of our modern existence, but don’t write it off completely. There might be some value in it for you. For example, let’s say you’re approaching month-end close and know you’ll be extra short on time in the days ahead. Instead of trying to squeeze in a session at the gym AND letting your dog out into the back yard when you get home, go for a brisk walk through your neighborhood with your dog. That knocks out the workout and the pet care at the same time. And that’s an extra hour you can sleep rather than spending it at the gym.

Think efficiency here: what other things do you have on your to-do list that could be consolidated together? Batch payments instead of single payments. Syncing A/P to your accounting software. All those minutes saved start to add up.

Consider a time management tool

This one’s tough because no one wants to admit that they’re wasting time. But I bet if you sat down and mapped out your entire day, you’d realize there are periods — however short they might be — where you could have better used your time. No one’s saying to eliminate wasted time completely. You can still invest as much free time as you like into bad reality TV, arguing with strangers on social media, or whatever else you enjoy.

However, a time management app might help you see that perhaps if you spent just a little less time scrolling Instagram, you could free up some time for more important things like sleep and self care. Maybe even responding to that email your old friend from college sent you three weeks ago, that you keep meaning to respond to. Just try tracking your time for a week and see how many hours you could claw back from less productive pursuits.

Declutter your life

The Marie Kondo method is all the rage these days but you don’t need to go through every item in your house, piece-by-piece, to weed out everything that doesn’t “spark joy” in order to declutter. For those of us whose joy is a little too easy to spark (you know who you are), clearing out some of the clutter can lead to a more efficient life and free up some time that you previously spent trying to track down that stapler that you just know you had. Give away the kitchen gadgets you never use, organize that messy desk of yours, and file papers away so you aren’t spending more time than you have on trying to find the things you need. A little time investment upfront will pay off in the long run. This also goes for digital declutter — unsubscribing from marketing emails and organizing your files both at work and home can help you find things faster and therefore free up precious time.

Oh, and one last piece of advice …

Put automation to work at the office

One Melio client increased their overall revenue by 30% and estimated that they save two hours every day using Melio to automate paying bills and receiving payments. Once payments come in, they’re seamlessly synced to your accounting software, saving even more time and trouble. Imagine what you could do with two hours a day. Two hours that aren’t spent waiting around for checks and chasing down clients. That’s one less thing to worry about, and surely we all need less to worry about these days.

These time-saving tips are brought to you by Melio, your partners in workflow efficiency. Save time and trouble with Melio’s full suite of A/R and A/P solutions.

The post 4 Ways to Automate Your Day and Free Up Precious Time appeared first on Going Concern.

Intuit is hiring at scale, onboarding thousands of new recruits that want to make a difference in the Intuit Expert Network mission. Intuit experts help TurboTax Live, QuickBooks Live, and Mint Live customers have confidence that their taxes and personal and business finances are accurate and complete, which in turn positively impacts their financial lives. 

The Intuit Expert Network is your opportunity to achieve your optimal work/life balance from your home office, while enabling you to connect and collaborate virtually with peers and expand your knowledge. And you’ll do it all through a powerful, unified technology platform that provides a seamless experience. 

Let’s take a look at how the Intuit platform can help you do what you do better—so you can open new career opportunities and guide customers toward better financial outcomes.

Capitalize on rapid changes in accounting technology

Over the last 40-plus years, accounting technology has evolved from text-based, command-line software to cloud-based systems offering automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Technology is changing faster all the time, and that trend is expected to continue. The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to rapidly develop remote working solutions, further hastening the rate of transformation.

Now more than ever, businesses and consumers need highly skilled tax, bookkeeping, and financial professionals to help them navigate the quickly-evolving and intersecting worlds of finance and technology. Becoming an Intuit Expert allows you to capitalize on this trend, learning Intuit products inside and out and keeping your abilities up-to-date as new solutions emerge.

Intuit was founded in 1983, and—with the release of Quicken DOS—emerged as a pioneer in leading-edge accounting technology. The company has built a proven track record of technology excellence in the decades since. Intuit has continued to grow and stand out throughout the Microsoft Windows era of the 1990s, the web era of the 2000s, and into today’s mobile and cloud era.

The company has also developed a reputation for disrupting how and where experts can serve customers, adapting its solutions to the cloud and successfully maintaining a large remote workforce years before COVID-19. Working with Intuit allows you to work on a platform from the industry-recognized leader in accounting technology—and gain the prestige of adding the Intuit name to your resume. 

Learn and work from a unified, intuitive platform

Intuit Experts build their skills and assist clients from a single, intuitive platform that leverages AI, machine learning, and automation for intelligent, personalized experiences. 

The platform provides a comprehensive, end-to-end experience that uses intelligent capabilities to help experts quickly onboard through a digital onboarding center, visually manage, track, and stay on top of their work, collaborate with other experts, enhance their skills, and communicate with customers.

If you become an Intuit Expert, you’ll have everything you need to develop your technology skills, serve clients, and expand your career—in your own way and remotely within the U.S. 

Work smarter and automate manual tasks

As an Intuit Expert, you’ll work from an ever-evolving platform that automates many mundane tasks. This allows you to be more productive and spend less time making calculations—and more time delivering great results for customers.

The platform also intelligently guides you as you work with customers, helping you identify customer priority and the specific task to tackle next. With powerful technology backing you up at every step, you can more easily and thoroughly give customers financial peace of mind. 

“The Intuit Expert Portal tool is pretty high tech. The use of applications interchangeably for client data, smart look, scheduling and even community questions is very impressive.”

— TurboTax Live Expert

Get the right technology and training to advance your career

Whether you’re just starting out, have an established practice, or are nearing the end of your career, becoming an Intuit Expert is a great way to chart a brighter professional future. You can use intelligent technology to deliver better results, increase your knowledge, and shape your career to fit your needs.

Reach out to Intuit now to learn more.

Learn more about becoming an Intuit Expert >

Related articles:

How Intuit Can Help Your Career Thrive In the Remote Work Era
Shape Your Accounting Career Your Way with the Intuit Expert Network

The post Advance Your Accounting Career with Intuit’s AI-driven, Intuitive Technology Platform appeared first on Going Concern.

Accountingfly is the answer to your “never commute again/never wear suit pants again” prayer–their core business is placing candidates in 100% permanently remote accounting jobs. 

Whether you’re looking for a permanent position or a freelance/temp gig, check out a sample of their current remote jobs below or visit Accountingfly.com to see all open positions. Before you go full-blown Office Space.

Not ready to jump ship quite yet, but know the day is coming? Sign up for Accountingfly’s Job Alerts. You’ll get notified whenever new remote accounting jobs open up. 

PS–Friendly reminder, if you want a remote job, don’t make a monkey of yourself in the video interview. Learn how to operate Zoom, be prepared for the interview, and most of all, don’t be like these people. If you need it spelled out for you in text form, here are some things NOT to do during a virtual interview. 

PPS–Required marketing tagline: Let Accountingfly make remote work for your career. Also, check out their Career Center if you want career advice from people who work from beach chairs and haven’t seen the inside of an office since before YouTube existed. 

PPPS–When you’re done applying for your new remote gigs, sign up for the Going Concern Accounting News Roundup (ANR) newsletter to get extraordinary accounting content (and/or just random news tangentially related to accounting) twice a week.

Top remote accounting jobs:

• Remote SALT Accountant
• Remote Tax Accountant, CPA
• Remote Tax and Accounting Manager
• Remote Tax Manager
• Remote Tax Freelancers
• Remote Business Advisor, CPA
• Remote Senior Accountant, Fund Accounting
• Remote Senior Accountant
• Remote Audit Freelancer
• Remote Workflow Automation Project Manager
• Remote Full Charge Bookkeeper

Click here to view all available remote positions.

The post Making Remote Work: June’s Hottest Remote Accounting Jobs appeared first on Going Concern.

You can move upward in your chosen field or move outward, ”changing lanes” to expand your expertise and learn new skills. And, no matter what, you can choose your own schedule according to your personal and professional needs.

But don’t take our word for it. Let’s take a deeper look at what it means to be an Intuit Expert—and, along the way, hear from some professionals on how they leveraged the opportunities offered by Intuit to create their ideal careers.

Choose your path 

As an Intuit Expert, you’ll be equipped with support and training to provide customers with the expertise they need and to help them overcome their most important financial challenges. Speaking broadly, you can work for the Intuit Expert Network in one of three roles:

“As you go” tax expert: You’ll take contacts (calls and chats) from customers, where you’ll support them in preparing and filing their taxes themselves. You’ll guide customers through their own tax returns and review their returns before filing, help them navigate TurboTax, answer specific questions, and advise and guide them on questions that range from simple to complex. 

Full service tax expert: If you’re hired as a full service tax expert, you’ll be responsible for preparing returns on behalf of customers. You’ll handle returns (nearly) from start to finish, spending some of your time interacting with customers and some preparing the return. You’ll supplement any downtime in full service taking “as you go” calls and chats.

Bookkeeper: You’ll work with our small business customers to help them better manage their business finances. You might help customers get set up on QuickBooks or onboarded to the QuickBooks Live service. Bookkeepers who are dedicated to “ongoing” bookkeeping service work in teams, which act as “firms” that manage a dedicated book of a business. Some work primarily in a front-office role, serving as the liaison between small business customers and their bookkeepers; others work primarily in a back-office role, preparing and managing the books. 

Expand your knowledge

Once you are interviewed and hired as an Intuit expert, you’ll get onboarded, receive training and resources, and continue learning and upskilling as you help clients and grow your career.

Michaela Schoonover, Expert Bookkeeper with QuickBooks Live and owner of Arm’s Reach Bookkeeping, said she found the training and knowledge-building opportunities offered by Intuit especially helpful. 

“By the time I had completed my training sessions, I was confident I had a team of managers, leads, and colleagues who would provide support when I needed it,” Michaela said. “My first days on the job left me with a very singular feeling—‘this is a place I want to be.’”

Michaela has continued to learn and grow as an Intuit Expert, taking advantage of both the educational resources and the vibrant network of professionals.

“Having the tools and resources to help so many customers from a wide variety of industries has given me new skills and a new confidence in myself,” Michaela said. “Above all, I’ve learned that finding a professional community can help get you closer to your goals, and make work a more rewarding part of your life.”

Expand your skills

As an Intuit Expert, you’ll take on projects and responsibilities that allow you to move up in your chosen field and build your professional skills. And you’ll get all the resources, support, and encouragement you need along the way. 

As a QuickBooks Live Expert, Wayne Brown discovered ample opportunities to grow his career.

“My performance led to me being on several special projects … which, in turn, has resulted in me being a subject-matter expert in certain areas of QuickBooks Live and also QuickBooks,” Wayne said. “In addition, I have made hundreds of connections with other Intuit Experts … and made an impact on the growth of my business.” 

Expand your expertise

Perhaps the most unique aspect of the Intuit Expert Network is the opportunity to “change lanes.” You can gain skills and even earn certifications that will expand your expertise from taxes to bookkeeping (or vice-versa). The network gives you the freedom to chart your own career path (or career paths, as the case may be.)

For example, the Intuit Expert Network can help you earn your Enrolled Agent (EA) credential, which is the highest credential the IRS awards. Let’s hear from three Intuit Experts who have taken advantage of this opportunity:

“I enjoyed study sessions, developed lasting relationships with peers, and shared insights on tax situations. As a result, I feel more confident interacting with clients, teammates, and peers when discussing various tax laws and situations.”

— Stephanie Brooks, EA

“Having great mentors, managers, leads, peers, and a support system helping me along the way was a big part of earning my EA. The credential, in addition to my years of tax experience, has helped me feel more confident answering questions and researching topics. I love being able to provide experts and customers with a much deeper understanding and knowledge necessary to address the different challenges concerning the ever-changing tax laws.”

— Robin Copeland, Tax Expert Lead and EA

“The EA program was great! I learned so much and feel so much more confident answering questions and researching topics. I was promoted up two levels … I’m enjoying much deeper interactions with clients and really feel I have the chance to make a difference.”

— Elizabeth Dickinson, EA

Shape your accounting career path, your way

Get on the path to expanding your career, learning new skills, and shaping your professional life to fit your needs. And find out just how far you can go. Learn more about becoming an Intuit Expert today.

Get started >

The post Shape Your Accounting Career Your Way with the Intuit Expert Network appeared first on Going Concern.

The more we talk to accountants, bookkeepers, tax preparers, and finance professionals, the more we hear from them that working remotely is having a positive impact on their careers. All it takes is the right attitude and the right strategy to ensure you’re making the most of today’s opportunities.

To that end, Intuit is providing a great way for you to advance your career in the remote work era. The company has begun hiring at scale, onboarding thousands of Intuit Experts in 2021 with plans to continue growing the program yearly. Intuit Experts help TurboTax Live, QuickBooks Live, and Mint Live customers have confidence that their taxes and personal and business finances are accurate and complete, which in turn positively impacts their financial lives.

Here are three reasons becoming an Intuit Expert can help your career thrive in the remote work era:  

1) You’ll personalize your career path

With more time on your hands, more freedom, and more options, the remote era allows you to wave goodbye to the rigid, programmed career paths of the past and blaze your own unique professional trail.

As an Intuit Expert, you’ll have the freedom to shape your career to fit your life. Choose how and when you want to work to fit your career goals or experience level. Select hours that work with your current practice, if you have one. Scale up or down as your needs change, or focus on the work that’s most rewarding to you as you move into the next chapter of your life. And you can even explore new skills across disciplines, from personal taxes to bookkeeping and more.

2) You’ll learn new skills and expand your expertise

Rather than remaining focused on a single discipline, the remote era allows you to shape your expertise however you want. Like a train shifting tracks, you can move between accounting, bookkeeping, tax, and finance, depending on your skills, gaining additional experience and building a practice that meets your clients’ needs more holistically.

Here again, Intuit offers an opportunity for you to expand your knowledge. Intuit Experts are provided with training, technology, and credentialing that leads to transformative learning and growth, enabling you to serve clients in a variety of meaningful ways. 

Intuit Experts also gain access to Intuit University, an unrivaled library of development programs and microlearning courses. These offerings go beyond simple training and education, delivering learning experiences that are engaging, personalized, and highly effective. 

The Intuit Expert program has a track record of helping professionals grow into new areas, currently sending through 1,000 new certified tax experts annually. And it boasts a 90% return rate for tax experts, a clear indication of its popularity and ability to help professionals advance their careers.

3) You’ll connect with others and collaborate in new ways

Thanks to advancements in technology and new methods of collaboration, accounting professionals are finding innovative ways to come together, helping each other solve problems and benefit from a larger pool of experience.

Becoming an Intuit Expert is a great way to quickly tap into this spirit of collaboration, leveraging a network of professionals to advance your career. Intuit’s community of experienced experts and team managers serve as advocates along your journey, providing you with the advice and mentorship you need to take your career wherever you want it to go. From virtual team rooms that let you engage with other experts and get advice anytime you want it to one-on-one guidance from your managers, the help you need is always close at hand. 

Your accounting career, now with limitless potential

In the remote working era, there’s nothing to stop you from achieving everything you want to do in your accounting or finance career. With the freedom to personalize your path, learn new skills, and connect with peers and mentors, the only limit to your potential is your imagination.

Whether you’re just starting out, have an established practice, or are nearing the end of your career, becoming an Intuit Expert is the perfect way to take full advantage of the newfound freedoms of the remote era. Reach out to Intuit now to learn more—and find out just how far your professional future can go.

Learn more about becoming an Intuit Expert >

The post How Intuit Can Help Your Career Thrive In the Remote Work Era appeared first on Going Concern.

Take Accounting Conferences and Seminars LLC, for example. For nearly a decade, the NASBA-registered professional training organization held two-day in-person conferences about 15 times a year, in different parts of the country, offering CPE credit to those attending sessions on the latest accounting developments.

But that all changed a year ago when the Rona caused companies to shut down all business travel. So ACS had to … you guessed it, PIVOT, by moving to a virtual format via GoToWebinar.

“Things have worked out really well,” said Rob Dowd, founder and managing director of ACS, who cut his teeth in public accounting at Deloitte and later Arthur Andersen. “We’re getting new clients that wouldn’t necessarily be able to travel to the different geographical locations where the conferences were held.”

The independent in-person conferences hosted by ACS attracted accounting and finance professionals from around the country who do the bidding of their company’s CFO—corporate controllers, vice presidents of finance, chief accounting officers, and accounting directors and managers, among others—so they could spend two days being briefed on the ever-changing accounting rules and requirements for topics like:

• Revenue recognition;
• Financial accounting and reporting update;
• SOX and internal controls;
• SEC reporting; and
• Life sciences accounting.

“It has always been a two-day format because people will travel for two days and it allows enough time to really delve into the nuances of the topics,” Dowd said. “All the speakers come from the Big 4 or the different regional or niche public accounting firms. And then we’d also have panelists from industry.” 

Through the years conferences were held at different locations throughout the country, but the San Francisco Bay Area had by far the best turnouts, according to Dowd.

“That area has such a high concentration of technology and software companies, and they have the most complex technical accounting issues like revenue recognition,” he said. “So we gravitated toward there and found that other people, whether they’re from Boston or Texas or other hubs of technology like Salt Lake City or Denver, were willing to travel there to get that expertise. Most of our events are on Pacific Daylight Time so we can accommodate our folks in the Bay Area.”  

Now, accounting and finance professionals from those tech and software companies can learn about how rev rec is being applied in a SaaS environment and be educated on the standard’s latest nuances—and earn CPE credit in the process—from the comfort of their own home offices, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants or even their PJs, if they so desire.

“The thing that separates us from other webcast providers is generally during a webcast you’re going to jump on there for an hour or two hours or four hours to learn about this new topic. It’s really rare to jump on there for two days and sit in your home or office and get updated during that big chunk of time,” Dowd said. “Attendees appreciate having the chance to really dig deep into these topics that you can’t do in an hour, two hours, or four hours.

“But you’re not going to sit down for 16 straight hours and hear somebody pontificate on what they think are the best ways to walk through revenue recognition, so it’ll be a mixture of lecture, case studies, and industry panelists,” he added. “One of the great things about going virtual is you can have great panelists from all over the country. Our next revenue recognition conference will have panelists from Starbucks and Bay Area tech companies. We might not be able to get those speakers in a live format, but the time commitment for them is not as difficult for just coming in and participating for an hour-and-a-half panel discussion.”

Dowd also said each 75- or 90-minute session is followed by a break so attendees can check their email and reply to urgent matters before the virtual conference reconvenes with the next topic and speaker.

While Dowd still believes there’s immense value that comes from a live in-person conference, he offered up a few other advantages to attending a virtual training event:

1. It’s more convenient (and cheaper)

Business travel can sometimes be a hassle—and expensive (well, expensive for your company because you’ll be trying to expense the hell out of everything you possibly can). The virtual conference means not having to worry about being stuck in traffic or flight delays or your luggage being lost or booking a room at a hotel with erratic Wi-Fi (although your Wi-Fi at home might be spotty because your kids are sucking it up on Zoom during school, but that’s a different story). So you’re saving precious time and your employer is saving precious money.

Speaking of saving money, once ACS decided to go virtual, Dowd said the business cut out all direct costs it would have to pay for a two-day in-person event, like for venue rental and food and beverages, which reduced the cost of attending a two-day virtual conference by $250 per person.

“We were able to reduce the fee for the virtual conferences from $795 to $545, which people really liked,” Dowd said. “We were getting comments like, ‘Why isn’t everyone doing this?’ and ‘Not only am I able to attend from my living room and having to not travel, my boss loves the cost savings.’”

2. These aren’t pre-recorded sessions

“They’re all done in a live format. Attendees are getting that instant interaction,” Dowd said. “If you don’t understand something on the slide the speaker is talking about, in real time you’re able to reach out to the instructor via the chat box and say, ‘Can you clarify what you mean by this acronym or this point?’ and they’ll be able to get right back to you and answer that question in real time. The average class size is manageable. We’re not talking about 500 people on a webcast. It’s usually an average of 80 to 100 attendees.”

3. Ask questions anonymously

So you’re in a hotel ballroom listening to a speaker and his or her talk ends and now it’s time for the audience Q&A. You’ve got a question you think is a pretty good one and you start to raise your hand for the moderator to give you the mic. But speaking in public is not an accountant’s forte, and anxiety sets in after scanning around at the 300 or so people in the same room as you. “Nevermind, my question isn’t really that important,” you tell yourself as you put your hand down. 

Well guess what? You needn’t feel intimidated by asking a question during a virtual conference. GoToWebinar is one directional, so you can’t see your fellow attendees, only the speaker and whatever materials he or she provides. And the instructor can’t see you. So ask your question pantsless if you want. Nobody would ever know.

“If you have a question that you might think is stupid or if you have a question that might put your company in a bad light—‘We’ve been doing it this way. Is this the right way we should be doing it?’—you’re able to ask your question anonymously in the chat box,” Dowd said. “We found that people are actually participating more than they would in a live event. They are asking more questions and they do like the low-risk anonymity of being able to ask questions through chat without having to hear their voice, without having to stand up and ask a question, and without having to identify themself.”

4. Review course materials repeatedly

The good news for those attending an ACS two-day virtual conference is you’ll get a video replay of the conference to rewatch at your leisure. The bad news for those who don’t attend is the conferences are not on-demand. So y’all are missing out on really engaging speakers presenting information in a way that won’t make your head spin. And the best part is you won’t have a person sitting next to you who was out drinking until the wee hours of the morning with his eyes closed and his head tilting backward snoring during the duration of the presentation. You know what I’m talking about. 

“One of the constant things we’re told by attendees is that the instructors are able to keep their attention during the session,” Dowd said. “And there are a variety of different delivery methods. It’s not just a straight lecture. It’s industry panels. It’s case study discussions with interactive polling. It’s more of a livelier format than just sitting there in a passive lecture.”

The next ACS virtual conference will be held on March 23 and 24, from 8:45 a.m. to 4:40 p.m. PDT on both days. The topic is “Revenue Recognition Accounting Update (ASC 606).” You can register for the two-day virtual conference here.

A full list of ACS events for 2021 can be found here.

The post Believe It or Not, There Are Advantages to Getting CPE In a Virtual Setting appeared first on Going Concern.

The timesheet isn’t dead, but it may well be on life support. According to a 2018 study from the AICPA, firms of all sizes are increasing their use of value pricing. The smallest subset of firms in the study reported that value pricing accounts for 50% of their total fees, indicating a particular attraction to value pricing models among smaller businesses and individual accountants.

In the value pricing era, accountants who spend less time on administrative tasks and more time knocking out projects for clients will win the day. So let’s look at some ways you can get through the tedious stuff faster—and make the value pricing era truly awesome for your accounting career or firm.

1. Spend less time billing (and more time earning)

Every minute spent handling payments is a minute you could be spending executing paid work for your clients. Today’s accountants need to find ways to accelerate their clients’ billing—so they can get back to creating awesome results.

Such was the case at Latitude Bookkeeping, a firm in Plattsburgh, NY. With many of its clients’ vendors insisting on the use of paper checks, Latitude and its clients were spending too much time handling payments. The company found the perfect solution in Melio, an online payment solution that allows its customers to send and receive payments in any form, all from one unified online platform.

“With Melio, a client can use a credit card to pay rent (and utilities) and Melio will send a check or ACH,” said David Perry, founder of Latitude. “It’s great to have all these payment options available to us not only on the payable side, but also for whoever is receiving the payment, and we can tailor it to their preference.”

Since partnering with Melio, Latitude has decreased their payment handling time by as much as 90%, saving an average of eight minutes on each bill payment.

“Once a week we go into Melio, we pay the bill. The client gets an email, approves, and that’s it,” Perry said. 

2. Onboard clients faster

Congratulations, you just signed a new client! You made the winning pitch, shook all the right hands (virtually, of course), and the ink on the contracts has dried. Now it’s time for the awesomeness to begin, right?

Hold up there, cowboy. First, you need to onboard the new client, teaching them how to work with you and use your services. Onboarding can take as long as 60 days, creating lead time between signing a new client and completing paid projects for them.

Fast onboarding has always been the goal, but it’s even more essential in the value pricing era. Without billable hours, you can no longer take your time getting a client set up—you need to move quickly so you can start working on projects. Plus, you can’t afford to take too much time away from other paying clients. 

Houston-based accounting firm Walker Agency got fed up onboarding its clients to use multiple clunky bank bill pay platforms. The firm turned to Melio to help increase efficiency and fill the accounts payable “hole” in its tech stack. Melio enabled Walker Agency to reduce onboarding and training time by three to four hours per client and decrease overall payment handling time by 40%.

“(Melio) takes very little time to set up,” said Amy Walker, founder of Walker Agency. “You hook up your bank account, put some approval levels in place, and you just start using it. On top of that, it’s free, so it saves our clients money and makes them very happy.” 

3. React to surprises with agility

Raise your hand if the phrase “in these uncertain times” makes you want to smash your TV with a sledgehammer, light it on fire, and write a passive-aggressive email to the manufacturer for creating a product that seems to utter that phrase roughly every 16 seconds. No, that’s just us? We’ll get help.

It might be annoying, but there’s a reason everyone’s talking about uncertainty. Even before COVID-19, sudden change was a hot topic in accounting, with nimble startups, cloud-based tools, and a move toward remote work creating disruption and unexpected results. The pandemic accelerated the pace of many of these disruptors while delivering a seemingly endless string of its own surprises—many of which have been costly for accounting firms and their clients.

More changes are coming, to be sure, and it’s impossible to be fully prepared for what the future might hold. But the accountants and firms that take this time to rethink their ability to react to surprises will position themselves for the best results moving forward.

Let’s venture outside the world of accounting for a moment and take a look at Regency, a supply company that saw demand for its products radically shift in response to COVID-19. Demand for certain products went down (like customized apparel and promotional items), while other products, like janitorial supplies, became vital for Regency’s onsite customers to stay in business.

Regency’s ability to pivot quickly and secure in-demand products was crucial to keeping its clients in business. The company needed to find ways to streamline administrative work, like bill paying and receiving payments, to improve its customers’ experience and increase their buying power.

By embracing value pricing and time-saving services like Melio, accountants and accounting firms can now offer their clients this kind of agility. You’ll have the time and resources to provide higher-quality service, helping your clients move where the market takes them and gain an advantage over their competitors.

Today, Regency uses Melio to automate check writing, onboard suppliers, and stock new supplies faster and with greater ease. With Melio helping it save time and quickly pivot to new supply demands, Regency has increased its overall revenue by 30%.

“I estimate that we save at least two hours a day just on the manual input of invoices details,” said Mason Sagan, founder of Regency.

Similarly, accountants have seen demand for various services change in response to COVID-19 and other disruptors. Solutions like Melio allow you to react to these changes swiftly, helping you continue to deliver awesome results for your clients—no matter how much their needs evolve.

Accounting awesomeness made easy

Make the value pricing era awesome for your accounting career or firm by putting time back in the day, onboarding clients faster, and improving business agility. Learn how unified digital payment solutions from Melio help you create more value for clients at Melio Accountants. 

Start using Melio today >

The post 3 Ways Accountants Can Get Awesome Results In the Value Pricing Era appeared first on Going Concern.

Have you ever wondered just who Elijah Watt Sells even was? Most people probably assume he was some try-hard super accountant with an uncanny ability to retain information and regurgitate it back out in multiple choice answer form given the award that bears his name. Those people might be shocked to learn he was actually a terrible accountant early in his career.

An AICPA profile says he was a “valued worker” in the railroad assistant station agent job he took out of college at age 16 “but fell short in his accounting skills.” Not to mention he didn’t even graduate from Baker University with an accounting degree (or any degree, for that matter). His reporting was so bad he got in trouble for it at work, at which point he did the most American thing you can do and lifted himself straight up by his bootstraps and got serious about his job. He would later go on to help form the AICPA and was a founding partner of Haskins & Sells, which you kids know nowadays as Deloitte.

So Sells wasn’t a prodigy by any means. Nor was he particularly exceptional at his job starting out, which some of you might be able to relate to. Through education, dedication, and old-fashioned determination, he became one of the most influential accountants of the 20th century, and his legacy lives on through the award that bears his name.

In 2019, nearly 75,000 aspiring CPAs sat for the exam and only 137 of them performed so well they can now count themselves among other Elijah Watt Sells Award winners. This means they passed each section on their first attempt with a cumulative average score above 95.50.

But how did they do it? Like the award’s namesake, they invested time and effort to meet their goals. It really is that simple. You’re welcome to engage in all manner of superstitious rituals if you feel that will give you an edge, but at the end of the day, the only way to get to the winner’s circle is to put in the work.

OK, but is it really that simple? Surely there has to be more to it. No, seriously, that’s it.

Becker surveyed dozens of 2019 Watt Sells Award winners who used their course — 90% of EWS winners did — and nearly every one said the same thing: practice exams and MCQ make all the difference.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of the MCQs,” said award-winner Michael Humphrey. “They allow you to really master the material.”

The key to mastering MCQ comes from going beyond memorization and using answer explanations to understand why. Otherwise you’re just grinding questions that you’ll never see on the exam for the sake of grinding questions, which will probably get you into 75 territory if you study enough, but Watt Sells Award not so much.

“The important thing with MCQs is not necessarily to do as many as possible, but rather to do as many as you can while fully understanding why the correct answer is correct, and why the incorrect answers are incorrect,” said award-winner Carson Angress. “This is the only way to know if you truly know the information, or have begun memorizing answers.”

The other key here is practice exams. Between AICPA practice exams and your review course, you should have more than enough material to familiarize yourself with the exam format. With the Becker system, candidates can build their own practice exams made up of MCQ, TBS, or both if they’re feeling bold. Then when they’re ready, they also have simulated exams with all new questions that feel just like the real thing and prepare students for the actual exam experience.

Let’s put this in other terms: Imagine you and your friend have decided to run a marathon in the spring. You’ve got a couple months to prepare, so how should you best spend your time? Your friend thinks the key is expensive running shoes and consuming endless YouTube videos from marathon runners. She spends hours on running forums, getting into Internet fights over the best way to replenish electrolytes. You, however, know that training is the way to go, literally putting your foot to the pavement to work on your endurance and fitness. Come marathon day, your friend has far better gear than you but burns out after just a few miles while you deftly glide to that last mile. How’d you do it? You already knew how you’d perform in the race because you’ve been practicing on your own all along.

This is the strategy that worked for 2019 award-winner Kara Killingsworth. “Once I would go through the practice questions and exams, I was able to gauge which areas I was weakest in and could go back to lectures or do more questions in those areas,” she said. “They really allowed me to put my knowledge to the test and feel prepared on exam day.”

In other words, she trained for the marathon (which the CPA exam is, let’s be real) with lots of runs and mini-marathons, which helped her to figure out where she needed to improve before the big race.

Look, it’s not rocket science. And at the end of the day, there’s no big secret to how to get the Elijah Watt Sells Award, no matter what clickbait blog titles may tell you. There isn’t some secret strategy or ideal brain-feeding meal plan that will get you there. It’s you. Put in the work, practice, practice, practice, and who knows, maybe next year you’ll find yourself in quotes giving advice to future CPAs who want to count themselves among the small number of people who have achieved this honor.

And if not, don’t feel bad. It’s a rare award for a reason. If it were easy, everyone would do it, much like the CPA exam itself.

Accounting and finance industry professionals and leading firms around the globe count on Becker for the help they need to raise their game, plus the ongoing expertise necessary for continued achievement. As the industry originals, we have helped more than one million candidates prepare for the CPA Exam and continue to advance the industry through our relationships and resources.

Learn more about Becker’s CPA Exam Review.

The post The Not-So-Secret Way to Get an Elijah Watt Sells Award appeared first on Going Concern.

Meanwhile, your client announces a major product recall, the disposal of a business segment, and a restructuring. Sales and the stock price plummet, raising serious questions about the possible impairment of intangibles.

During a planning meeting, the partner on your audit informs you that he is long overdue to be inspected by the PCAOB and he believes the audit you are leading will be selected by the PCAOB for inspection. The partner provides a stern warning that the audit must be fully compliant with PCAOB standards.

Fast forward to busy season. You have been working nights and weekends trying your best to make everything work. You barely have time to get home, sleep, and get back to work the next morning. If you are single, your social life is suffering. If you are married, you are dealing with a spouse who does not understand why you need to work so much. If you have children, there is an extra level of pressure because you are missing in action. In other words, your work-life balance is out of balance.

The audit hours and audit issues are piling up. You are worried that you are running over-budget. The client is increasingly frustrated with your inexperienced audit team. You are worried about getting several audit and accounting issues resolved, meeting the earnings sign-off deadline, and being PCAOB compliant. Making matters worse, your access to the partner and manager has been limited and they are well-behind where they should be in their review of the workpapers.

Many of you have seen this movie before. Is this the formula for audit quality or a train wreck?

You hear a ping on your smartphone. It’s an email from your Big 4 firm announcing that it is once again in Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2020. Wait a minute, how can that be?

That question has always perplexed me until I finally decided to investigate further for my new book, The Truth About Public Accounting. I learned that the Fortune survey is compiled by its research partner, a company called Great Places to Work. Survey data is compiled from five broad categories:

1. Perks
2. Diversity
3. Paid time off
4. Compensation
5. Applicants per opening

Mysteriously, work-life balance does not factor into the Fortune “Best Companies to Work For” survey.

Vault.com conducts an annual survey of accounting firms using criteria identified as important to job seekers.  Those criteria, followed by their weight in the survey results, are as follows:

• Prestige (35%)
• Firm culture (20%)
• Job satisfaction (10%)
• Compensation (10%)
• Work-life balance (10%)
• Business outlook (5%)
• Formal training (5%)
• Informal training (5%)

The Big 4 are generally in the top four of this survey due to the heavy weighting given to prestige. However, commentary from the survey reveals that, “The Big Four … regularly score much lower (usually 20^th place or below) along the dimensions that are most indicative of the desirability as places to work, most notably firm culture, work-life balance, and job satisfaction. … It suggests that the Big Four may be more desirable as resume-building stopovers in a career path pointed elsewhere than as long-term destinations.”

This last observation should be troubling to investors and audit committees counting on reliable audits. It should also be troubling to the leaders of the largest audit firms and to the PCAOB. The largest audit firms are trying to differentiate themselves by hyping “data analytics” — hoping everyone will ignore the reality that corporate America is audited largely by young people just out of college who have not yet earned their CPA license.

Improving audit quality begins with making public accounting a better place to work so that the profession becomes known for delivering experience, continuity, and quality. Heavy workloads, high turnover, and low staff continuity are inherently inefficient and are a complete mismatch for the complexity auditors need to master to perform high-quality audits. Compounding matters, the high ratio of audit staff to partners creates a heightened risk that inexperienced audit staff will be inadequately supervised.

To draw attention to these problems and to advance potential solutions, I recently published The Truth About Public Accounting. My book identifies everything I wish I had understood when I first entered the profession. There is no shortage of conflicting pressures that can make your head spin and undermine good judgment. Whether you are an auditor, prospective auditor, investor, audit committee member, or regulator, it is important that you understand the Truth About Public Accounting. You can learn more about my book on Amazon by clicking here.

About the author:

Robert Conway is a retired Big 4 audit partner and former leader of a PCAOB regional office. He currently provides expert witness services in controversies pertaining to GAAP and PCAOB compliance. Mr. Conway’s website is at www.TheTruthAboutPublicAccounting.com and his email address is RetiredAuditPartnerACAP@Live.com.

The post The Truth About Public Accounting, Part I: How the Sausage Is Made and Those ‘Best Places to Work’ Surveys appeared first on Going Concern.

However ...

Even the most laser-focused, bottom-line-oriented accountant is missing something in his or her new pandemic work life. “Work hard, play hard” is now just “work hard alone in your apartment.” And in a lot of ways it kinda sucks. The energy isn’t the same. The competition isn’t as obvious; the drive wanes when it’s just you.

Working from home might not be ideal for future CPAs, but what can we do about it? 

The answer is, you have to do something. Accounting firms face the huge challenge right now of keeping talent. They can’t afford to have any more staff move on after they’ve gotten their CPAs. The office might have changed, but you still have to keep your talent happy.

The answer, according to experts at Dayshape, an AI-powered planning platform used by top 10 global firms, is to become a more sensitive, compassionate firm (Sensitive??? Stay with us. All will be explained.) while also delivering an office culture people actually like, making work the reward, and automating to make it all happen.  

When you put energy into all four of these strategies, you’ll create a firm that talent will be scrambling over themselves to be a part of. 

Let’s take a look at why these strategies are so important in our chaotic world. 

Get sensitive

Accounting firms aren’t well-known for their pronounced compassionate streak. 

Not saying accountants aren’t compassionate. It’s just that you might call it a latent tendency in an environment driven by bottom lines. That needs to change because everyone, and I mean everyone, is feeling fragile right now. Let that emotionally loaded word sink in a minute. 

Fragile? 

Who wants to think they’re fragile when they built their career around 14-hour days and all-nighters during busy season? Accountants are anything but fragile. 

Except that was before a pandemic forced us into home offices with no non-Zoom colleague interaction whatsoever. Now, we’re all a little bit fragile, including partners, and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can create a strategy around it. 

A strategy could be as simple as asking, “How are you?” but going a little further, pressing after the typical “Fine” answer and letting your team know that they can tell you how they’re really doing.

If this sounds like an infantile strategy to retain talent, you’re thinking from the pre-pandemic mindset. In a pandemic mindset, you can’t underestimate the power of relating emotionally, because we’re all starved for connection right now. 

If you’re sitting in your apartment with your cat, staring at a screen all day, and someone asks with real curiosity how you’re doing, that jolt of warmth will stand in for the late-night pizza and coffee breaks. A little genuine human compassion goes a long way. 

Learn this valuable skill, make your firm known for it, and talent will lean in your direction because they won’t be able to help themselves. 

Nurture your office culture

Whether your office culture was legendary like at WeWork, or a fairly normal culture centered around impromptu singalongs of Toto’s 1982 pop classic “Africa” and an easygoing “ask anything” policy, no doubt you had at least some culture back at your brick-and-mortar office. A culture that’s been replaced by the incessant chirping of crickets as you sit in the blue glow of your screen entering figure after figure into endless spreadsheets. 

Instead of impromptu singalongs, office culture now has to be a little more planned. 

Keeping a dedicated “random” channel going with aimless chatter about everything from how funny clients can be on Zoom to the huge number of tax returns you snatched up on your last game of “Zombie Accountant” provides a good release from monotony. 

You might even find this random channel facilitates a broader conversation than what was possible in pre-COVID days when the chatter often occurred among the same people. Could the work-from-home culture actually be more inclusive, less cliquish than the pre-COVID office? Hey, why not? Accountants like silver linings as much as the next person.

Make work the reward

Because most of our hours on Earth are spent either sleeping or working, your talent needs to have happy feelings on their commute to the office. 

Of course, in COVID times, there’s no office and no commute so … what now? 

What’s the point of work? Money? Yes, duh! But there’s also that special something that gets the accountant’s heart involved. For many accountants, pre-pandemic, it was the fact that there was a home away from home with a culture that they could count on. Now that everybody’s actually home, something else has to spark that feeling. More than ever, that thing has to be the work itself. Not just the money (we already know how everyone feels about that) but the type of work.

Any CPA can tell you that certain projects grab us by the gonads more than others. Who in your firm likes to work for nonprofits? Who gets excited about seeing a brand-new startup on its way? Now is the time to focus on giving your talent the work that makes them wake up, take notice, and care. 

Fairer, better, more relevant projects for everyone, women and minorities included, is crucial at a time like this. The firms that are known for making tailored job assignments are the firms that will get and keep the talent. 

Automation

Automation can help you achieve all the above.

According to Andrew Bone, CEO and co-founder of Dayshape, there are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to automation.

“People hear automation, and they worry about biases being reinforced. But automation in scheduling can actually take bias out of the equation by ensuring work is assigned based on predetermined criteria like skills, certifications, or independence requirements—not based on who you know or don’t,” he said.

Automation can help ensure that your talent is getting better, more relevant assignments that are spread out over the team, limiting burnout. Automation also frees up time by taking over repetitive tasks that don’t need human input and accomplishing other tasks like budget tracking more efficiently. 

This freed-up time can be used to check in more often with your team to make sure no one’s about to plunge off a cliff … or bolt to the cooler firm on the other side of the world.

Dayshape is an AI-powered planning platform helping professional services firms strike the right balance between profitability, client service, and staff happiness.

To learn more about how Dayshape can help your firm plan, manage, and adapt during our new WFH culture, visit Dayshape and be sure to sign up for their monthly newsletter.

The post Get Sensitive or Else: How to Keep Talent When the World’s Gone Crazy appeared first on Going Concern.

Some of the best accounting and finance talent had already gone remote, eschewing traditional work hours and stale coffee for the liberties of working from home through freelance and/or temporary gigs. And as businesses roll out their “return to the office” plans, other companies are leaning in entirely to the remote life, which will surely redefine what hiring needs and practices mean. 

These factors have created a challenging recruiting environment, forcing businesses to fight with competitors over an increasingly shrinking pool of accounting and finance talent.

But it’s possible to transform the gig/remote economy into an advantage for your company, harnessing it to actually improve the quality of accounting and finance work at your firm. You just need the right mindset—and the right partner.

Hire accounting and finance professionals faster and from a pre-vetted talent pool

Speed is often the most critical factor in accounting and finance recruiting. While, ideally, you want to acquire talent well before (or at the exact moment) you actually need it, even the most sophisticated talent pipeline and company timelines will frequently be thrown off course by unexpected events. 

When you sign a new client, they’ll want you to begin working for them immediately—and they don’t care that you’re still going through résumés to staff up or to replace workers who have left the company or are on leave.

The gig/remote economy offers the opportunity for you to sign talent faster—no protracted negotiations over salary and benefits, no fears that a competitor will snatch them away at the last moment—and put them to work when and for however long you need them. But it’s hard to do that on your own.

“You should be able to plug somebody in to play right off the bat,” added Alex Loewenstein, head of CPA practice at Paro. “So you’re billing hours to clients immediately, you’re not training them, onboarding them, taking resources away to get them up to speed.” 

Working with a partner like Paro, you can find and acquire top accounting and finance talent at lightning speed—improving your service quality while reducing the recruiting burden on your organization. 

“I’d say 60 to 70% of our clients hire the first person we introduce them to,” said Jon Repka, vice president of sales at Paro. “We can cut a ton of time out of your recruiting process, allowing you to get up and running with top-tier talent very quickly.”

Another advantage of the gig/remote economy is the ability to expand your talent search beyond the barriers of your region. Here again, Paro can help—leveraging its network of the best remote accounting and finance talent to find the right person for you, no matter where they work and live.

Build your business with better accounting talent and financial expertise

The gig/remote economy allows you to source and hire a better breed of accountants and finance professionals. Because today’s remote workers can take on multiple clients, you don’t have to worry as much about losing talent to your competitors—they can work with both of you. And even when you do lose out on talent, you have a larger pool from which to find replacements. 

But while there are great advantages to having faster access to a wider range of talent, the gig/remote economy has also compounded the complexity of vetting candidates. As the haystack continues to grow, finding that needle is only going to get harder.

Working with Paro makes that job much easier. When Paro says they’ll only offer you the best accounting and finance talent, they mean it—just 1.5% of applicants are accepted into their network. 

“Somebody comes in, they apply, we review their resume. If they pass that step, we give them a competency test to evaluate their financial knowledge. They get through that, they speak to a couple of our folks, we do reference checks, background checks, and give them something in terms of a simulation to present to our team. Only after all that will we add them to our network,” Loewenstein said.

Perhaps an even greater advantage of the gig/remote economy is that it allows you to go beyond just finding great talent, making it easier to find the right talent for your firm or for a particular client or project.

In addition to its intense personal vetting process, Paro uses a sophisticated AI system to match applicants to your needs, helping you find someone with the ideal blend of skills. 

“Our philosophy is, ‘Never say no.’ Whether that means you’ve got a new project you’ve never taken on before or a service line you’ve never explored, through Paro you’ll get the confidence of knowing we’ll always say, ‘Yes, we can get that for you,’” Repka said.

Create long-term relationships with freelance/temporary accounting and finance professionals

One of the greatest threats of the gig/remote economy is the loss of teamwork. With your accountants and finance professionals working far away from each other and often through temporary engagements, collaboration between them and with your permanent workforce is an ongoing challenge.

While its primary function is to match your firm up with the right talent, Paro also serves in a consultancy capacity that can help you mitigate these issues—or even head them off before they become prevalent.

“We’re not going to take your order. We’re going to help you figure out what you need,” Loewenstein said. “We’re going to look at the goals of your engagement and help you figure out who you should really be looking for and what price point you should consider. And we’re going to connect you with them. That precision helps to create longer-lasting, more effective relationships priced at market value.”

Through its advisory function and white-glove commitment to service, Paro consistently goes beyond one-time placements for a single job, with engagements often blossoming into long-term relationships of mutual benefit. And that helps keep teamwork and collaboration alive at your firm.

Partner with Paro and make the gig/remote economy work for you

By leveraging Paro’s network of top-tier remote accounting and finance professionals, you can take advantage of the positive aspects of the remote/gig economy while mitigating its risks and negative impacts.

Whether you need a temporary bump in expertise to handle an acquisition, assistance due to employee turnover, additional bookkeeping help because of seasonality, or something else entirely, Paro will work with you to accommodate your specific needs. For a single tax preparation job, full CFO leadership, and everything in-between, Paro has you covered.

Get the accounting and finance talent you need to consistently win in an inconsistent world—today and for years to come. Connect with Paro now.

Start now >

The post Finding the Best Accounting and Finance Talent In a Gig/Remote Work World appeared first on Going Concern.

OK, so maybe that’s not the worst (although a TopResume survey revealed it to be the No. 1 biggest deal-breaker for employers). Maybe it’s understandable that a frantic, jobless CPA accidentally dismantled his or her spell check. But that’s not the only mistake that turns up with frequency on résumés.

Let’s take a look at the most egregious mistakes, kindly contributed by the experts at TopResume, so you don’t repeat them. Not that you would. However, keep in mind you probably don’t want to make these mistakes in your marriage proposal either, so … you’re welcome!

1. The first thing they read … you were on the dance team

A résumé is definitely the place to showcase your talents, but make sure they’re relevant. You’re far enough along in your career to put your education at the bottom and leave off the little details you used to pad your résumé right out of college. Lead with quantifiable work details, such as the high volume of tax returns you prepared last year. Make it clear that you’ve earned your stripes as a bold CPA in corporate finance, not as first-chair clarinet in the marching band.

2. A terrible headshot (or any headshot)

There are so many reasons why you shouldn’t include a headshot. It’s not very considerate of your sought-out employer, for one. They’re trying to be non-discriminatory, don’t you know? Plus, you want your skills to get you the job. If your impressive beard gets you a Big 4 job, you’re in trouble. If you really hate the idea that you can’t charm them with your Blue Steel pose, include the URL to your LinkedIn profile. They’ll get the idea. Also, here’s a helpful life tip: Stay away from Blue Steel for any occasion—job interview, marriage proposal, final week of tax prep (unless it helps you stay sane). 

3. They don’t care that you like Dave Matthews Band

We get it. You’re desperate. You want to stand out by relating on a personal level with others who like Dave Matthews Band. But, and we can not repeat this enough, your résumé isn’t the equivalent of your high school locker door. Stick to the task at hand, and remember that you’re an accountant, not a stage manager, lighting technician, roadie, or anything else related to being a rock star. If that made you cry, you should be reading a different blog post. 

4. Embarrassing spelling mistakes and other typos

All spelling mistakes are bad, but some are worse than others. Don’t include an “Educuation” section and list “accruel accounting” as a core competency—after claiming to be detail-oriented in your cover letter. If you spell out CPA, make sure you include the “l” in “public.” Then there are those spelling mistakes that just look sloppy. Get your “their,” “they’re,” and “there” right. Make sure you get the spelling of your favorite software right: Sage Intacct, Thomson Reuters, Xero. The best thing you can do is hand your résumé over to someone else: your most anal-retentive friend, your mom, or a professional résumé reviewer.

5. Your email address belongs to a party animal

Consider how your email address might come across in the professional world. It can’t be the one you owned well before you were considering your career path. “Pintsizecutie,” “hotbuns,” and “kegk1ng05” are all highly inappropriate for making the right impression on your future employer. Shared email addresses like “smith.family@att.net” also give the wrong impression. It just looks bad when you can’t manage to set up one professional looking email address for your job search. It doesn’t take long and it costs nothing to create one through a provider like Gmail, so take the time and set yourself up for success. 

6. Don’t make your résumé an eye exam

Your résumé needs to be super-scannable and not result in a migraine. Recruiters are going to be looking for six pieces of information in the first six seconds of scanning your résumé. You need to make it effortless for them to find that info. Trying to cram your entire life onto one page by using 9-point font and one-fourth-inch margins is not going to help them see why you’re the best CPA for the job.

By the way, those six pieces of information are:

1. Your name;
2. Certifications;
3. Contact information;
4. Supporting media;
5. Headers; and
6. Professional title. 

There’s a lot you need to get right when crafting your résumé. The least you can do is get rid of the seemingly obvious, easily avoidable mistakes. Yet so many résumés land on the hiring desk with those same mistakes—over and over again. What’s going on? We’re going to chalk it up to the weirdness that happens to a brain as it approaches a life moment you don’t want to screw up. It’s understandable.

The best thing to do is take deep breaths and don’t rush out your resume until it’s ready. Or your CPA exam. Or a marriage proposal. Although, now that we think about it, you’d better get your résumé and CPA exam straight before you even think about a marriage proposal. Good luck! 

Want to see how your résumé stacks up?

Get a free review from one of the résumé experts at TopResume.

The post 6 Real-Life Embarrassing Accounting Résumé Mistakes You Never Want to Make appeared first on Going Concern.

Just imagine it! Working from home in your pajamas, setting your own hours, taking Netflix-and-nap breaks. No co-workers bugging you with stories of their latest golf triumphs—no sound at all, really, just silence and solitude and letting your personal hygiene slide …

… wait …

… OK, imagine all of that stuff, but for real and permanent, with no “return to office” plans hitting your inbox in a few weeks.

And the whole WFH thing is just an option, not a requirement, and you can really work from anywhere—which means you can travel. Oh, and imagine you’re getting to pick what you want to work on and who you want to work for, and you’re making more money than you do at your current job.

OK, that’s better.

That dream is a reality for many of the top-tier finance professionals providing freelance CFO leadership, controllership, accounting, bookkeeping, financial planning, analysis, and more as part of Paro’s freelance/temp placement network.

We know what you’re thinking: “I’ve looked into the freelance thing before, and it’s just not for me.” But Paro is different. In this article, we’ll show you how—and we’ll start by getting straight to the good stuff.

Find out what you’re really worth—and then earn it

Though he wasn’t exactly the greatest role model, a (fictional) clown once taught some bad guys a lesson by telling them, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” It wasn’t long after that he was sliding down a giant pile of cash. (Then some other stuff happened, but we don’t need to get into that.)

Unfortunately, many accounting and finance professionals don’t get paid anywhere near their real market value. If you’re not sure what your value should be, you can check the salary guide from Robert Half or various other calculators and resources online.

“I cut my teeth at a Big 4 firm,” said Jon Repka, vice president of sales at Paro. “I was told what I was worth, which was 15% of my bill rate at the time. But on an open marketplace, how much should a senior auditor with 15 years of experience go for on an hourly basis? A lot of people guess, some overbill—really, the vast majority underbill. But with Paro, you’ll know exactly what you’re worth, and we’ll do everything we can to get it for you.” 

Even if you’re one of those lucky so-and-sos who is actually getting paid what you’re worth, just think of how much more you could make by taking on the occasional high-paying freelance gig when times are slow?

The amount you earn will vary based on a number of factors, and Paro will help you identify accreditations or certain types of experience that will boost your rate. But here’s a general sense of what professionals in Paro’s network get paid, broken down by job title:

CPA Firm Support:

• CAS: up to $30/hr
• Tax preparation: up to $50/hr
• Prep and review: up to $60/hr
• Review: up to $75/hr

Small Business (SMB) Support:

• Bookkeeping/accounting: up to $40/hr
• Controller: up to $65/hr

Take the fear out of freelance

OK, so technically taking the “fear” out of “freelance” leaves you with “elnce,” but you get what we mean.

If you’ve never done it before, taking the plunge into the world of freelance accounting can be a bit frightening. But don’t worry—Paro takes care of all the scary stuff for you. And as a famous (fictional) sensei once said, “It’s OK to lose to an opponent. It’s never OK to lose to fear. Now go wax my car.”

For those of you who do have some freelance experience, you know you don’t always get a ton of choice in the companies you work for. Inevitably, you wind up dealing with people who aren’t your type (unless “people who take six months to pay your invoice” is your type). And sometimes you sign on for a job you thought you were qualified for—but when you get there, it turns out you’re in a bit over your head.

You won’t have to worry about any of that when you work with Paro. Paro has a sophisticated matching system that leverages years of expertise and artificial intelligence to help align your skills and interests with a client’s needs. 

“Paro has given me the platform to find clients that are a perfect match for my services,” said Kristie Woods, a CPA and member of Paro’s talent network. 

You’ll have the full freedom to set your own rate and hours, control the number of projects you work on at a time, and turn your availability off and on at your leisure. And once you’ve begun working with a client, you can rely on continuous support from the Paro Home Team. 

“Paro handles all of the marketing, billing, and collections for me, so I can fully focus on my clients’ accounting needs. They are great to work with,” Woods said.

Get your life back

A famous (fictional) teacher once told a student who got so caught up thinking about the future that he failed to continue standing on his head while telekinetically lifting some rocks and a robot, “Control, control, you must learn control!”

For accounting and finance professionals, control means recognizing when it’s time to put your nose to the grindstone—and when it’s time to work a little less and live a little more.

“Someone I talked to recently said, ‘When I was in public accounting, during busy season I used to drop my daughter off at school and I wouldn’t see her until the next day,’” said Alex Loewenstein, head of CPA practice at Paro. “One day her daughter said, ‘Mommy, why don’t I see you anymore?’ She left public accounting to spend more time with her family, but she’s still working with firms during the season because it’s great money.”

Teaming up with Paro gives you all that freedom and more. Want to work 60 hours a week and—unlike in public accounting—actually get rich doing it? No problem. Want to take a few jobs here and there and spend the rest of your time with family or video games? You got it. Need some time off to travel the world—or play video games even more? Paro has your back.

Perhaps most importantly, Paro gives you the freedom to work with the firms of your choice rather than for them. Through Paro’s white-labeling services, you’ll get the prestige of representing a big firm (or the comfort of representing a smaller one) but you’ll do it on your terms, picking the jobs and industries you want to work on while passing on the ones you don’t.

Paro can’t help you mentally project a hologram of yourself across the galaxy where you can fight your nephew in a duel that’s really just a distraction to give your friends time to escape from an assault by an evil empire—yet—but we still think the teacher we mentioned earlier would be impressed by you exercising that level of control.

What are you waiting for?

The potential to earn more money, work with better clients, get more freedom—there’s no downside to checking out Paro and applying to join their network. Go pay them a visit and see what they’re all about. 

As a famous (fictional) computer hacker said as he offered a newbie a choice between a red and a blue pill, “I’m trying to free your mind. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.”

So walk through it, already! Trust us on this one—that blue pill may look tempting, but it tastes like unpaid overtime. 

Learn more or join the Paro talent network >

The post Yes, You Can Make More Money as a Freelance Accountant or Finance Professional appeared first on Going Concern.

Recruiting season is anxiety-inducing enough in the most normal of times: making small talk, promoting yourself without coming off as self-absorbed, and let’s not even get into worrying about your lunch lingering in your teeth. As Covid drove the working world indoors and into their respective home offices, it also meant that in-person recruiting events were just one more thing instantly vaporized by the virus. For the time being, anyway.

Here’s the good news: it may be the strangest recruiting season in history (and might stay that way depending on how things shake out in the next year or so) but many of the same tips for mastering Meet the Firms that have been around for ages are still relevant. Whether you’re totally new to recruiting or back in the mix with a recruiting season under your belt, here’s how to make the most of this, the weirdest virtual recruiting season ever.

Make Some Space

First thing’s first. It goes without saying but the first thing you want to do is ensure you have an appropriate space for virtual meetings. Ideally, this is a quiet, private, well-lit space free from clutter. As 2020 has taught us, we don’t always live in an ideal world. As you’re probably a college student, we’re just going to go ahead and assume you don’t have a private study in which to conduct your video conferences like those guys constantly doing interviews from in front of their expansive bookcases for news programs. Don’t worry, they hand those out when you make partner.

In the meantime, make the most of whatever space you have, even if it’s just a corner of your room. Your anime posters and Funko Pop collection may be a source of pride to you but try to keep your video conference space as uncluttered — and professional! — as possible. In a pinch, you can always throw a sheet up behind you (plain and washed, obvs) to create a blank canvas.

Just before your event, get everything set up so you’re not surprised by those obnoxious spontaneous Windows updates with the mandatory reboots that always seem to pop up at the most inconvenient of times. Test your video and microphone, close out any excess tabs and apps you may have open in the background, and turn off notifications so you aren’t dinging the entire time you’re trying to talk to recruiters.

Alright, so your space is all set. Now what? Let’s talk attire.

The Clothes Make the Man (or Woman)

From the dawn of time until now, recruiting events have always been conservative. Although most of us have been living in sweatpants and T-shirts for far too many months, you are still expected to don your best business attire for virtual recruiting. If you don’t know what counts as business attire, find your nearest adult and ask. And yes, you should wear pants even though no one is going to see your bottom half. Keep the accessories to a minimum, stick with muted colors, and do your best to not look like a person who has been locked inside without human contact since spring. That quarantine beard? Get rid of it, or at least give it a very neat trim.

You’re going to get a little more leeway with grooming than you would under regular conditions but there’s still no reason to look like the wild-haired guy that hangs out downtown with a ‘The End is Nigh’ sign just because you haven’t been able to get a haircut in a few months.

Alright, so your video conference space is clean and you brushed your hair, what next?

Back to Basics

First, review these tips on networking for CPAs. Although some may not apply (you won’t be physically handing out business cards any time soon), still others like drafting and perfecting your virtual elevator pitch will always be a good idea.

Many schools are using Handshake to help connect their students to employers, think of it as LinkedIn for students. The big benefit to you if your school is one of the many requiring Handshake registration prior to attending virtual events is that attending employers are all listed, giving you a chance to research before your event. This is important as you might be asked “why do you want to work for our firm?” and “I’m sick of living off ramen and I heard you guys give new hires the best phones” isn’t generally considered an appropriate answer.

Take the time to familiarize yourself with the firms attending your recruiting event and once you’ve identified your top targets, go find out what you can about their clients, leadership, and other positive newsworthy things the firm is up to. No one is expecting you to be able to recite the firm’s entire history, but you should at least be able to make small talk about what sets that firm apart from others.

One bright side to virtual recruiting is that it may be easier to get one-on-one time as all campus virtual recruiting events we’ve seen are offering both group and 1:1 sessions. So no longer do you have to claw your way through a crowd of hungry classmates to get five minutes with your firm of choice, neat! And those of you with weak handshakes or perpetually sweaty palms are making out like bandits here too, no one will ever know about that limp wrist of yours. See, there had to be something good to come from all this.

Connecting with recruiters is an area many accounting students struggle with so don’t feel bad if the idea of small talk fills you with existential dread as you’re definitely not alone. Many of the people you’ll talk to at recruiting events were once in your shoes, so let them lead if you get tongue-tied and have questions in mind to ask.

If you’re having trouble coming up with questions on your own, here are some suggestions to get you started from Jared Bleiler, Sales Director, University at Becker CPA Review:

• 1. What skills are you looking for in an intern/new hire?
• 2. What are the expectations of an intern/new hire?
• 3. What do you like about working at your company?
• 4. What is the company culture like?
• 5. What learning and development opportunities does your company provide?

Professional communication takes practice and very few people are naturally good at it, let the fact that your classmates are equally as nervous as you be a comfort. Don’t overthink it, you’d be surprised how far a genuine smile will get you. Being prepared ahead of time will help, of course.

At the end of the day, it’s important to keep in mind that recruiting events are as much an audition for you as they are for the firm. Both sides are trying to figure out if it’s a good fit. While it may feel like all the pressure is on you to make a good impression, remember the firm wants to make a good impression on you as well. And why wouldn’t they, you’re awesome!

Accounting and finance industry professionals and leading firms around the globe count on Becker for the help they need to raise their game, plus the ongoing expertise necessary for continued achievement. As the industry originals, we have helped more than one million candidates prepare for the CPA Exam and continue to advance the industry through our relationships and resources.

Learn more about Becker’s CPA Exam Review.

Check out our Careers Center for more articles like this!

The post How to Absolutely Kill It at Virtual Recruiting and Interviews appeared first on Going Concern.

When continuous testing was first announced in 2019, we saw many candidates were confused about what this would mean to them. As adoption moved forward, some of these misconceptions persisted. Some believed that being able to retest immediately after receiving a failing score meant that they’d receive their scores practically as soon as they walked out of Prometric. Unfortunately, the benevolent overlords of the CPA exam haven’t quite gotten to that point, but it does mean that candidates don’t necessarily need to wait around for their scores like they used to.

To slice through some of the confusion and make sure everyone is clear about what continuous testing means for their own CPA exam experience, we talked to Angie Brown, senior director of product management at Becker, to get the scoop.

Going Concern: Other than eliminating blackout windows, are there any major changes candidates should be aware of as far as applying for NTS, exam timing, applying, all that good stuff?

Angie Brown: The only change to the exam application process will be that students who receive notification that they failed an exam will be able to immediately apply to retake the failed exam. The reapplication process is relatively quick and should take about a week to receive approval.

GC: Does this change your recommendations for how many parts a candidate should choose for their NTS, and if so, what is your recommendation?

Brown: The number of parts per NTS should be determined by the NTS length (which varies on a state by state basis and can be three months, six months, nine months, or 12 months). A good rule of thumb for most candidates is to plan to take one exam every two to three months.

GC: Given that retakes can now happen much sooner under continuous testing than under the previous model, what is your advice to candidates who have failed an exam section (as in, should they move on to a new one or re-study and retake the one they just failed?), and does continuous testing change that advice?

Brown: If a candidate fails an exam with a score close to 75, the candidate should quickly apply to retake the exam, restudy all areas of weakness identified in the score report, and retake the exam as quickly as possible (within one to three weeks). Before continuous testing, it was not as easy to quickly retake an exam because candidates were prohibited from taking the same exam twice in a testing window. This rule was eliminated with continuous testing.

Friendly reminder: Becker students qualify for the Becker Promise, which is Becker’s tuition waiver program for candidates without unlimited access who complete their review course but do not pass the CPA exam.

GC: Does continuous testing change your recommendations for how much time a candidate should spend studying each section?

Brown: Continuous testing does not change the amount of time needed to study for each section, but it does make it easier to schedule exams.

GC: The score release schedule through 2020 is out, should candidates expect similar frequency going forward in regards to score releases?

Brown: Yes, the score release schedule for the second half of 2020 is representative of planned score releases under continuous testing.

GC: So what common misconceptions about continuous testing are you hearing from your students? One that seems persistent is that it means candidates will receive their scores almost immediately.

Brown: Unfortunately, candidates will not receive their scores immediately. The AICPA is going to stick with its score release schedule of 4X each calendar quarter. So students will not be able to “immediately retake” failed exams. They will need to wait to receive their score to find out they passed and then it will take about a week to apply for and receive an NTS to retake a test. But the retake process will be much quicker than it was before continuous testing.

We hope the above helps clear up any lingering confusion you may have about what continuous testing means. Don’t feel bad if you were one of the ones who mistakenly thought it meant CPA exam scores delivered right to you faster than a same-day online grocery order. Maybe one day.

Accounting and finance industry professionals and leading firms around the globe count on Becker for the help they need to raise their game, plus the ongoing expertise necessary for continued achievement. As the industry originals, we have helped more than one million candidates prepare for the CPA Exam and continue to advance the industry through our relationships and resources.

Learn more about Becker’s CPA Exam Review.

Check out more articles on the CPA Exam on Going Concern.

The post Continuous Testing Is Here. Here’s Everything You Need to Know You Didn’t Think to Ask appeared first on Going Concern.

Because who couldn’t use a little professional education these days? 

The topic of the webinar is “The Future of Financial Forecasting and Planning,” which is timely not only because of the uncertainty businesses everywhere are facing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic but also because businesses of all sizes still have not embraced the technologies that keep all the important data they need to plan for the future in one place.

When you look for a pair of socks, wouldn’t you rather have all of your socks in one drawer instead of some in a drawer, some in a pile on your desk chair that you have to put on your bed because you have to sit in said desk chair to work, and some stashed in your kids’ closet? Yeah, one drawer. I don’t have a lot of time in the morning to go hunting for that one pair of Donkey Kong socks. And business leaders don’t have a lot of time to go hunting for data that they have stored in various formats, like spreadsheets and databases, to make the most accurate predictions.

Leading this webinar are our friends at Alteryx, who know a thing or two about data analytics, predictive modeling, and automation, and the folks over at PwC. 

Here’s everything you need to know about the Aug. 27 webinar straight from Alteryx:

Recent economic uncertainty and increased pressure to forecast cash flows puts additional demand on finance functions to meet requests of internal and external stakeholders. Performing multiple scenario analyses and developing/adopting contingency plans can lead to considerable effort and frustrations when time-sensitive tasks are attempted with spreadsheets or an IT dependent technology.

Additionally, the ability to manage and influence cash flows has been propelled to the top of the CFO’s agenda in supporting the optimization of working capital and the management of cash and liquidity. As a result, finance teams should have a solution that provides flexibility, automation, and control over large volumes of data and an ability to revise calculation models to meet changing fact patterns and new requests. This all leads to agile, in the moment, decision making to accelerate actions through real-time insights.

Join us for this financial forecasting webinar where you will hear from leaders at PwC and Alteryx on how to:

• Leverage data and analytics to provide greater insights in driving real-time decision making
• Develop complex models for high impact analysis across a wide range of use (e.g. legal entity forecasting, working capital and more)
• Drive automation efforts in FP&A and treasury functions through a digitally transformed workforce 

And the best part is the webinar is free, and the best-best part is those attending the webinar are eligible for 1 CPE credit.

This isn’t the first finance webinar that Alteryx and PwC have teamed up on. Two previous webinars can now be viewed on-demand:

• The Role of Finance In a Digital World
• Digital Transformation In the Tax Function

So now that you put the Aug. 27 webinar on your desk calendar, you can register for it here.

The post Learn How to Make Financial Forecasting as Easy as Finding Your Favorite Pair of Socks appeared first on Going Concern.

When you think about the great American inventors of the last few centuries, you probably think about the same ones as everyone else: the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison. Thanks to those guys, you don’t have to work in the dark and can swiftly get to the client site halfway across the country in a matter of hours. Yeah thanks for that, guys.

One profession is noticeably absent from any good list of American inventors who completely transformed the modern world. You know where I’m going with this. Spoiler: it’s accountants.

Other than the guy working as a cost accountant for a trading card company who invented the trademark pink bubblegum still enjoyed today, there haven’t been many accountants making names for themselves with groundbreaking inventions. Let’s be real here, it’s not exactly the most innovative of professions, no matter what firm press releases may say to that end.

That changes today. If the project is successful, that is.

We’d like to introduce you to Dave Lemke, public accounting grunt. The LemKey 10-key was born when Dave started his Big 4 job a few years back and realized very quickly that his firm-issued laptop was bullshit as far as 10-key functionality was concerned. So he whipped out some scratch paper and sketched out what he thought would be the ideal 10-key for his needs.

Lucky for him, he has a nerdy brother with a 3D printer, and before they knew it, the first — admittedly primitive — LemKey had been developed.

Before we get to that, there’s something you should know about Dave. He actually had aspirations to become a rockstar (who doesn’t), and had he stuck it out he could have been in one of the biggest bands of the last decade. Not kidding, there’s the evidence (he’s the bass player on the left):

Alas, he went down the Big 4 track instead which as we all know is far more prestigious than any band could be. At least we think that’s what he tells himself when he’s questioning his life choices.

So back to his office. Before long, his colleagues were hanging around his desk demanding to know where he got that amazing 10-key from and wanting their own. Anyone who ever messed around with a LEGO Technic set in elementary school can tell you putting working parts together is a pain, which is what Dave and his brother John learned right around making the 10th early LemKey for Dave’s office. “Fuck this,” they said. OK they didn’t actually say that. But they did realize A) there was obviously a need for this thing that wasn’t currently being met by the market, and B) they needed scale to meet that need.

So they’re here now with a Kickstarter in hopes of meeting a $10,000 goal to bring LemKey to the number-crunching masses. Taking a look at the features you’ll see it’s built for grinding spreadsheets just like you:

• Dollar sign, percent sign, and comma – the foundation of any good number
• Equal sign – for starting formulae (yeah, we said it) or for using in IF statements
• F2 and ESC – for editing cells and toggling the edit mode
• Alt key – combine with “=” to instantly Autosum a whole table, combine with Tab to switch apps, and of course the Quick Access toolbar
• Control key – to quickly move around tables, combine with PgUp / PgDn to switch tabs, or combine with Delete for faster editing in emails, combine with Tab to switch spreadsheets
• Calculator app launcher – be the fastest math whiz on that conference call, works with Windows, Apple / Mac, or even Linux (we got you, nerds)
• Backspace and delete – erase entire cell contents with a single click, easier email editing when combined with Control
  Enter and tab – handy for entering table-style data to a spreadsheet manually, and even more handy for tabbing through internet forms
• Page Up and Page Down – quickly scroll through spreadsheets, PDFs, and webpages, combine with Control to switch tabs in Excel or internet browsers
• F4 – quickly cycle through cell absolute references, combine with Alt to close an app, combine with Control to close a tab or document
• Section symbol (on Windows) – cite tax code like a boss and get the IRS off your back

Now, I’m no spreadsheet jockey but they sent me one to try out, and I have to say, it’s got a nice tactile feel that I’m sure you’ll enjoy during those long month-end close hours late at night when you’re hunched over in front of your two monitors asking yourself why you listened to the school guidance counselor who said you were good with numbers and would enjoy accounting as a profession. It withstood being sat on and dragged across my condo by the cord in at least two cats’ mouths so it’s durable and will probably appreciate being thrown in your laptop bag over getting accosted by cats. So there’s my review.

If they meet their goal, they’ll be able to start cranking these things out for everyone from AP clerks to firm partners who actually do work. They can even do custom-branded ones, as evidenced by the one they made for us. Hint hint campus recruiters, imagine being the talk of Meet the Firms with these in your recruits’ swag bags.

So go check out the Kickstarter, put that sweet public accounting salary to good use and get your hands on one of these bad boys. It’s not often something comes along that might just make your work life a tiny bit easier, not since Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented computerized spreadsheets anyway.

The first 200 backers get a LemKey of their own at 50% off retail, better get on that. And no, you can’t have mine.

The post This ‘Almost-Rockstar’-Developed 10-key Is the Best Thing to Happen to Accounting Since Microsoft Excel appeared first on Going Concern.

By that we mean surely not even the most prepared candidate in the country could have possibly seen this coming. A thorough study plan might allow for, say, a winter flu or a particularly heavy busy season workload. But global pandemic and total shutdown? Yeah, no one penciled that one in. Prometric closures early on in the pandemic threw a wrench in everyone’s plans, from the most well-prepared candidate to the procrastinator who figured they’d get around to the exam whenever.

But now that Prometric is almost back to normal — not to mention cleaner than it’s ever been — and exam slots are beginning to be easier to come by than paper towels were in late March, it’s time to move on as best we can and start making plans. Not so easy to do when you have no idea what the next year might look like, which is all the more reason to buckle down and get it over with.

That said, there are a few “certains” on the horizon that we already know are coming in the form of CPA exam changes. Starting in October, you can expect to see CARES Act material tested in REG. Given it’s literally in the name (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act), you can probably figure out what that covers. And there are changes to AUD on the horizon that add task-based simulations on data analytics using Excel to sort and filter data.

These changes are enough reason to get the exam over with before you have to worry about them, but if you find yourself still dragging your feet, keep in mind that NASBA recently announced the CPA Evolution project is moving forward, which means a huge change to the exam in 2024. So there’s that.

Need one more reason to knock out the exam? Credentialed accounting and finance professionals make 5% to 15% more than their uncredentialed counterparts. Even in a less-than-certain job market there’s no denying that the CPA can open doors and give you a leg up on the competition, so remind yourself of that next time you struggle to find the motivation to get this thing over and done.

So how exactly does one tackle the CPA exam in six months? Not gonna lie, it will take a bit more planning than the meandering, get-around-to-it-when-you-get-a-chance route some candidates take. (What, you thought this was going to be some CPA exam cheat code? Yeah sorry, no.) Even without the uncertainties of coronavirus in play, the benefit is obvious: you get the thing over with. And is there any better benefit than that?

Thanks to new continuous testing — which launched July 1 — you can retake a failed section as soon as you find out you didn’t pass, whereas under the old score release timeline you had to wait for the next testing window to retake a section. More flexibility in scheduling is good, but the six-month plan means you should prepare for and schedule each subsequent test assuming you passed the last. To better understand what that means, scroll down for a sample schedule from Gleim that lays out how to plan your exam sections under this model. If that sounds a bit confusing written down, here’s a sample schedule Gleim put together to show you how to schedule each section. If you remember, Gleim previously recommended taking FAR first; however, given the upcoming changes outlined above, they’ve switched up their recommendation so candidates can get REG and AUD out of the way before significant new content hits.

As you can see in the sample schedule above, this still allows for a retake. Let’s go with the schedule the way it’s listed and say you take REG on September 4¹. Your target score release date is September 16, so assuming the score release gods are smiling down upon you, you receive your score on or before that day but DARN, got a 74. It happens. What should you do?

If you answered “stop everything, throw things at your computer and meticulously review REG in order to retest,” sorry but that’s incorrect. Under the six-month study plan, you would have already started studying your next section (AUD, in the case of our handy-dandy example here) and would continue to forge ahead on that next section. BUT, because you now have the luxury to schedule a REG retake right away, you should review the score report provided to you by the AICPA after a failed exam, review the areas in which you are weak, and schedule your retake for October while continuing to study for AUD.

The key to making this plan work is not sitting around and waiting for your scores to arrive before you move on. This may feel strange as most candidates — your colleagues, classmates, and probably even you — are used to the soon-to-be antiquated tradition of waiting for your scores and then having to schedule around blackout windows should you need a retake. With these scheduling barricades effectively smashed to bits, you’re now empowered to keep pushing forward, but doing so requires sticking to your plan as best you can.

Maybe this sounds a little aggressive. Maybe you’re interested in the concept but don’t think you could possibly make a six-month study plan work with your limited available free-time. May we interest you in a 12-month study plan instead?

You see the concept is the same. It just allows a bit more time between sections. Whether you choose six or 12 months, the idea here is to use your schedule as motivation to keep going as planned, even if you fail a section. In other words, a failed section doesn’t mean your plans go out the window. With the above examples and with a little help from continuous testing, you already have allowed for a failed section just in case. Now that you have your exam dates penciled in, you can visit the Gleim Study Plan blog for a detailed study plan and more guidance on what to do next. We also suggest you check out this exam guide to learn more study tips and guidance on the exam process.

It goes without saying that a study plan like this might mean you need a little extra support. It’s not a bad idea to connect with other exam candidates, be it on forums or even through study groups (on Zoom for now, probably). If you need more support, keep in mind that Gleim has a team of Personal Counselors that will keep you on track with your study plan and cheer you on. Who doesn’t need their own cheerleader every now and then? Head over to Gleim’s website to check out all of the Gleim Premium Review System’s features, including access to your own personal coach!

Look, we don’t need to give you the big speech on tough times and all that. But when so many things are up in the air right now, wouldn’t it be nice to have a plan you can stick to? Plus, studying for the CPA exam makes a great excuse when your friends start asking why you haven’t Konmaried your entire house during quarantine like seemingly everyone else has.

Studying can feel overwhelming, especially now. But it doesn’t have to! We at Gleim are here for you. Our courses support you from start to finish and take away all the guesswork so that studying at home doesn’t feel like studying alone. Our SmartAdapt course will guide you through the topics you need to master and tell you when you’re ready to sit for the CPA exam. We deliver complete coverage of exam content through easy-to-understand outlines, plus on-demand, closed-captioned videos when you need a professor to teach you the concepts (or you just want to see someone else’s face). Best of all, our Personal Counselors are here to provide one-on-one assistance and would be thrilled to receive your call or email!

When it’s time to test your exam readiness, our mock exams are closer to the real exam than any other you will find. Demo REG for free today and make the most of your time at home by joining the millions who have passed with Gleim!

The post Here’s Your No-Nonsense Plan to Knock Out the CPA Exam in Six Months appeared first on Going Concern.

While the majority of the data collected from the survey pertains to flexible and remote work programs within accounting and consulting firms, this year ConvergenceCoaching has added questions to learn more about firms’ recent remote work shifts and what they project for remote and flexible work and service as they re-open their offices. This includes questions that refer to your practice before COVID-19, and others that ask you to imagine what might be different in the future based on your experiences during the pandemic.

ConvergenceCoaching is committed to helping firms succeed through the adoption of remote and flexible work. Part of their commitment is to study the accounting profession’s remote and flex progression, hence the reason why this survey was created.

The data from this survey will be summarized and used to identify trends that will be published in various publications and educational presentations. When you share your contact information, you will receive a copy of the survey results and could be contacted to clarify answers. ConvergenceCoaching will not disclose anything specific related to your firm’s participation in the survey without your explicit permission.

[Ed. note: This survey should be completed by accounting and consulting firms only and only one response per firm. Please respond only if you own or work within an accounting firm and coordinate between your managing partner, firm administrator/firm manager/COO, and HR professional to avoid duplicate submissions.]

The post How’s Your Remote Plan Going? What Worked and What Didn’t? It’s Time to Move Forward appeared first on Going Concern.

(By “dreams,” we’re speaking figuratively—we’re not talking about your recurring nightmare where your calculator chases you around a maze until you find a power pellet, which allows you to turn around and eat the calculator. You should probably see someone about that, BTW.)

Thankfully, there’s a new class of analytics platforms with digital transformation as their endgame that do a lot of that work for you, putting more time back in your day to do high-value tasks that move your firm forward and get you noticed.

The solution is called analytic process automation (APA), and it marks the convergence of analytics, data science, and process automation.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some benefits of APA and show how they can ultimately have a positive impact on your career. Fair warning—when you finish this article, you’re really going to want to make sure your organization has APA. And, unfortunately, you can’t just pop into the digital app store of your choice and grab it for 99 cents (or free with ads).

So we strongly encourage you to share this article with your boss, or whomever makes software purchasing decisions at your firm. Tell them Going Concern sent you. It won’t help, but we’ll take any cheap plug we can get. 

(If your bosses aren’t big readers, just send them the link to this video that quickly explains APA.)

And while the bigwigs are being wowed by all the oohs and ahhs of APA, it’s never too early to start evangelizing the benefits of automated analytics to your fellow analysts and co-workers. There’s power in numbers—but we don’t have to tell you that. If you need help, use an Alteryx starter kit to get the rest of your team on board.

Start the day off right with accounting and financial insights

Many accounting and finance professionals start their workday off with a hearty breakfast (and sometimes lunch, and sometimes dinner) of searching for, putting together, and attempting to understand data. 

This is bad because, according to a stat we just made up, data is high in cholesterol and sodium, and is responsible for 48% of all paper cuts suffered in North America.

It’s also bad because, by the time you’ve got the insights you need to actually do the thing you were trying to do, you’ve received three more requests from various departments to perform additional tasks. And that means the next day is going to start the same way, with the ultimate result being either: a) you’ll miss every episode of Conan this week and still turn everything in late, or b) you’ll be calling your recruiter so often, you’ll need to put her on your family cellphone plan. 

APA simplifies analytics and data science, using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced technologies to allow accountants and finance professionals to start their days with the insights they need. It also enables you to more easily use data to forecast the future, rather than just report historical trends. 

With APA, you can quickly and easily retrieve actionable answers to the questions you now have to dig through data to find. And, often, the answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask will be there waiting for you when you need them, allowing you to jump straight into work that helps your firm increase revenue, reduce costs, and find opportunities for growth.

Alteryx—the pioneer of APA—offers an all-in-one platform that makes accessing these insights easy for everyone, democratizing analytics through simple interfaces that don’t require coding or developing algorithms.

Get faster, more accurate accounting and finance results through process automation

There is only one catch, and that is Catch-GC. (Short for “Going Concern.” And that’s cheap plug No. 2.)

Catch-GC is defined as follows:

• To be successful, accounting and finance professionals must complete their work quickly, which is sure to lead to errors.
• To be successful, accounting and finance professionals must complete their work without errors, which is sure to be slow.
• If the first two sound unfairly contradictory, that’s because they are.

Thankfully, the Alteryx APA platform optimizes and automates processes in ways that can finally solve Catch-GC, helping you perform tasks quickly AND with a low risk of errors. Alteryx APA creates a single, end-to-end flow of data between departments and teams, avoiding the stopgaps and errors associated with manual handoff. And it enables full transparency and traceability, so any errors that are made can be spotted and corrected long before they result in negative business impacts.

Many organizations are already realizing big gains in accounting and finance through the Alteryx APA platform:

• Siemens can now process 50 million rows of financial data in mere minutes.
• Chick-fil-A reduced time spent processing tax data for 1099-Ks from 10 hours to 10 seconds.
• Western Union can now derive essential customer insights from its financial data in hours instead of weeks.

Quickly and organically develop skills that today’s accounting and finance pros need

Here’s the worst kept secret in the business world: Employees hate (and, therefore, don’t get much out of) forced training.

Accounting and finance professionals are no exception. Sure, there may be the occasional program you get genuinely excited about. But, most of the time, your top priority is to get through the training as quickly as possible, so you can go back to doing your job. (“Actually learning something” is much further down the list, underneath “Remembering to DVR Judge Judy” and “Trying not to aggravate your carpal tunnel by clicking through the modules too quickly.”)

Using the Alteryx APA platform allows you to develop essential data and analytics skills naturally—no struggling to stay awake through training videos hosted by z-list actors required. If you are already familiar with using spreadsheets to do things like input data, this will be a breeze for you. 

Experience is the best teacher (besides Mr. Feeny), and Alteryx makes gaining that experience fast and easy. As you click through its intuitive interfaces, you’ll start to understand analytics on a deeper level than mandatory training programs can provide. 

Fueled by the thrill of solving problems quickly, you’ll discover tricks, shortcuts, and tips that you’ll want to share with co-workers. In turn, they’ll be sharing their own advice with you. Before long, pervasive learning will organically spread throughout your team and across your organization. You’ll depend less on IT and data specialists, and—often without realizing it—upskill yourself to find and use the insights you need to be more productive and effective at your job.

One of the Big 4 firms (we can’t tell you which one, but we’re betting there’s a 25% chance you can guess it) successfully upskilled 50,000 people using Alteryx APA—across accounting, finance, tax, audit, HR, and client service delivery.

Spread the word and get Alteryx APA at your firm

We warned you. You’ve made it to the end of the article, and now all you can think is, “How do I get me some of that sweet, sweet Alteryx APA?!” And with the ability to start your day with essential insights, automate processes so you can work faster and with fewer errors, and easily learn skills that can advance your career, no one can blame you.

You can get the ball rolling by sharing this article with your bosses, or by sending them a link to this video and/or this white paper that explains Alteryx APA in more depth. And for those raring to get their hands on automated analytics with the skills they already have, you can hook them up with a starter kit. 

Be sure to tell them that Alteryx APA delivers big ROI across top-line growth, bottom-line returns, efficiency gains, and perpetual upskilling of their workforce. And that thousands of companies globally use Alteryx APA to drive human-centered digital transformation.

If all else fails, just be frank. Let your bosses know that Alteryx APA is the ultimate solution for getting your head out of the data and enabling you to perform your job more effectively. (And you know it’s true because you read it on Going Concern. Cheap plug No. 3 achieved!)

Watch the video >

Get the white paper > 

The post Get Your Mind Out of the Data with Modern Analytics (So Your Accounting or Finance Career Can Take Off) appeared first on Going Concern.

But it’s not like you can just spend a summer at Camp Data and learn everything you need in a few months—while sharing spooky campfire tales about the spreadsheet with the hook for a hand.

(Side note: It’s not quite summer camp, but if you’re a new graduate or recently lost your job, you can apply for free access to data science and analytics training courses through the Advancing Data & Analytics Potential Together (ADAPT) program. S’mores not included.)

Becoming data-fluent will require you to shift the way you think about data, allowing you to have a bigger picture view of your work and its effect on the business. Then you’ll take your coveted spreadsheet skills and expand on them to learn modern analytics.

We searched high and low (mostly high, because it was “the floor is lava” day at the office) to find the most important data and analytics skills for accounting and finance professionals. Here’s our list—along with some advice on how to jumpstart your skill-building journey.

Build predictive model forecasting skills

Predictive analytics means taking historical data and analyzing it with algorithms or tools to make educated guesses about future events.

It’s not hard to see how this would be useful in the accounting and finance function, particularly when it comes to forecasts. The ability to accurately predict the outcomes of horse races and sporting events transformed Biff Tannen from a car-washin’, tracksuit-wearin’ loser into a casino-runnin’, hot tub-soakin’ fat cat who owned half of Hill Valley (it also turned him into a murderer, but let’s ignore that part for now). 

Unfortunately, most of us can’t rely on a future version of ourselves traveling back in time to give us a sports almanac that helps us cheat our way to fame and fortune. We have to make do with building and using forecasting models that can intelligently predict future market behavior.

And if you’re thinking your fond memories of model airplane club are going to help, you’re in for quite the shock. Depending on what you’re trying to predict, the method for creating your forecasting model will vary, but the process can generally be divided into three steps:

(WARNING: We’re about to get super technical here. If you start to get lost, feel free to skip to the next section. We promise not to tell.)

1. Transform “seasonal” data into “stationary” data. This essentially means removing any time elements that affect your data. For example, if you’re running a car dealership and your sales spike during the annual President’s Day sale (because buying a car is the best way to celebrate freedom, apparently), you might need to strip out that fluctuation in order to achieve stationary data. This step sometimes involves the use of linear regression.

2. Build a time-series model. This means first selecting the appropriate “base model” (options of which include the naive model, the moving average model, and the exponential smoothing model, which sounds like a list of people who routinely swipe left on our dating profiles). From there, you’ll probably need to implement an ARIMA model, which is an acronym for a bunch of words that we don’t understand, but hey, that’s why we’re giving you links.

3. Experiment with different models and determine which one is the most accurate. You’ll actually need to perform Step 2 multiple times, which will leave you holding several different time-series models. So the final step is to figure out which one of them works best and then put it into play. Perhaps the fastest and easiest way to do this is by calculating mean absolute percent error (MAPE), which you may actually remember from your college statistics courses. That six-figure tuition debt you racked up is now totally worth it.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds way too complicated and outside of my skill set,” then congrats, you’re reading the right article. No one said this stuff was easy—but it is way easier than you think and there’s training and technology available to help you come out on top.

Our friends at Alteryx can give you a huge assist, providing all kinds of educational resources and training courses. The Alteryx Designer Knowledgebase offers articles on forecasting models and many other topics, and experts regularly post informative blogs in the Alteryx Community that can be a great help.

Perform advanced revenue analytics

Accounting and finance professionals are using data and analytics tools to look at revenue in new ways—helping to create innovative strategies for increasing cash flow that both make the business stronger and increase their individual importance within the organization.

“Advanced revenue analytics” is a broad category that may encompass many different algorithms, models, and tools—so it’s pretty much impossible to explain “how to do it” within the confines of this article. (We might be able to explain it if we wrote a whole book on the topic, but we’re way too busy with our wildly unpopular fanfiction series about “What If Spider-Man Married Black Cat Instead of Mary Jane” to have time for that.)

What we can do here is show you some areas where advanced revenue analytics are currently being applied. From there, you can work backward to learn how to use analytics to perform each of these three tasks—or whatever revenue-related metric or forecast you want to create.

1. Smarter geographical pricing. If you work at a larger company that spans multiple regions or countries, you may have experienced the difficulties of setting appropriate prices in relation to geography. Advanced revenue analytics can help solve that problem, allowing you to dynamically adjust prices for different locations based on a wide variety of factors—and do so with minimal risk to profitability.

2. Data-driven promotions. It’s a given fact that promotions and marketing have the power to increase revenue. But, for most of human history, measuring the direct impact of a specific promotion or campaign has been the equivalent of playing “Guess Who?” blindfolded—you can’t be sure if you’re winning, and even if you are, you have no clue how you’re doing it. Advanced revenue analytics can bring more clarity to promotion and marketing metrics, allowing the business to examine the effect of certain strategies from a wide variety of angles—and then optimize campaigns accordingly.

3. Optimizing physical and digital shelf-space. Putting your best-selling products and services front and center is common sense in the business world, whether that means a supermarket giving Cap’n Crunch the most shelf space (even though Cinnamon Toast Crunch is so obviously superior) or a nerdy news site putting all the Star Wars articles above-the-fold. It’s often considered too dangerous to put newer or less-popular items in these coveted spaces—but advanced revenue analytics changes the equation. Using certain tools and algorithms, your organization can move its physical and digital products around and create small-scale tests to measure the change in revenue with little risk—or it can even go zero risk by running these tests in simulated environments.

Alteryx again offers many great resources on this and other related topics, helping you master a variety of advanced revenue analytics skills through training courses and content like this slide share on accelerating revenue growth.

(Extra credit) Learn basic SQL programming

Take a deep breath—you don’t need to learn code to use modern analytics. Today’s tools automate the gathering, prepping, blending, analyzing, and auditing of data for you, transforming what would’ve been hours and hours of coding work (not to mention hours of clumsy data manipulation using spreadsheets) into just a few clicks.

So we’re not suggesting that you join five poorly-groomed dudes to ignite a billion-dollar compression algorithm war in Silicon Valley. But picking up a basic understanding of SQL—the most popular language used to connect and facilitate communication between databases—will help you understand data better and do wonders for your career.

There are about a gazillion resources out there that can teach you basic SQL programming, so we won’t insult your Googling abilities by providing any links. But while you’re out there, can you do us a favor and figure out if most people pronounce it “es-cue-el” or “sequel?” We’re still working on our official stance, and we want to get to the point where we can be all militant and scornful about it like we are with GIF. (We won’t reveal our opinion outright, but know not to expect any Christmas jifts from us anytime soon.)

Taking the next step

Predictive model forecasting, advanced revenue analytics, and making the shift from spreadsheets to analytics workflows will put you way ahead of your accounting and finance peers—but in case that’s not enough homework for you, here are a few other skills you might want to look into:

• Cost optimization
• Real-time model development
• Data visualization

Throughout this article, we’ve talked about how Alteryx can help you build these skills and advance your career. But the best way to really get your data and analytics motor running is to encourage your organization to start using the Alteryx platform.

The Alteryx platform delivers end-to-end automation of analytics, machine learning, and data science processes, allowing you to learn data and analytics skills faster and then do more with your newfound abilities than you ever would’ve thought possible.

Be sure to take advantage of Alteryx’s full library of resources and apply for free access to training courses and more through the ADAPT program. To learn even more about how Alteryx can make your job easier and help you use data and analytics to take your career to the next level, check out these two webinars:

Webinar: Reshaping Demand Forecasts for the New Normal >

Webinar: Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) Automation >

The post What Data and Analytics Skills Do You Need to Advance Your Accounting or Finance Career? appeared first on Going Concern.

The Big 4 and the top midtier firms paint a rosy picture of how wonderful they treat their thousands of employees and how much they really care about making sure “their people” have lives outside of work—and doing so with a straight face—while at Meet the Firms events or talking with college students who don’t know any better during recruiting visits on campus.

The biggest firms will hire recruits who fall for their schtick, and before they know it, these poor souls are busting their butts for 75 to 80 hours a week—and it’s not even busy season. No wonder CPAs in public accounting can’t wait to make the jump to industry.

But when Cover & Rossiter, a 37-person CPA firm based in Wilmington, DE, touts its work/life balance and flexibility, we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. Here’s why:

37.5-hour workweek

Being located close to the glitz and glamour of large metropolises like Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, and Washington, DC, the folks at Cover & Rossiter realize that someone fresh out of college will probably find living and working in these big cities more attractive than living and working in Wilmington. That’s when Cover & Rossiter has to go in hard to sell that new accounting graduate on the soft benefits it offers that larger firms overlook.

“If you’re looking for that Big 4 experience or that big city experience, we don’t have it. And that’s OK to want that. Firms in these big cities are going to pay a lot more; however, the cost of living is going to be much higher, too,” said Lindsay Wheeler, marketing specialist and recruiter at Cover & Rossiter. “But someone who wants a small firm and values work/life balance, we’re going to be a great fit. I think there are plenty of candidates out there who want one or the other and there’s enough to go around.” 

What Cover & Rossiter can offer that those bigger firms don’t is a 37.5-hour workweek instead of a 40-hour workweek. Yep, you read that right: 37.5. And the firm pays overtime.

An employee doesn’t have to get to 40 hours a week to start earning OT, according to Wheeler. OT starts right at that 37.5-hour threshold. Cover & Rossiter caps OT at 55 hours a week, although there can be exceptions, such as meeting a difficult deadline, when an employee can work more than 55 hours and still get that sweet extra OT, but then that person has to dial back his or her hours the following week.

“Even if they have to work longer-than-usual hours, they’re not working obscene hours,” Wheeler said. “It really just helps manage burnout and still gives people the opportunity to do what they like to do in their free time. It could be just sitting in front of the TV, but they’re getting that time they need outside of the office, they’re well-rested, and they’re happier. They’re going to do better work because they’re not going to be so tired that they’re making mistakes. They’re going to be more willing to work for the company and do right by our clients. So it’s kind of the recipe that we’ve found works well for us, for our people, for our clients, and for everyone involved.” 

Start work early a.m. or late a.m.

Wheeler has two young children, so she’s up fairly early every morning, but by the time she finishes the “two hours of kids stuff and house stuff that I have to do,” she doesn’t get to the office or log in to work while working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic until 8:30 or 8:45 a.m. On the other hand, Luci Roseman, CPA, a manager in the firm’s Tax Department, starts work at 7 a.m. each day so she can cut out by mid-afternoon. That’s the beauty of working for Cover & Rossiter.

“You can flex an hour and a half off of 8:30 a.m., so you can start as early as 7 a.m. or as late as 10 a.m.,” said Wheeler, who has worked at the firm for more than 10 years. “So if Luci wanted to get her overtime hours in and started work at 6 a.m., that’s fine, as long as she’s in that 7-3:30 range for her time.”

As one of two tax managers at Cover & Rossiter, that flexibility allows Roseman to get some work done earlier in the morning, then have her daily meeting (or call during the pandemic) with the two people who report to her to see what they’re working on, before leaving the office once her workday is done to enjoy her interests outside of the office, such as horseback riding.

“Every morning we go over what their plans are for the day and if they have any issues that I can help them through,” said Roseman, who has worked at Cover & Rossiter for over nine years. “And then at the end of the day, they give me an update on how they did, so I think that’s been really helpful with keeping people productive and not making them feel like they’re all alone at home with no one they can turn to for help.”  

Now hiring

Hey, guess what? Cover & Rossiter currently has a few job openings, including two in its Audit Department. 

There are two facets of the firm’s audit group: captive insurance and nonprofit. Wheeler said finding a potential candidate with captive insurance experience is pretty rare, and if that person all of a sudden were to fall in their lap, “it would be like angels coming down from the heavens.” 

But not having captive insurance experience isn’t a dealbreaker, she said. “We can teach the industry.”

Nonprofit audits are what is traditionally done at Cover & Rossiter as the firm doesn’t currently have any corporate audit clients, so potential candidates with nonprofit audit experience will have a leg up on the competition. But like with captive insurance, nonprofit auditing can be taught to people who don’t have that background on their resumes.

“If they can do the auditing, we can teach nonprofit,” Wheeler said. 

So if you’re looking to join a small firm that has a relaxed culture, likes to have fun, has room to grow, and doesn’t just pay lip service to work/life balance and flexibility, like the Big 4 and the top midtier firms, why not send a resume Cover & Rossiter’s way?

Here are the two audit jobs the firm is looking to fill:

• Audit Supervisor/Manager
• Audit Senior Accountant

You can find other job openings by visiting Cover & Rossiter’s Careers page.

The post When This Accounting Firm Touts Its Work/Life Balance, You Should Listen appeared first on Going Concern.

All of these things were true at the end of 2019, and that was less than half a year ago. So why does it feel like another lifetime?

The events of the last few months have put us in a kind of time dilation bubble, where massive, transformative changes occur on a seemingly daily basis. As millions of us sheltered in place and social distanced, it felt like the world was on hold (a feeling compounded by the countless hours we spent actually on hold, gaining a growing but begrudging respect for the music of Kenny G.) 

Meanwhile, businesses scrambled to give us the tools we needed to continue to work, play, and not drive each other completely insane while at home. Many of these solutions had been in the works for years, but the time bubble drastically accelerated their development, rollout, and use. 

We’re now living in a world with many technologies that weren’t predicted to be available or prevalent until 2025.

We won’t pretend we’re smart enough to understand the full scope of this technology time warp nor its impact on accounting and finance. We’ll leave that to future scholars and the countless books they’re sure to write about this phenomenon, at least two of which are sure to be adapted into bad-but-somehow-irresistible Tom Cruise movies. 

But we are smart enough to look around the accounting and finance world and observe how some things are a lot different than we ever could have predicted at the start of 2020. Things like …

We got more done by not going to work

In a recent Gartner survey, 74% of CFOs said they planned to shift at least 5% of their employees to permanent remote work positions. Nearly 25% of them said they’d transition at least one out of five workers to full-time remote. 

So there’s a good chance your Spider-Man pajamas could become your official work uniform (just don’t wear the mask while you’re on video calls). But, if that happens, there’s an even better chance that you’ll be just as effective at your job, if not more. A recent study showed that overall U.S. worker productivity has gone up by 47% in 2020 compared to 2019. 

Within the finance function specifically, 90% of CFOs in the Gartner survey said they expected the increase in remote work to cause “minimal disruptions to their accounting close process, with almost all activities able to be executed off-site.” 

These stats certainly don’t “close the books” (see what we did there?) on the in-office/remote work productivity debate—an oft-cited study from 2012 showed that workers are more productive performing “dull” tasks in the office and “creative” tasks at home. But these numbers do, at the very least, help to dispel the terribly outdated “while the cat’s away” theory of work. 

It turns out, accountants and finance professionals are not children. You guys might eat ice cream for dinner, make some prank phone calls, and learn some naughty words staying up past your bedtime to watch Kimmel, but you don’t need a babysitter when it comes to doing your job. Whether you’re in your PJs and trading your favorite “Savage Challenge” videos with co-workers between tasks or in full suit-and-tie at the office, the math still comes out the same. 

We made smarter use of our data

For accounting and finance professionals, having fast access to the right data has always been critical. And, as the world has changed and grown more complex, it’s become even more essential for employers to provide you with tools that allow you to easily get the information you need when you need it (and the ability to write off your WoW subscription as a business expense).

So it’s no wonder that—even as overall IT budgets are shrinking—investments in analytics technologies are stable or going up. 

A pre-COVID IDC study revealed that advanced spreadsheet users spent 26 hours per week working in spreadsheets and wasted eight hours a week repeating the same data tasks. No wonder you guys drink so much Red Bull. 

While we don’t yet know the full effect of the time bubble and increased spending on analytics solutions, we do know that a new class of technology solutions is putting valuable insights at your fingertips while automating tedious data tasks. According to one report, using modern analytics allows you to complete financial forecasts 74% sooner, make decisions 25% faster, and improve financial report accuracy by 16%.

That’s a lot of time put back in your day. And time, as they say, is money—money you can spend on the things that really matter, like pre-ordering The Last of Us Part II. So, in a way, if your employers are using modern analytics solutions from companies like Alteryx, they are paying for your video game habits. (But you should try to expense them anyway and see how it goes.)

“Free” stopped being a four-letter word

Remember when encyclopedia sets cost $1,000? No? Man, you guys make us feel old.

For the first 50,000 years of human history (give or take), information and education were expensive products that only the wealthy elite could afford, akin to the contemporary trend of eating gold for no reason. In the U.S., the first free public school system and free public high school didn’t exist until 1837, and the federal Department of Education wasn’t founded until 1867. 

We still place a premium on education, demonstrated by the rising costs of college tuition (and, for those of us who study international relations by watching 90 Day Fiancé, by the rising costs of cable TV). 

But we’ve come a very long way. Today, if you can afford a high-speed internet connection or a local internet cafe, you can access a virtually unlimited and ever-expanding stack of information. And as ad- and user-supported sites like YouTube and Wikipedia have become more prevalent, the economic barriers to information have further deteriorated.

This was a trend we always expected would continue—but, again, the time bubble sped it up substantially, as a seemingly endless stream of paid services were put on discount or given away for free. 

Among the list of things that are now free:

• Library of kids’ shows from Amazon Video;
• Online streaming of select Broadway musicals;
• Tech support from Support.com;
• Social media marketing through Hootsuite;
• Daily virtual workout sessions from Planet Fitness;
• The Kahoot! virtual learning platform (free to schools until they reopen); and
• 450 courses from Ivy League schools.

Not to mention, Alteryx provided us with a bunch of those sweet, sweet data and analytics services for free or at discounted rates.

Training and skill-building became more essential (and more available)

With so many employees now working from home, businesses are looking harder at training programs to ensure their workers’ skills stay fresh—and companies that provide those services are responding by giving many of them away for free.

For example, through the Advancing Data & Analytics Potential Together (ADAPT) program, new graduates and unemployed data workers can get access to free data science and analytics learning courses, an Alteryx Designer license, a community of thousands of Alteryx users, and 1:1 virtual support from Alteryx associates.

Alteryx also offers webinars, ebooks, starter kits, and a wide variety of other resources that will help you learn to make smarter use of your data. Through the Alteryx Academy, you can participate in live, self-paced, predictive, classroom, and certification training courses. 

What will 2021 look like for accounting and financial professionals?

With so many uncertainties and the rapid pace of change, it’s hard to make any realistic long-term predictions about the future of accounting and finance. (Doc Brown, Professor Farnsworth, and Miss Cleo were all unavailable for comment.)

All we can say is that certain trends are probably going to continue—so imagine there’s a “more than likely” in front of all the following predictions (because we’re too lazy to type it over and over): 

• Companies will keep investing in cloud-based accounting and online client portals.
• More processes will become automated, allowing you to focus on higher-value work.
• Data and analytics skills will become increasingly valuable and sought-after.

To that last point, you might be wondering: What specific data and analytics skills do I need in order to stay relevant and competitive? That’s probably a topic for another article. In brief, however, businesses are looking for accounting and finance professionals with skills in:

• Predictive model forecasting
• Advanced revenue analytics
• Cost optimization
• SQL programming
• Real-time model development
• Data visualization

But don’t wait until 2021 or the next time warp scenario. Improving your data and analytics abilities can give your career a boost right now. Start working with companies like Alteryx, and build the skills you’ll need to stay relevant and competitive in the job market today. 

To learn more, register for The Role of Finance in the Digital World, a digital event sponsored by Alteryx and PwC. And check out the links below.

Access data and analytics resources >

Apply for free training through the ADAPT program >

The post How COVID-19 Warped Us Five Years Into the Future—And What That Means for Your Accounting or Finance Career appeared first on Going Concern.

We were hoping to ask Spreadsheets what really gets their wheel of death going—specifically, data management and analytics for tax, audit, office of finance, and accounting. But, just when it appeared that this dream had gone to the place where dreams go to die (aka the GC comments section), serendipity struck.

One of our writers was perusing a Saturday morning garage sale, when there they were. Hiding in the corner behind a dusty VCR and a heavily-bearded Jonathan Taylor Thomas, sorting through a bin of slap bracelets and fanny packs, there stood the ultimate obsolete relic of the 1990s: Spreadsheets, discovered at last.

(By the dubs, if you’ve got friends who are stuck in the past with retro analytics, you can earn enough cash to buy a portable CD player WITH skip protection by referring them to a modern platform.)

It took a good deal of cajoling, but our writer eventually convinced Spreadsheets to agree to an interview. (We won’t go into the entire sordid tale, but it involved a lot of complex formulas, a lengthy conversation with an animated paper clip, and a sizable donation to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.) What follows is the complete, unedited transcript of that conversation.

Can spreadsheets keep up with the modern business world?

Going Concern: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Spreadsheets. We think it will mean a lot to our readers. But why has it taken you so long to come forward?

Spreadsheets: =SUM(declining employment+shame+was stuck on a floppy disk for 18 years).

GC: That’s hilarious, but please talk normally from now on. Our writers aren’t clever enough to keep that gimmick going for an entire article. 

S: =FINE. Er, sorry. Fine.

GC: Appreciate it. So let’s start with the big question and the main reason we’re here. Why does it take 10 or more clicks for tax, audit, office of finance, and accounting professionals to manage their data or get useful analytics out of you?

S: Where’d you hear that?

GC: The internet. The alley behind a high school gym. In the audience of a pro wrestling match. Pretty much everywhere.

S: <Sighs.> We suppose the larger problem really breaks down into five key issues. We’ll recite them for you, but when you publish this interview, would you mind putting them into a numbered list? That will make them easier to read and should improve SEO.

GC: Um, sure.

S: Oh, and separate it with a catchy subhead, something like …

Five reasons spreadsheets don’t get along with accounting and finance data

1. We don’t like blending different data types or data from multiple sources. We’re not the Dalai Lama—how do you expect us to keep the peace between data from Access, SQL, the cloud, social media, and other spreadsheets?

2. We can’t even get along with each other. If you’re trying to juggle cross-updating spreadsheets and tabs within spreadsheets linked by VLOOKUPs and other functions, you probably won’t like the results. But a #NAME? or two never hurt anyone, right?

3. We like our data “dirty.” When you bring us data that’s fraught with errors or is incomplete, we like to keep it that way. You can try to cleanse, restructure, and reformat the data all you want—but we’re not gonna make it easy on you.

4. We can only take so much automation. We like our capabilities like we like our sports cars—manual. We’re down for a little automation here and there, but only through a perfect macro or a bug-free Visual Basic script. And even then—much like with our classic car driving record—there’s gonna be a lot of crashes.

5. We don’t like making predictions. Every yoga retreat we’ve ever been told us to “stay in the present,” yet you guys keep asking us to deliver predictive insights. Make up your minds, people!

GC: Given all of that, does it surprise you that so many financial and accounting professionals are moving away from spreadsheets and embracing modern analytics platforms like Alteryx? 

S: It doesn’t surprise us, but it does hurt our feelings. We’re tried and mostly true, trusted and only a little bit busted! What do those solutions have that we don’t? Wait, that was a rhetorical question. Please don’t answer it. But if you really have to, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t call attention to it with another big, bold subhead, because that would be very …

What modern analytics platforms have that spreadsheets don’t

S: … rude. Ugh, nevermind. Go ahead, please—tell us what these tools have that we don’t. 

GC: For starters, modern analytics platforms are great at knocking down data silos. They make it much easier to build data sets—even if you’re working with different file formats, database connections, or cloud data stores. 

S: Um, silos are used to store grain. If you go knocking them all down with your fancy analytics machines, people won’t be able to eat. There’s a headline for your snarky little website, “Going Concern Promotes Silo Destruction; World Starves.” 

GC: Different kind of silo. And how’s this for snarky? Modern analytics platforms clean data quickly and, unlike spreadsheets, they do it with minimal risk to data integrity. In Alteryx, you can create new columns, remove rows and columns, and change data types with a single step—a step that applies instantly across your entire data set. 

S: Bah, instant this, instant that. Everyone’s in such a hurry these days! People should stop and smell the roses more.

GC: They might, if they weren’t so busy performing tedious, repetitive data tasks. Modern analytics platforms give you more time to smell whatever you want by letting you blend data however you’d like. And Alteryx tracks everything you do, making it easy to retrace your steps and undo anything, anytime.

S: Oh, because “undo” is such a new thing. It’s called Ctrl+Z. And, yes, it can undo ANYTHING, ANYTIME, too!

GC: Sure, if you realize you want to change something immediately. What if you want to change something you did five minutes ago—or five hours, or five weeks?

S: You just keep hammering Ctrl+Z until you get there!

GC: Great solution. Speaking of solutions, modern analytics platforms allow you to transform your data into insights and answers faster and in ways that reduce errors and risks. The Sort, Transpose, and Cross Tab Tools in Alteryx allow you to organize and pivot your data in many different directions automatically—so you can see the big picture quickly. No more pivot tables. 

S: We’ve been told we “can’t see the forest for the trees,” but have you ever looked at a tree? They’re very pretty.

GC: No argument here. There’s also no argument that writing and running formulas is much easier with a modern analytics platform. Using the Formula Tool in Alteryx, you can—with a single click—add a field to an input table or create or update data fields based on an expression or a data relationship.

S: Hey, we’ve been in a relationship with data longer than anyone!

GC: That explains a lot. Speaking of bad relationships …

S: Hey!

GC: … spreadsheets can summarize data with pivot tables, but the process is way too slow, and the results are often error-prone or limited in scope. Modern analytics platforms deliver multiple results and views automatically—allowing you to explore outliers, find patterns, and ask deeper questions as fast as you can think of them. 

Take your day back from spreadsheets with Alteryx

S: Fine. You win. We still have our uses, but in today’s world, data management and analytics are just too complex for us.

GC: Now you’re getting it. Spreadsheets will always have their place, but for repeatability, transparency, and drag-and-drop flexibility, a modern analytics platform is the only way to go. And for tax, audit, office of finance, and accounting professionals, there’s no better analytics platform than Alteryx. 

S: Oh, please tell us more.

GC: Gladly. With Alteryx, you can find profit-boosting insights faster, dig up answers to just about any question your co-workers or clients throw at you, and wow your bosses with deep, easy-to-digest visualizations.

Read the eBook, “A Radical Guide to Data Analytics Mastery,” and see how you can take back your day from tedious, repetitive data tasks now.

S: We’ll read it if you buy us a slap bracelet.

GC: Deal.

The post Exclusive Interview: Spreadsheets Reveal Why They’re Terrible at Tax, Audit, Finance, and Accounting Analytics appeared first on Going Concern.

You don’t need us to tell you things are rough out there. Roughly 38.6 million Americans are unemployed. Many Main Street businesses are still shuttered. Barflies have resorted to — gasp — grabbing cases of beer from the grocery store. And Lord knows it’s a terrible time to be a gym owner.

Despite unprecedented government intervention, business owners have still found themselves struggling to make payroll and in desperate need of guidance from their most trusted advisors. Who do business owners turn to in a crisis? Their drunk Uncle Pete who owned a moderately successful carpet-cleaning business in 1975? A sketchy strip mall psychic who will undoubtedly bill them to cleanse the curse upon their mortal soul? A Magic 8-Ball? Nah. Their CPA.

As much as we’re sure countless CPA firms would love to strap on their capes, fire up their best spreadsheets, and go forth into the world (at a six-foot distance, natch) to solve this crisis at zero cost, at the end of the day they have employees to pay, too. After all, accounting firms aren’t immune to economic downturns themselves. In just two short months, we’ve seen firms large and small across the U.S. and the world take all manner of cost-cutting measures, from furloughs to pay cuts, in reaction to economic uncertainty. Internships have gone virtual. Offers for new hires have been delayed. Everyone sort of puckered up at once like coronavirus shoved a handful of Warheads in the world’s mouth and no one could escape the consequences.

Short of telling clients they can pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, what are firms supposed to do when clients need them most but may not consider the services of their CPA to be an “essential” business service?

“Be business partners with them, know they’re struggling, and try to help them,” advises Jeremy Sperring, CFO and chief operating officer at Frazier & Deeter, a top 100 firm. Sometimes the answer is as simple as picking up the phone and asking clients “is there anything I can help with?” Keep the lines of communication open and make it known that your firm is there to guide them through these rough seas.

There’s another way to help, and it starts with your invoices. Twenty-five percent of the top 100 accounting firms in the U.S. are already using QuickFee PayNow and QuickFee PayLater to quickly and easily receive client payments, and though their reasons may be varied, now more than ever it makes sense to go paperless. One big reason: there’s likely no one at the office to collect paper checks. Thanks, Rona!

“The demand for contact-free payment options has skyrocketed and QuickFee provides three different online payment options,” says Andreas Diwing, senior director of marketing at QuickFee. “This, coupled with the fact that most offices are closed and there is no one that can or wants to go through the hassle of depositing a paper check, has led to QuickFee more than doubling processing volumes over the past six weeks.”

In March, the World Health Organization spokesperson told U.K. paper The Telegraph “people should use contactless technology where possible” to prevent the spread of COVID-19. So there’s one more reason to make the move toward digital payments if your firm hasn’t already.

Additionally, “Buy now, pay later” programs are becoming increasingly popular, as anyone who frequents retail stores or Amazon can tell you. What if clients could apply that same concept to much-needed professional services?

“People today expect options, and in retail, Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) providers like Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay that allow consumers to pay in installments are more popular than ever before. BNPL is the fastest-growing online payment method worldwide. QuickFee brought this same payment experience to the professional services industry.”

With QuickFee PayLater, your firm gets paid in full as soon as the next business day, while clients have the convenience of an affordable payment plan that allows them to pay over time. Win-win, right? I mean, at the end of the day if you do work for free, it’s not client work, it’s charity.

No one wants to have the awkward “hey, you got my money yet?” conversation with clients. You’re running an accounting firm, not an interest-free bank. By offering digital — and, more importantly, flexible — payment options to clients, you empower them to focus on their business while you do the same. You know, without needing to have the conversation about where the money to pay your invoice is going to come from.

Your clients aren’t the only ones worried about cash flow. Everyone is. Why not make it easier on yourself and your clients and give our friends at QuickFee a shout to see if their PayNow and PayLater payment solutions are a fit for your firm?

It’s simple. QuickFee firms get paid faster and improve their cash flow. QuickFee firms see an average reduction of 32% in DSO. Further, QuickFee firms are also saving on transaction costs, reducing time spent on administration, all while providing their clients with a convenient, secure, and contactless payment experience. Also, as we know many partners don’t like having that “cash discussion” with their clients, that discussion becomes so much easier when their firm has multiple Payment Plan options to offer.

The post Keeping Cash Flowing In Turbulent Times appeared first on Going Concern.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, Prometric took the extraordinary step to close testing centers across the U.S. and Canada in March, leaving many CPA exam candidates to wonder “what happens to my exam?” Prometric is now scheduled to reopen on May 1, but as we all know state and federal authorities are continually adjusting shelter-in-place policies, so we’ll see if that date sticks. It seems no one really knows what’s going to happen and we’re all just trying to do our best day-to-day in all this uncertainty. The good news is you can sign up to receive coronavirus text alerts from Gleim to get the latest CPA exam info so you’ll know right away if that situation changes. At least that’s one less thing to worry about.

Meanwhile, NASBA announced that due to Prometric closures they would extend the Notice to Schedule for candidates with an NTS expiring between April 1 and June 30 until Sept. 30, 2020. The 2020 second quarter CPA exam testing window was due to open on April 1, but obviously it looks like May 1 now.

NASBA says not to contact your board of accountancy regarding NTS extensions; they’re working on it. Candidates are, however, encouraged to monitor NASBA’s website and social media for updates.

So, what are candidates supposed to do with this information? “Freak out” is not the answer, sorry. You’re probably going to be surprised by our suggestion. Hope you’re sitting down: STUDY.

I know what you’re thinking. “Are you crazy, lady? Why would I study when I can’t even schedule my exam right now?!” I assure you I’m sane. Bear with me, let me explain.

Anyone who has studied for the CPA exam while working — which is a good chunk of people who have ever sat for the exam — will tell you it’s difficult to balance work, studying, and all the other things human beings do when they’re not working and studying. It’s doable obviously or no one would ever pass, but it’s a delicate balancing act that requires discipline and determination. Here’s the thing: Due to COVID-19, a lot of you don’t have commutes to worry about (unless bed to couch to kitchen counts, which I assure you it doesn’t). That right there frees up time, potentially A LOT of time depending where you live. Know what you can do with that time? STUDY.

Maybe you were one of the lucky ones pre-pandemic who didn’t have a long commute. No doubt the ’Rona has opened up several time-saving opportunities you can now apply to studying for the CPA exam other than not commuting. For example:

• Gym rat? Not any more, bucko! All that time you used to spend pumping iron is wide open. Use it.
• Chronic Tinder-swiper? Yeah, those dates aren’t happening. Put the time you used to spend swiping toward studying.
• Parent? Believe it or not, even you guys now have a unique chance to capture some free time. Think about it, all that time you used to spend carting your beautiful little spawn to soccer and band practice and softball is all yours to do with as you please. STUDY.

Or let’s look at a different scenario. Let’s say you’re a soon-to-be grad or recently graduated. Congratulations, first off. With so much up in the air right now, it might not seem like the best idea to clamp down and start studying, but think about it, what better time than when you have nothing but time? If you, like many grads, had penciled in some travel time post-graduation, you can pretty much assume that’s out. Why not use that time to study? That big trip you had planned will be waiting for you when all of this blows over.

The biggest and most obvious benefit to studying now is that you probably have the time to do so. At least more time than you’d usually have. “I’ll study when I have time” has never been a very wise study plan for CPA exam candidates, but hey, finally all y’all who tell yourselves that have no excuse. For everyone else, studying can also help lend a bit of security in uncertain times. I know your CPA review materials aren’t normally what you’d associate with comfort, but in this case, a little routine can help keep you focused and on-track.

On board? Good. So let’s talk about a plan.

Even in the most normal of times it’s a wise idea to develop a study schedule and stick to it. How that looks varies by candidate, but generally speaking, you can start by loosely plotting out the order in which you will sit for the four parts, your time frame to do so, and then budget your available study time from the day you begin studying a section up until test day.

Obviously with Prometric closed for the time being that might get tricky, but let’s say you go for the “knocking out the section most find the hardest” approach and decide to sit for FAR first. How convenient, because the remainder of this article is about how to tackle the beast.

There’s a reason FAR has the reputation it does as the sheer breadth and volume of information means it takes the longest to study. That’s a good thing as it means there’s plenty to keep you busy while Prometric is closed, but FAR’s size makes it an easy contender for the “worst” CPA exam section. As one former Gleim candidate wrote in their advice for passing FAR, “The only thing I can think of that’s worse than taking FAR is taking FAR more than once.”

So we know Financial Accounting and Reporting covers a lot of topics, but you’ll be relieved to know that many of them should be familiar to you as they were covered in school.

See? Hopefully knowing you already have a foundation in this area helps you feel slightly less intimidated by the sheer volume of this section. Besides familiarity, however, there are more reasons to choose FAR as your first section.

“Starting with FAR makes the most sense because, quite frankly, it is by far the most difficult section of the CPA exam,” says Garrett Gleim, CPA, CGMA. “You have to learn generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) to identify, conceptualize, and analyze transactions. At the end of the day, FAR is the section where you learn those fundamental skills, and AUD, BEC, and REG all assume some underlying knowledge of GAAP. Further, you want your 18-month completion window to begin after passing FAR because with FAR under your belt, you’ll be ahead of the game for the other sections.”

We won’t get too deep into the nitty-gritty here but a question many candidates have about this section in particular is how to tackle it without getting overwhelmed. Lucky for them, our friends at Gleim have some FAR-specific advice:

1. Put in plenty of practice with multiple-choice questions and task-based simulations. Practice MCQ and TBS will be your friend as you work through FAR. OK, maybe not a friend. More like a helpful companion.

2. You’ll want to make sure you’re proficient with journal entries, schedules, and T-accounts. This one is pretty straightforward. Because FAR is the most accounting-y of the four CPA exam sections, expect lots of the above.

3. Practice rewording information rather than simply reciting it. You’ll know you’re familiar with FAR topics when you’re able to explain them using your own words. Rote memorization simply won’t help you here.

For more guided advice like the above, be sure to grab your free CPA exam study guide from Gleim which offers tips, tricks, and all the basics you need to know about taking the exam.

Although it seems like so many things are up in the air right now, one thing you have control of is sticking to your CPA exam study schedule so you’re ahead of the game when Prometric’s doors reopen. Why not use this time to get yourself one step closer to your goal of passing the CPA exam? It’s either that or re-watch Breaking Bad for the fifth time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but imagine how good you’ll feel when all this blows over knowing that you made an investment in your future and got yourself that much closer to your ultimate goal of licensure.

Studying can feel overwhelming, especially now. But it doesn’t have to! We at Gleim are here for you. Our courses support you from start to finish and take away all the guesswork so that studying at home doesn’t feel like studying alone. Our SmartAdapt course will guide you through the topics you need to master and tell you when you’re ready to sit for the CPA Exam. We deliver complete coverage of exam content through easy-to-understand outlines, plus on-demand, closed-captioned videos when you need a professor to teach you the concepts (or you just want to see someone else’s face). Best of all, our Personal Counselors are here to provide one-on-one assistance—they’re adjusting to remote life too, and would be thrilled to receive your call or email!

When it’s time to test your exam readiness, our mock exams are closer to the real exam than any other you will find. Demo FAR for free today and make the most of your time at home by joining the millions who have passed with Gleim!

The post Why Now Is the Time to Study For the CPA Exam and Why FAR Should Be First appeared first on Going Concern.

The Connected Organization: Bridging the Gap Between People, Process, and Technology gets the Amplify GO show started at 1 p.m. EDT on March 24. After this hourlong session, you will be able to:

• Identify ways to modernize your reporting processes by connecting data, documents, and teams at scale.
• Determine new ways to connect your reports and build trust in your data.
• Utilize best practices for reporting and share them with stakeholders across your organization AND walk away with one unit of CPE.

We’ve all heard the complaints of firms being less-than-adept when it comes to people and technology, so I expect some of you will line up to learn more about how to solve these pain points at your firm.

The conference continues on March 25, and attendees can choose one of six available sessions, including one on using intelligent data to increase trust in disclosures and a session with speakers from Intel on how their company was able to shorten their close process through tighter processes and the wonders of technology.

The full list of sessions and more details can be found here. We strongly encourage you to head over and check it out yourself (click through each session icon to learn more).

After the first sessions of the day, the floor is opened to a customer roundtable panel discussion. Attendees who attend the March 24 keynote, one March 25 1 p.m. session and the March 25 2 p.m. session will receive three units of CPE. Not bad for an afternoon you’d probably tend moving your mouse around to appear active in Skype while working from home.

To see the full list of available sessions and register, just head on over to the Amplify GO site. Registration only takes a moment and is open through the end of the event, so if you don’t see this until Tuesday, you still have a chance to sign up and join.

The post Get Off Nintendo Switch and Earn Some CPE While You’re Working From Home appeared first on Going Concern.

Today, we’re sitting down with Marcus Mire, partner at Lafayette, LA-based CPA firm PRM CPAs + Advisors LLC, and by “sitting down” we mean “sharing a convo we had with him via email a few weeks back for the purposes of this article.” Just so everyone is clear. (Conversation edited and condensed for clarity.)

Going Concern: Let’s start with the basics, tell us about PRM. Most importantly, what services do you offer?

Marcus Mire: Tax compliance and planning, advisory/consulting, bookkeeping, and payroll.

GC: So a veritable smorgasbord. What about the culture at your firm? Everyone’s always talking about firm culture.

Mire: We have a fun culture comprised of a work hard, play hard mentality. We work as a team and have each other’s back.

GC: That’s important for sure. So what made you want to join your firm?

Mire: I joined PRM after being a sole proprietor for a few years to share resources with other like-minded professionals.

GC: Alright so you’re trapped in an elevator, and the person you’re in there with is starting to panic. In order to calm them down, you make small talk. They ask you what you do for work, how do you respond?

Mire: I help clients meet their goals. Anything I can do toward that end is a win in my book.

GC: So one thing that I absolutely need in order to get my work done is Slack so my colleague can pester me about getting my weekly newsletter column to him. What tools can you not live without at work?

Mire: Xero, Teamwork, Gusto, Excel.

GC: Bonus points for the Gusto mention, well played. How’d you first hear about them?

Mire: Colleagues from across the country that I met in XPAC (Xero Partner Advisory Council) sold me on Gusto. It was a great move.

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GC: Even with a glowing recommendation, sometimes you can still be surprised once you pull the trigger. What’s been your biggest surprise about partnering with Gusto?

Mire: The ease of onboarding and the support from my rep, Griffin Kauvar. She has gone above and beyond to ensure a smooth transition for my clients.

GC: This might be a tough question because there are so many possible answers, but in your opinion, what’s the best perk of partnering with Gusto? Besides the referral bonuses, obvs.

Mire: The fact that they take tasks like payroll tax deposits and payroll tax returns off our plate and integrate with Xero.

GC: Alright, now some easy questions about YOU. What do you eat for breakfast?

Mire: I usually don’t eat breakfast.

GC: Me neither, unless coffee counts. How ’bout this: How do you relax after a stressful day?

Mire: Conversation with my wife over a glass of wine. She brings a thought process to my daily problems that is so different than mine.

GC: Lucky guy. Now tell me a fact about you that would surprise people to hear.

Mire: After watching my daughter perform in “Matilda,” I love musicals! My wife and I are going to see “Jersey Boys” soon.

There you have it, folks. If you missed our previous conversations, go ahead and catch up with Bruce Phillips of Aprio Cloud and Nayo Carter-Gray of 1st Step Accounting if you’re so inclined. So if you’re ever stuck in an elevator with either of them, you’ll be able to tell them you know a surprising fact about them that no one else could ever possibly guess. And while you’re in a click-happy mood, be sure to stop by and say hi to our friends at Gusto so you can say you were into headache-free payroll before it was cool.

The post An Interview with an Accounting Firm Partner ‘Mire-d’ In Client Service and Musicals appeared first on Going Concern.

Ten years from now, if you were to look back at your career like it was a superhero movie (and you will, of course—our Disney overlords will require it), everything before self-service analytics will probably look a lot like the first act: the beginning of the movie, where the hero is a good person with a good life—but something’s missing.

You’ll remember the introduction of self-service analytics as the kickoff of the second act—where the hero gains his or her powers and takes the first steps toward learning to use them to make the world a better place. And once you’ve mastered self-service analytics, that’s when you reach the third act—unleashing the potential that was inside you the whole time to take down the villain and save the world.

You might ask yourself how big a deal it really is to change the way you’ve always done things—sure, your data processes are full of duct tape and holes, but hey, they get the job done. But by relying on spreadsheets, you’re like Thor without Mjolnir or Iron Man without his suit. Self-service analytics isn’t just about boosting your day-to-day processes—it can spark an entire career transformation, completing your hero’s journey and giving you the rights to make the sequel however you want.

Enough set up—let’s dive into the three-act story of your accounting or finance career, with self-service analytics as the turning point.

Act I: Accounting without self-service analytics

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re somewhat satisfied with your accounting or finance career. You might be like Peter Parker—the important people in your life love you and regularly praise you for your intelligence and accomplishments, but you still want more. Or maybe you’re even like Tony Stark—at the top of your field, appearing from the outside as the man or woman who has everything, but yet there’s still something missing.

That sense of dissatisfaction may be due in part to the large amounts of time you spend working with data. A study by IDC found that professionals who primarily use spreadsheets for data preparation and analysis spend 28 hours a week in spreadsheets, and waste eight hours a week performing redundant data tasks. Tax professionals may have it the worst—they spend more than half their workday gathering and preparing data.

You probably also get asked questions (usually by other departments) that you’re either not sure how to answer or you know that determining the answer won’t be worth the time it takes—20 hours of research and number crunching to give a salesperson a talking point he or she uses for 15 minutes in a presentation? No thanks.

So why is gathering and preparing data so inefficient for most accounting and finance professionals? The main culprit is data glut—most organizations have too much data spread across too many systems that don’t talk to each other, requiring manual intervention to put all the pieces together. Ninety-four percent of organizations have multiple data sources, and 60% have five or more.

Answering a simple question like, “How much money is our marketing campaign bringing in?” requires you to painstakingly pull structured data from countless spreadsheets and an alphabet soup of CRM, ERP, and other software platforms. But how often is all the data you need even where it’s supposed to be? You’ll probably also have to gather unstructured data from emails, memos, text messages, notes on the office fridge, etc.

If that weren’t enough, increasingly strict regulations and reporting requirements make your job even harder, necessitating new transparencies and redundancies that slow you down even more.

The time you spend gathering and preparing data for reviews, reconciliations, and analysis is holding your accounting or finance career back. You’ve proven that you’re worthy, so where’s your Mjolnir or your Green Lantern power ring that lets you achieve at the level you know you’re capable? Enter self-service analytics.

Act II: Self-service analytics for accounting and finance superpowers

This is it—your radioactive spider bite, your super-soldier serum, your gamma bomb that unleashes the beast inside you (except, you know, in a non-“Hulk-smash” kind of way.) Adopting self-service analytics is the beginning of your accounting or finance career’s second act—that critical moment when you gain the power to outwardly transform into the hero you’ve always been on the inside.

The right self-service analytics platform reduces grunt work, automatically gathering and blending data from every source. It pushes all data to a centralized database and plugs it into formulas that produce the insights you need, automatically and repeatably. Suddenly, performing reviews and reconciliations and generating reports are no longer journeys into “Excel hell”—they’re things that happen in the background, requiring minimal oversight or input.

With your focus shifted away from manual data tasks, you can win your day back and spend more time on the things that matter—like finding revenue and cost-cutting opportunities that will make you the office hero and push your career forward. Answering questions like, “How much money is our marketing campaign bringing in?” no longer causes you to break out in a cold sweat because you know determining the answer is as simple as pushing a button.

But gaining superpowers means so much more than just fixing your old problems. Imagine if Peter Parker’s story ended when he knocked out the school bully, Flash Thompson. No, gaining superpowers from self-service analytics will allow you to develop new abilities and proficiencies that will take your career even further.

With self-service analytics, you can develop more accurate and intricate forecast models, helping your business predict its financial future and take the right steps to improve it. You can look at the effect specific trends are having on your bottom line and determine the best ways to respond. 

You can find ways to optimize existing financial processes, eliminating waste and increasing margins. You can answer more complex questions like, “What would happen if we launched this product in these 50 stores across this geographic area?” allowing you to explore a wide variety of scenarios to discover opportunities your business doesn’t even know exist.

As your self-service analytics skills grow, you’ll likely discover abilities we can’t yet predict—like when Spider-Man realized that buzzing in his head was a sixth sense that could warn him of danger. Self-service analytics open so many possibilities that it’s impossible for us to account for them all now—but many of them are ones we’ve just discovered in the last few years, so it stands to reason that there are more out there waiting to be found.

Now this is where the story really starts to get good.

Act III: Transforming your career and your business with self-service analytics

You might be wondering why we keep referring to “self-service” analytics rather than just using the term on its own. That’s because we want to draw a distinction between complex analytics platforms that only data scientists can use and simplified solutions that allow accounting, finance, and every other business department to easily access the data and insights they need—without writing code or going back to school for IT certification.

A self-service analytics platform is just that—a platform on which all members of the business, regardless of technical sophistication, can create new data partnerships among IT, analytic teams, and lines of business. Whether you are an analyst or data scientist, you can solve even the most complex analytic business problems, with less time and effort, to drive business-changing outcomes across your organization.

Over time, the use of self-service analytics changes the culture at a business, enabling it to make more decisions based on data rather than gut instinct. Suddenly everyone is a data expert, and new ideas are coming from everywhere. HR finds a sales opportunity in Detroit the rest of the company missed. Marketing sees a way to streamline manufacturing and production. Accounting develops a killer PR strategy. With self-service analytics, the chains come off and the business can start succeeding at levels its founders could never have imagined.

And if you’re the one who championed self-service analytics at your business, a lot of the credit for that transformation will go to you. But even if it doesn’t, you’ll still gain specific accounting and finance advantages that will allow you to do and see more, faster and easier. Loki, Thanos, and all six versions of the Joker* don’t stand a chance.

Let’s take a look at one of these specific benefits across each of the accounting and finance disciplines:

• Tax: Self-service analytics enable tax professionals to easily and repeatedly perform correlation analyses to identify drivers of effective tax rates and disparities between statutory and effective rates.
• Audit: With self-service analytics, audit professionals can easily perform end-to-end process testing and control validations and identify high-risk patterns earlier.
• Finance and FP&A: Finance and FP&A professionals can use self-service analytics to more easily perform risk-weighted asset calculations for capital, interest rate risk modeling, sensitivity analysis, liquidity reporting, and compliance.
• Accounting: Self-service analytics enable accountants to create more transparency at review through automation in data extracts and accrual calculations and seamlessly pass accounting details through to the journal after approvals are made.

Supercharge your accounting or finance career with Alteryx

There are a lot of analytics platforms out there. So which one is the best for accelerating your accounting or finance career?

From an accounting and finance point of view, analytics platforms generally fall into one of two categories:

1. General-use products providing few-to-zero specific accounting/finance functions.
2. Traditional accounting software with some analytics capabilities shoehorned in but lacking the raw power of general solutions.

Only Alteryx gives you the best of both worlds—a superpowered, proven, self-service analytics platform that’s been specifically customized to automate and enhance the tasks and processes most critical to accounting and financial success. 

“When I use Alteryx, I feel like I just got the star power-up in Mario Kart,” said Jessica Chen, manager of marketing analytics at Alteryx.

This is your big hero moment—don’t let it pass you by. With Alteryx, you can finally free your workday from tedious, manual tasks and allow more time for the strategic analysis needed to unlock your superpowers and maximize the potential of your accounting or finance career.

Learn more about Alteryx >

* Yes, we’re aware the Joker has taken on dozens of incarnations across different media. We went with six because that’s the number of different ways he’s been portrayed on the big screen in feature-length films: by Cesar Romero in Batman: The Movie, Jack Nicholson in Batman, Mark Hamill (voice) in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, Jared Leto in Suicide Squad, and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker.

The post How Self-Service Analytics Will Boost Your Accounting or Finance Career In 2020 appeared first on Going Concern.

Now by starting this article with that kind of strong, no-nonsense lead paragraph, we know we’re going to need at least one solid example to back it up. But as Confucius once famously said, “Why give one example when you can give five?” (Please don’t look that up.)

Here are five instances where modern analytics saved the day for professionals in accounting, tax, audit, and the office of finance.

1. Trinity Industries turns five months into five minutes

Trinity Industries, an industrial company, manages hundreds of thousands of rail cars from a fixed-asset tax reporting perspective. The company needs to regularly create reports on these assets for both executives and the IRS. To do this, the team previously utilized Excel spreadsheets in what became a tedious and version-control-issue-laden process—one that took about five months to complete.

Trinity Industries was able to shorten the time needed to complete that process to about five minutes. And no, the company didn’t use Hermione Granger’s time-turner necklace to do it—it used analytics. With the right analytics platform in place, Trinity Industries can now:

• Eliminate tedious manual work.
• Produce more trustworthy reports that result in fewer time-consuming questions.
• Give its tax office more time to do work that adds value to the business.

2. Aetna saves millions in potential overpayments

Internal audit processes at Aetna were slow and labor-intensive. But by adopting analytics tools, eliminating inefficiencies, and creating a “robot” that looks friendlier than H.E.R.B.I.E., the insurance giant successfully transformed the face of its internal audit department.

Today, Aetna performs continuous auditing through an automated end-to-end process review—a faster and more reliable method that has saved the company millions of dollars in potential claims overpayments. Other benefits include:

• Faster audits—audits are now completed five to eight days quicker than before.
• Visibility into data before the claims process even begins.
• Time savings for other departments through automatically generated self-service audit dashboards.

3. Cetera Financial sees the future

Creating accurate revenue and expense forecasts is hard. Like, taking down a boss in Dark Souls hard. At Cetera Financial, it requires combining data from assets, net flows, revenue, advisors, and market flow, then finding a way to analyze and extrapolate on that data to predict the future. When done manually, it’s a cumbersome, labor-intensive process—and the results aren’t always reliable.

But the team at Cetera found a way to largely eliminate manual steps and create scenario-based revenue and expense forecasts with maximum accuracy, reliability, and usability. How’d they do it? You guessed it—analytics. By pumping the data through an analytics platform, Cetera can now quickly create highly accurate and intuitive forecast dashboards. Cetera also used modern analytics to:

• Incorporate both internal key performance indicators and external drivers to refresh forecast scenarios automatically.
• Combine quantitative and qualitative data to identify holistic patterns.
• Leverage the vast capabilities of its analytics platform to strategically bring software and data together and create precision insights.

4. Thomson Reuters puts 24-30 hours back in the month

To perform its required month-end cost assurance process, Thomson Reuters had to run general ledger line item queries for six separate organizations, map in master data information, segregate the data by expense category, and create pivot tables in order to review for accuracy. This took about 24 to 30 hours to complete, occupying much of its controllership office’s time during those critical final days of each and every month.

The company used an analytics platform to create a repeatable workflow that automates much of this work. As a result, Thomson Reuters has given those 24 to 30 hours back to the workers in its controllership office, who we assume are using that time to find new financial opportunities for the company—because that’s totally what we’d do with the extra time. We definitely wouldn’t use it to search for continuity flaws in The Mandalorian so we can complain about them on Reddit.

Thomson Reuters continues to push the boundaries of modern analytics in ways such as:

• Ability to complete the monthly post-query process in just 24 minutes.
• Increased collaboration between the controllership and other departments.
• Plans to improve productivity for other internal teams, including finance, cash flow, master data, treasury, tax, and human resources.

5. Educational Media Foundation cuts costs by $500,000, aims for $2.2 million

Educational Media Foundation (EMF) is a nonprofit mostly known for broadcasting popular radio stations such as Air1 and K-LOVE. While the company has been rocking out with solid financials since 1981, the EMF team wasn’t exactly Jersey Shore-style fist-pumping for joy when regulatory changes caused its national Internet radio streaming costs to more than double—from less than $1 million to more than $2 million annually.

But we’d like to think the company let out a collective DJ Pauly D “Yeaaaaaaaah buddy!” when it discovered ways to reduce those costs through modern analytics. EMF learned that some of its regional streams were underutilized, while others exceeded their cost-effective limits. This and other analytics-derived insights led to 16 changes to systems, software, programming, and contracts. 

EMF reported that four of those changes led to $500,000 in savings through the second half of 2016. The company continues to use analytics to find more ways to cut costs, projecting that its efforts can ultimately save as much as $2.2 million a year.

Beyond cost-cutting measures, EMF used modern analytics to:

• Eliminate eight months of labor per year and fix more than 200 errors by better ensuring that taxes for its radio transmitters are filed for the proper jurisdictions.
• Reduce manual checks and restarts for its content delivery network.
• Provide better experiences for donors who give to the nonprofit multiple times.

Save the day and be the office hero with Alteryx

All the companies in our examples have one thing in common—they chose Alteryx as their analytics solution. But if you’re interested in seeing similar results at your business, you’ll quickly learn Alteryx is far from the only option on the table.

As you research these solutions, however, you’ll find that they fall into one of two categories:

1. General-use products providing few-to-zero specific accounting/finance functions.
2. Traditional accounting software with some analytics capabilities shoehorned in but lacking the raw power of general solutions.

Only Alteryx gives you the best of both worlds—a proven analytics platform that’s been specifically customized to automate and enhance the tasks and processes most critical to accounting and finance success. 

It’s time for analytics to save the day at your business. With Alteryx, you can finally free your organization from manual steps and allow more time for the strategic analysis needed to put your firm on top.

Learn more about Alteryx and start your free trial >

The post 5 Times Modern Analytics Saved the Day In Accounting and Finance appeared first on Going Concern.

Before we jump in, we encourage you to pay Gusto a visit to find out how they’re bringing payroll and benefits into the 21st century. Forget flying cars, what the future needed was a modern solution to getting your people paid, onboarded, and insured. I mean, flying cars would have been nice but hey, this is pretty good too.

This time around, you’re meeting the incomparable Nayo Carter-Gray of Maryland-based 1st Step Accounting. Not to play favorites but we’re particularly fond of her paperless approach and how she’s using technology to embrace the deskless lifestyle.

Going Concern: Let’s get some introductions out of the way. Tell us about your firm.

Nayo Carter-Gray: 1st Step Accounting is a virtual accounting and tax preparation firm that is environmentally conscious and focused on leveraging technology for efficiency and convenience.

The culture I’m building for my practice is one of flexibility and freedom. I truly believe no one should be tied to a desk because of the advancement of technology, and so I try to ensure that my customers can work with us regardless of location and can access all information with at bare minimum a smartphone.

GC: As laptop hobos ourselves, we fully get behind the deskless lifestyle. What all do you do over there?

Carter-Gray: We currently offer accounting and bookkeeping services, tax preparation and planning, education and seminars (online and in-person), QuickBooks online setup and training, IRS and state tax audit and collection services, as well as consulting for small business growth and development.

GC: Nice. So a solid well-rounded suite basically. Bit of a personal question maybe but why did you start your firm?

Carter-Gray: I started my firm initially as a tax preparation firm, and I focused on multilevel marketing business owners because I was a MLM business owner. I found that my team members and other colleagues were being fed bad information when it came to reporting the business income and expenses on their taxes. After the first tax season, I discovered a need for bookkeeping and education for the small business community since the larger firms don’t want to waste their time and resources on these customers because they don’t earn them enough billable hours.

GC: It’s funny, we’ve heard that from other firm owners about starting with tax prep and then branching out when they see a need to provide more services to their clients. It’s almost as if tax prep is a gateway drug. So, if the little old lady you’re helping cross the street asks you about your work, how would you describe your job?

Carter-Gray: I make accounting a little less taxing for small business owners all across the U.S.

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GC: Excellent play on words. While you’re making things less taxing for your clients, what tools can you not live without?

Carter-Gray: So many to choose from! My project management system Trello keeps me on track, my forms builder Cognito Forms helps me organize data collection from clients, and my online scheduler/CRM vCita does just about everything: it helps me keep my schedule in order, allows my clients to conveniently book appointments that work for them, and helps me to keep communication and notes in one centralized location.

As an honorable mention, I can’t live without my SideTrak second monitor for my laptop which conveniently attaches to the back of the laptop and slides out to make working from home as easy as working from my office.

GC: And Gusto, natch! How did you first hear about them?

Carter-Gray: Another accountant mentioned them (not sure who), and shortly after I heard about Gusto, I attended QuickBooks Connect where I got to see all the features for myself at a breakfast they hosted. I switched my largest customer at the time a month later because I was so impressed.

GC: Excellent first impressions aside, any surprises about partnering with Gusto?

Carter-Gray: No real surprises because Gusto did a fabulous job of presenting its product. I will say the payroll autopilot feature definitely lived up to the hype. I have several clients on salary and this makes payroll a breeze!

GC: Positive feedback is always nice. How about you? What do you think is the best perk of partnering with Gusto?

Carter-Gray: I do love how Gusto listens to its community and makes improvements based on our feedback. And it’s awesome that Gusto offers a discount or revenue share when we refer the product to our communities.

GC: Alright, enough about all the benefits of partnering with Gusto. What are some challenges your firm has faced in 2019? And don’t be afraid to tell us the really tough stuff.

Carter-Gray: This year my firm struggled with finding a project management system to stay in constant communication with my clients. After taking some hard but necessary feedback from a few clients that left the firm this year, I decided to make it a priority to find/create a system that would allow us to stay on track of deadlines and give our customers the insight they needed to know what was going on with their project.

Another challenge is because I’m the only person working in the firm year-round, my personal goals have hindered the growth of the firm this year. I’m currently sitting for the CPA exam, which is very time-consuming and it has taken away from major marketing efforts to bring in tons of new clients like I have in the past.

GC: Wow, that’s got to be incredibly difficult. We’re sure you’ll do great. Back to your clients, are you seeing any future trends on their side our readers might be interested in hearing about?

Carter-Gray: My clients will continue to grow in their respective industries. Because I work with businesses that are newly formed or have only been in business for one to two years, I get to watch their growth from part-time hustle to full-time enterprise. So I’m expecting a few of my part-timers to go full time in their businesses in 2020 because of their steady growth.

GC: That’s gotta be fun for you to see your clients thrive. On that note, can you tell us about an interesting client situation that you’ve advised on? Or something exciting your clients are working on?

Carter-Gray: The most interesting situation that I have advised on may not be very interesting at all to most. For me, I’m very interested in watching my clients grow. So the situation I have had the most pleasure of advising on was watching a current client who is a hair stylist create and sell a physical hair-styling product. To be a part of the team that helped her go from concept to reality was an amazing experience.

The client’s reality is that the older she gets, the harder it will be for her body to sustain the hours she puts in at the salon standing and styling people’s hair. So creating her product is going to allow her to create an exit plan before she actually needs it, and this is so inspiring and interesting to me.

GC: I bet! I’m happy to report that we’re done with the interrogation portion of this interview, now on to the easy stuff! What’s your usual breakfast?

Carter-Gray: Usually it’s two eggs over easy, but during the winter months when it’s cold or I’m traveling, it’s apple cinnamon oatmeal.

GC: Everyone has a routine for winding down at the end of a stressful day. What’s yours?

Carter-Gray: I love me some good TV and a delicious Coca-Cola slurpee. I can drink them every day no matter the temperature.

GC: Man! I haven’t had one of those in FOREVER. Alright, tell us a fact about you that would surprise people to hear.

Carter-Gray: I was a parent by the age of 14.

GC: Yep, definitely surprised! What a wonderful example you’re setting of how hard work and a forward-thinking attitude can take you far in life and make an impact in the world.

So that’s all we’ve got with Nayo Carter-Gray. Feel free to check her out on YouTube for more. And if her glowing review of Gusto made you eager to learn more about how partnering with Gusto can help you and your clients seven ways to Sunday, be sure to check out their partner program for more details.

The post An Interview with a Paperless Practitioner Doing Things Her Way appeared first on Going Concern.

From free on-demand webinars to reports that are far more interesting than your aunt’s dramatic hysterectomy story, find something below to keep you distracted from the fact that you don’t actually like these people you’re related to.

Chick-fil-A breaks down its transformative tax data handling approach with self-service analytics. This session is designed to impart real-life examples of how to reduce risk, increase value, and better identify tax-saving opportunities with analytics.

Tax functions spend more than 50% of their time gathering tax data and less than 30% of their time on strategic tax analysis. Transform your tax analytics with a solution that creates huge efficiency and productivity gains.

Financial leaders are under pressure to improve tax compliance performance – while reducing costs by increasing speed and efficiency via innovation and automation. See how best-in-class companies are meeting this challenge.

That’s all we’ve got for you today. Enjoy!

The post Be Thankful For These Learning Resources This Thanksgiving appeared first on Going Concern.

We can, however, declare a winner in a different war, this time without the use of tongue-in-cheek parentheticals. In Chick-fil-A’s own private war against the complexities of the U.S. tax code, the Georgia-born chicken empire is emerging victorious—thanks in large part to a juicy analytics solution.

Among other accomplishments, Chick-fil-A employed analytics tools from Alteryx to reduce time spent processing tax data for 1099-Ks from 10 hours to 10 seconds. That means Chick-fil-A’s tax professionals (as will yours, if you follow the company’s example) have way more time to actually look through tax data and discover opportunities to increase revenue, widen margins, and reduce errors.

Alteryx is an ideal solution for organizations of every shape and size—combining the robust capabilities large enterprises require with the flexible pricing and ease-of-use needed by smaller companies. In the case of Chick-fil-A, Alteryx successfully manages the massive tax data flow of a fast-food empire. 

With more than 2,300 locations across 47 states (and Washington, DC) and a 2018 revenue of more than $10 billion, Chick-fil-A faces the stiff challenge of navigating thousands of sales tax jurisdictions.

Like many companies, Chick-fil-A’s tax department was spending about 80% of its time on data preparation, leaving little room for analysis or validation. A few years ago, Matt Burton, Chick-fil-A’s senior principal team leader of tax technology, inquired if there was a better way for the company to crunch tax data and take advantage of its data.

“I asked, ‘Instead of me having to run a SQL query over and over, is there some tool that would allow other individuals within the tax department to access that data?’” Burton said. 

Burton’s colleague suggested analytics solutions from Alteryx, and the rest is history.

Today, Chick-fil-A’s tax department is much more agile and can adapt to changes quickly. In addition to 1099-K prep time going from 10 hours to 10 seconds, querying daily tax rates—a process which once required a staff of five to six people—is now performed daily by a single individual.

Chick-fil-A uses Alteryx to automate manual processes, put time back in tax professionals’ days, and improve overall business results. Let’s take a look at four key ingredients of Chick-fil-A’s recipe for tax success.

1) Blending tax data

Imagine standing at a Chick-fil-A counter and ordering a chocolate milkshake. You watch as the employee places the various ingredients into your cup—then gasp as he informs you that it will take about four hours to blend them all together.

That outcome would be unacceptable to just about any customer. Likewise, the amount of time it took Chick-fil-A’s tax team to prepare and blend 1099 data from various sources (AWS, spreadsheets, and Oracle ERP) was unacceptable to the company’s tax function.

To streamline the process, Chick-fil-A placed Alteryx analytics in the middle of its 1099 workflow. Now Alteryx quickly combines the data from the various sources—while also identifying components that are in one set and not another, which can alert the team to data errors they might otherwise never find. The platform then automatically formats, validates, and outputs the clean 1099 data onto a fresh spreadsheet.

The process is fast, efficient, and less error-prone than the methods Chick-fil-A used in the past. And the company’s tax team can now use the extra time to look through its data and identify opportunities for cutting costs and growing revenue. 

2) Running tax data simulations

Buttery buns and crunchy pickles will only get you so far. To maintain a successful business, Chick-fil-A must make decisions based on reliable, timely data. And that includes the ability to accurately simulate and forecast the tax implications of a decision before it’s made.

“Let’s say you want to simulate what the tax rate will look like in 300 different locations. With Alteryx, you can quickly do that,” Burton said.

Chick-fil-A uses Alteryx to transform tax rate data from a spreadsheet into an XML block. From there, the tax team can easily input the parameters of what they want to test, and Alteryx spits out an API call—a piece of code that requests data from another piece of software. That API call ultimately generates a new XML block that contains the results of the query.

“Alteryx gives you the ability to parse the XML so tax analysts can make sense of it,” Burton said. “You can even send various parts of the results directly into the workflows themselves.”

3) Deriving analytics from tax data

Data science doesn’t always move as smoothly as a Chick-fil-A drive-thru line. It can be easy to get “stuck in the data”—overwhelmed by the noise and unable to derive the insights you actually need.

Chick-fil-A uses Alteryx to avoid getting stuck, leveraging powerful analytics capabilities to uncover opportunities and errors within the company’s data in an automated fashion.

Blending data from multiple input files across databases, spreadsheets, and CSVs, Alteryx analyzes millions of transactions while automatically and dynamically updating certain parameters every day. The resulting analytics create all sorts of benefits for Chick-fil-A—and one of the most immediate is the ability to identify potential issues before tax returns are filed.

“If the system detects a potential problem, it will issue alert emails to various tax professionals. Everything is automated, so you don’t have to worry about it until you receive an alert,” Burton said.

4) Leveraging robotic process automation for tax

You didn’t think we’d get through this article without the robots taking over, did you?

Actually, while robotic process automation (RPA) can help with a lot of things, it turns out the machines need a good deal of help to do their jobs intelligently. So we’re probably safe from a self-aware uprising for the time being.

“You still have to get the data into Alteryx for it to consume,” Burton said. “So we looked into ways to automate that.”

Burton and his team use an RPA product called Blue Prism to automatically move data from the company’s ERP system and into Alteryx—eliminating the need for tax and data professionals to manually input the data and putting even more time back in their days. Alteryx processes the data quickly and effectively, then spits it back to Blue Prism, which sends emails to the parties who need to know what was done with the data—again saving time by eliminating manual steps.

“Alteryx is the brains of the workflow, and Blue Prism is the hands feeding in the information,” Burton said.

Win your own war against tax complexities with Alteryx

“Alteryx is a very unique tool and a fun tool to use because it’s not just necessarily focused on data,” Burton said. “Yes, data runs through it, but it also helps you improve your business processes. It helps you analyze your data and just kind of see into that data and make it a little bit clearer. I think of it as uncomplicating the complicated.”

Your business can also benefit from the powerful, proven Alteryx analytics platform. Unlike most other analytics providers, Alteryx offers solutions that have been specifically customized to automate and enhance the tax processes most critical to business success. 

Isn’t it time your company took a bite out of the complexities of the tax function? Alteryx frees your organization from manual steps, allowing more time for the strategic analysis needed to accelerate business outcomes and gain a delicious edge over the competition.

Learn more about Alteryx and start your free trial >

The post How Analytics and Chicken Sandwiches Can Put Time Back In Tax Professionals’ Days appeared first on Going Concern.

Rather than waste a half-a-dozen paragraphs on the merits of Gusto (much to their chagrin, surely), we thought we’d talk to one of their partners to find out what makes him get out of bed every morning and how Gusto helps. We know you’re a busy little bee and don’t have forever to wade through a sales pitch, so let’s get right to hearing about Bruce Phillips, his firm Aprio Cloud, and how Gusto is making his worklife just a tad bit easier.

Going Concern: Tell us about Aprio, what are y’all about over there?

Bruce Phillips: Aprio Cloud, formerly HPC, is the leader in U.S. cloud accounting. Our clients say our people, technology, comprehensive services, and fixed-fee access to expertise make us unmatched in the industry. Entrepreneurs and small-to-midsized businesses around the world count on Aprio Cloud to pair customized real-time financial insights and meaningful advice to help them make smarter, faster business decisions.

Since our founding in 1952, Aprio has grown to be the largest independent, full-service CPA-led professional services firm based in Atlanta, GA. Our over 550 partners and associates provide their best thinking and personal commitment to every client, demonstrating a passion for their work that fuels our clients’ success.

Our purpose is clear: We advise clients so that they can achieve what’s next, whatever that may be.

GC: Sounds cool. So let’s say I’m a potential client, what can you do for me?

Phillips: Aprio Cloud offers a suite of services: People and Services, Technology Automation, Tax and Compliance, Payroll/HR Support, and Managed Accounting Solutions.

For 65 years we’ve provided advisory, assurance, tax, cloud accounting, and private client services across the insurance, manufacturing and distribution, nonprofit and education, professional services, real estate and construction, retail, franchise and hospitality, and technology and biosciences industries.

GC: So what made you start your firm?

Phillips: Very long story, but I was basically almost forced into it with the sudden death of the founder/managing partner of the firm I was a partner in. This was in Atlanta on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1992.

GC: Would love to hear that story some time. Alright, here’s one. You’re at a party and a stranger asks you what you do for a living. What’s your answer?

Phillips: I operate a technology company that happens to provide accounting services.

GC: A follow-up to that: What tools can you not live without at work? And don’t say the coffeemaker, everyone always says the coffeemaker.

Phillips: Xero, Karbon, Slack, Zoom, and, of course, Gusto.

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GC: So glad you brought up Gusto so we don’t have to make this an awkward segue! How’d you first hear about them?

Phillips: Met the team at Xerocon when they were still a startup. I was one of their first partners.

GC: Ah, so you were into them before they were cool. What has surprised you most about partnering with Gusto?

Phillips: Its rapid growth. I remember learning about Gusto’s talent acquisition team hiring, onboarding, and training a ridiculous amount of people each week, back during their early scaling days.

GC: And what’s your favorite benefit of being a Gusto partner?

Phillips: Being able to talk about a product that works, is easy to use, and everybody needs. Not to mention the fact that employees can basically onboard themselves.

GC: Totally get it, we’re all about efficiency over here. Work smarter, not harder and all that. Speaking of work, what have been some of your firm’s biggest challenges in 2019?

Phillips: Staffing, training, and business acquisition/transitions.

GC: Mind telling us how Aprio is meeting the challenge of training your people?

Phillips: We provide training through Aprio Learning & Development, and our tool partners provide trainings detailing new updates and previews of upgrades to come. We also are very active in sharing and collaboration through Slack and Zoom.

GC: That’s enough work talk. Let’s wind this down and let me ask you how you unwind after a long day?

Phillips: Tennis game or a nice glass of red wine.

GC: One last thing, Bruce: Tell me something that would surprise people to hear about you.

Phillips: I have been to and visited 58 countries (maybe they won’t be surprised). I love to sleep and can sleep virtually anywhere, anytime.

Ready to sleep better at night knowing your clients’ payroll and onboarding woes are solved? Give Gusto a shout and rest easy, they’ve got you covered.

The post An Interview with an Accounting Firm Managing Partner Who Likes Sleep as Much as We Do appeared first on Going Concern.

In the real world, getting bitten by a radioactive spider will probably just leave a nasty scar, and jumping into a gamma bomb blast to save the world’s most annoying teenager will definitely kill you. But that doesn’t mean superpowers don’t exist. 

With The Economist declaring that data has now replaced oil as the world’s most valuable resource, it’s time for accounting and finance professionals to start unlocking the great power (and, of course, great responsibility) of data and gain the capabilities they need to stay competitive.

Like Steve Rogers, you already have those abilities inside you. You just need a super soldier serum boost to unleash your full data potential.

So what is that secret formula? You’ve likely read countless articles about data literacy initiatives being the key to success in this new age. While data literacy is certainly important, it’s the superpower equivalent of Squirrel Girl’s ability to talk to and mobilize squirrels—useful, but not exactly world-shaking.

To become the hero the accounting and finance world needs, you’ll have to go beyond simple data literacy to achieve data domination. And the only way to do that is with the right analytics platform—one that empowers your organization to easily unleash the value of your data and grab your cape to analyze it, share it, and automate key tasks along the way. 

You’re probably thinking, “That all sounds great, but what exactly will these data superpowers allow my organization to do?” Let’s take a look at some specific benefits and use cases across tax, audit, finance, and general accounting—and show you what unlocking your inner data hero really looks like.

Data and analytics superpowers for tax professionals

Tax professionals spend more than 50% of their time gathering tax data and less than 30% on strategic tax analysis. If your organization could flip those numbers, you could transform tax data from a liability into a superpowered asset. When tax professionals dominate data, they can:

• Stop collecting data like an RPG character mining for XP: Reduce time spent manually gathering data, business and legal entity reconciliation, and tax reporting; increase time for higher-value work like performing multiple analyses of transactions.
• Become a data Mr. Clean without shaving your head: Easily clean data from any source, including multiple ERPs, consolidation systems, billing systems, commerce platforms, and more.
• Comply faster than a Star Trek Borg: Get a complete analytical view of audit processes across compliance, fraud detection and investigation, risk assessment, operational performance, and internal controls. 
• See flaws better than an Inhuman: Improve efficiency and accuracy to understand anomalies before and after meeting compliance requirements.
• Say “I know” more than Han Solo: Boost confidence in data integrity and in uniting all team members and decision makers around a single source of truth.

None of that happens if you stick with the spreadsheet ways of the past. The right analytics solution can evolve your process to visual, repeatable workflows. That means performing correlation analyses to identify drivers of effective tax rates and disparities between statutory and effective rates. And it means better forecasting of effective and cash taxes, determining optimal transfer pricing patterns, and conducting “what if” analyses ahead of M&As.

Data and analytics superpowers for audit professionals

Using spreadsheets for audits today is like trying to run Starcraft II on your old 386 PC—it just doesn’t work.

But with a modern, superpowered analytics platform, auditors can use intuitive, drag-and-drop interfaces to achieve data domination through experience and experimentation. Code-free and code-friendly platforms provide deeper understanding in the auditing process—no matter your analytics comfort level—and make it easier to identify anomalies and classify potential irregularities.

With data powered by self-service analytics, audit professionals can start to:

• See farther and wider than Heimdall: Easily perform end-to-end process testing and control validations.
• Cut costs like Edward Scissorhands: Lower existing and future audit costs through scheduling and automation of data collection, preparation, and analysis.
• Calculate risks more accurately than C-3PO: Produce earlier identification of high-risk patterns in spending, codes of conduct, and across a network of partners and suppliers. 

The right platform can also drive new capabilities like text analytics, which can recognize specific assets on printed balance sheets, or robotic process automation, which can reconcile balances in multiple sub-ledgers. 

Overall, using analytics in audit makes the process faster and cheaper while offering better coverage in testing. And the technology is only going to get better—constant evolution continues to push what’s possible with new artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.

Data and analytics superpowers for finance professionals

At the risk of beating a dead spreadsheet, getting full visibility across key financial management systems just can’t happen with manual data processing. With spreadsheets, data remains static, siloed, and hard to manipulate, so achieving organization-wide data domination is less likely than Warner Bros. ever making a good Green Lantern movie.

To stay competitive in today’s financial world, you need to be able to access and blend all relevant financial data from your internal systems and those of partners and suppliers. That’s a lot easier and faster with superpowered analytics solutions that can bring together data from multiple accounting ledgers and consolidate it for statutory reporting and sub-ledger account analysis in an automated fashion. 

After just a bit of experimentation with the right analytics platform, finance professionals can learn to:

• Bring everything together better than Avengers: Endgame: Manage diverse and unstructured data sources to create high-quality reconciliations.
• Keep more robust records than the Jedi archives: Standardize master data records using fuzzy matching and pattern recognition.
• See the future better than Madame Web: More easily perform risk-weighted asset calculations for capital, interest rate risk modelling, sensitivity analysis, liquidity reporting, and compliance.

Data and analytics superpowers for accounting professionals

Quick, what’s the best superpower you could possibly have? Super strength? Not unless you want to crush your favorite co-worker’s ribs during your next celebratory chest bump. Flight? That’d be fun—until the bill for all the FAA violations you’ve committed comes due. 

No, the best superpower is the ability to manipulate time. Think about it: Put enough hours in the day and there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.

That’s exactly what the right analytics platform can do for accounting professionals. It gives you back the hundreds of hours you spend on manual data extraction and accrual calculations across multiple departments and inconsistent systems. 

With analytics, accountants can:

• Get better transparency than Sue Storm: Automation around data extracts and accrual calculations creates transparency at review, and analytic workflows also make it easier to document the steps in the process—should issues arise.
• Have better connections than Bezos or Gates: By having strong data connection options, accounting details can be seamlessly passed through to the journal after approvals are made.
• Be more consistent than Superman saving Lois Lane: Analytics drive consistency and accuracy, freeing you up to do more with your superpowers than you ever thought possible.

Get data superpowers in a box with Alteryx

As you research analytics solutions for your organization, you’ll find that they generally fall into one of two categories:

1. General use products providing few-to-zero specific accounting/finance functions.
2. Traditional accounting software with some analytics capabilities shoehorned in, but lacking the raw power of general solutions.

Only Alteryx gives you the best of both worlds—a superpowered, proven analytics platform that’s been specifically customized to automate and enhance the tasks and processes most critical to accounting and financial success. Alteryx is an ideal solution for organizations of every shape and size, combining the robust capabilities large enterprises require with the flexible pricing and ease-of-use needed by smaller companies.

It’s time to push data domination across your organization and evolve to heroic levels of tax, audit, finance, and accounting analytics. With Alteryx, you can finally free your organization from manual steps and allow more time for the strategic analysis needed to unlock your data superpowers and put your firm on top.

Learn more about Alteryx and start your free trial >

The post How Accounting and Finance Professionals Can Use Data to Gain Superpowers appeared first on Going Concern.

Who is 1-800Accountant? It’s a fast-growing company and one of the largest virtual accounting firms in the nation, serving more than 40,000 clients. Last year the firm completed approximately 25,000 tax returns and is on pace to do the same amount this year. And the firm’s CEO, Michael Savage, was named one of Glassdoor’s top 50 CEOs in 2018, based on employee approval ratings.

1-800Accountant needs experienced tax accountants to prepare individual and business tax returns starting the first week of January 2020. This isn’t a side hustle; you’ll be expected to have full-time availability, especially during the peak of busy season. But you get to work remotely, so that’s cool.

Starting in January, successful candidates will be expected to work a minimum of 20 hours a week. In February, that bumps up to 40-plus hours a week. And as busy season reaches its crescendo, 40 to 50 hours of tax prep work a week will be expected.

The nice thing is, as long as you put in the hours and get the work done, you can work when you want. Just block off time in your calendar, which will be visible to your supervisor, of when you’re available to knock out tax returns.

Pay is $25 to $30 an hour depending on experience, the folks at 1-800Accountant told us.

Alright, before we get into the nitty-gritty of the job, let’s see if you’re cut out for it. The ideal candidate has:

• Five years tax/bookkeeping experience or is a CPA or enrolled agent.
• Bachelor of Science degree in accounting or finance.
• At least three years experience preparing individual and business tax returns, including the most recent tax season (2019).
• Experience using such tax software as CCH Axcess Tax and CCH ProSystem fx.
• Proficiency using Microsoft Office suite and/or equivalent supporting software. 
• Working knowledge of general business practices and is able to demonstrate business and financial understanding.
• Experience working remotely.
• Proven to protect taxpayer confidentiality.
• A strong internet connection.

These requirements are a slam dunk for many of you tax geeks. So now that we know a lot of you are qualified, here’s what the job entails:

• Seasonal position with a minimum 20 hours a week/40-plus hours a week during peak tax season. The position starts on Jan. 7, 2020, and ends in April.
• Prepare individual (1040) and business tax returns (1120, 1120S, and 1065) and associated schedules and financial statements.
• Collect and research data; synthesize complex and diverse information.
• Your clients will primarily be small business owners, based in every state and in nearly every industry; therefore, knowledge of SALT filings and various industry tax treatments is required.
• You should be comfortable explaining a tax return to a client in layman’s terms, through both written and verbal communication.
• Keep in constant contact with your clients for data necessary to fulfill compliance and filings.

That’s it in a nutshell. Probably nothing you seasoned tax professionals haven’t done before. And if you’ve met or are close to meeting all your goals, 1-800Accountant would be glad to have you back the next tax season.

Once hired, you’ll be expected to attend one of three online job orientation classes that 1-800Accountant has coming up. That’s when all new hires will learn about the firm’s procedures and platforms. The online orientations will be held on Oct. 29, Nov. 12, and Dec. 5.

So sharpen up those resumes and get at it because Tax Season 2020 waits for no one.

Apply for a 1-800Accountant Remote Seasonal Tax Preparer job by clicking on one of these three links:

Remote Seasonal Tax Preparer, Eastern Time Zone

Remote Seasonal Tax Preparer, Central Time Zone

Remote Seasonal Tax Preparer, Mountain and Pacific Time Zones

The post Get Dialed In for Busy Season 2020 with These Remote Tax Prep Jobs appeared first on Going Concern.

But put down those Morpheus blinders for just a minute and take a deep breath. We’ve got some good news for you flesh-and-blood number-crunchers: Now more than ever, companies need your accounting expertise to grow.

Accounting skills are in high demand

Today’s growing companies desperately need your accounting skills as they attempt to achieve the trajectory that will transform them from SMBs into full-on enterprises. And this is a trend that likely won’t bend during the next decade.

This means that, even as they adopt new intelligent technologies, these growing companies will continue to need you out in front of the customer, doing what you’ve always done: creating financial solutions.

“Foundationally, accountants understand finance, but they also tend to have good problem-solving and critical-thinking skills,” said Pavan Satyaketu, a leader at consulting firm Advaion. “Businesses are increasingly working with accountants to help them tailor those skills to the client’s unique financial needs.”

Satyaketu said Advaion consultants are involved with young companies from their startup—advising them through first-round fundraising through customer relationship management (CRM) strategy and more, ultimately helping them grow and, in some cases, go public. (Scroll down to the bottom of this post to view open Advaion accounting jobs in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and New York City.)

You know how to mend the financial software gaps

Some firms have absconded traditional software in favor of cloud-based solutions and/or intelligent technology. But many still rely on the old tools of the trade—or are in the process of transitioning from one to the other. Throughout all these stages of technological maturity, growing companies rely on people with accounting skills to get the most out of their software.

“As companies move from the toddler-preteen stage, they hit a point where they are going to start growing quickly,” Satyaketu said. “They’ve been operating on a QuickBooks system, and now they need to move to a more sophisticated solution.”

Satyaketu said these companies will benefit most from working with consulting firms that have experience building a company from the ground up, noting that this means pointing the client to the right system scale and making sure they have the right CRM for their business needs. He said accounting skills are essential to managing those growth scales and making sure a company can meet its long-term expectations and contracts.

“Accounting skills help us answer questions like: Is the client really profitable? Does it have enough cash in the bank for the next 18 months? Answering those questions is critical to helping companies grow and scale,” he said.

You already have the leadership skills to take flight

Although a veteran Michael Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships during the 1990s, no one ever questioned the playability of the other four players who joined him on the court. (OK, a lot of people did, but they were wrong. Scottie Pippen was awesome.)

The same philosophy can be applied to young accountants who are increasingly stepping up to use their skills to relate to growing companies that are hungry to trim costs, increase productivity, and expand outside their existing business shells.

Like Scottie Pippen, Luc Longley, Dennis Rodman, and the rest of the ’90s Bulls, accountants may never be the star attraction. But without them and their skills, growing businesses will reach a frustrating Orlando Magic-esque plateau—right on the cusp of greatness but falling just short of championship gold.

Satyaketu said that one of the key components of Advaion’s success is the strong accounting skills of the firm’s consultants. Advaion employees understand the immense value they bring to growing companies and have the confidence to work directly with clients across the world.

“You want to always maximize your value, and that starts with understanding accounting processes,” he said. “By not understanding accounting, a growing business could leave a couple million dollars on the table because it doesn’t have the correct numbers at hand.”

Are you ready to maximize your potential?

Is being part of a firm that understands the future of the industry and helps its employees accelerate their careers important to you? Of course it is.

A career at Advaion capitalizes on your existing accounting skills, augmenting them with new abilities that help transform you into a future business leader. The firm exposes you to every part of the business, helping you grow your consulting and interpersonal skills while teaching you how to take advantage of AI and other new technology that is shaping the industry.

You’ll work with businesses of every size, helping them grow and achieve their goals as your career advances in lockstep with their success. If you’re ready to take your career to the next level, click one of the links below to apply for an open advising job at Advaion now.

Accounting jobs in New York City

Senior Manager

Senior IT Consultant

Financial Audit Consultant

Accounting jobs in Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Financial Audit Consultant

Senior IT Audit Consultant

The post Why Growing Companies Desperately Need People With Your Accounting Background appeared first on Going Concern.

While I’m sure they wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to hear about a juicy group fraud that maybe your former or current colleagues were involved in, or maybe even you were involved in, that’s not the goal of their research.

What they want to know is if you ever felt pressured to participate in a fraud or something else unethical with others in your organization and you refused. Why did you refuse to participate in it, and how were you able to avoid it? What person within your organization was the leader, or “recruiter,” of the fraudulent activity? What anti-fraud controls were in place at that time? What was the culture like in your organization?

Your participation in their research would be kept confidential.

[Click here if you aren’t sure if you qualify, or keep reading to learn more about their research.]

What is group fraud?

Group fraud, which the researchers define as “an intentional illegal act (fraud) committed with at least one other person within an organization,” is a less understood phenomenon than solo fraud, said Pamela Murphy, PhD, CPA, CFE, associate professor and E. Marie Shantz Fellow in Accounting, Stephen J.R. Smith School of Business, Queen’s University.

“Statistics have shown that within an organization, group fraud occurs more frequently than solo fraud,” she said. “And of course it costs so much more because when people work together, they can override controls more easily, and the fraud is so much bigger.”

A 2016 KPMG report found that fraud is almost twice as likely to occur in groups as in solitude, partly because fraudsters need to collude to circumvent anti-fraud controls, such as internal audit, suspicious managers and co-workers, and anti-fraud processes. Colluders also tend to do more damage than individual fraudsters; 34% of those who participated in a group fraud cost their company $1 million or more, whereas only 16% of solo frauds exceeded that amount, according to the KPMG report.

In addition, KPMG revealed that men tend to collude more than women do—by a five-to-one margin—but the proportion of women involved in a group fraud has increased since 2010. Male fraudsters tend to be more senior than women in the organization.

Some of the more common types of fraud that could be perpetrated as a group include:

• Misappropriation of assets (theft, disbursement schemes, inventory schemes)
• Corruption (bribery, using one’s organizational influence for personal gain)
• Fraudulent statements (falsified financial statements, falsified tax returns)

“Fraud hits you in the head like a feather”

But for those of you who trusted your gut instinct and declined to be a part of something unethical, the researchers want to find out why you resisted that temptation. They have already examined those who didn’t heed their gut instinct.

“There’s a saying in business that, ‘Business decisions should be rational. Don’t let your emotions get involved.’ But this is a case when you should let your emotions get involved because your emotions are telling you about the warning signals,” Murphy said.

One husband and wife team who were convicted of fraud ignored the warning signals until it was too late, according to Murphy. Several years ago, the husband had gotten the job of his dreams working for a large, privately-held company in the U.S., he told Murphy during an interview. He was part of the C-suite, basically heading up all of the administrative functions within the organization, such as accounting and human resources, and he was tasked with hiring several midlevel managers for the company. He had to hire them quickly, and he wanted to impress his boss.

It just so happened that his wife was a headhunter, so he hired her, even though there was an obvious conflict of interest.

“Part of him knew this because he told his wife to bill the company using her maiden name so they wouldn’t attach the names to each other. But at the start, she was charging a reasonable amount. There was no fraud. She helped him hire quickly, so he looked great to his boss, and things were going beautifully,” Murphy said.

The wife ended up dropping all of her other clients and worked solely for her husband’s company. Because of this, he told her to raise her rates a little bit, so she started charging the company more, unbeknownst to management. Eventually they realized that “we might actually be committing fraud here,” Murphy said.

“They were quite worried about what to do about it, so he decided to leave his job, which he did,” she said. “They thought this was all behind them. But after he left, the company started putting in a new accounts payable system, came across these invoices that appeared to be too high, and started an investigation. When they realized what happened, the company pressed criminal charges. The husband and wife were both found guilty.”

The researchers want to understand how the recruitment process works. Who tried to recruit you to participate in a group fraud? Did that person fit the typical profile of a recruiter, which, according to Murphy, is a high-ranking, male C-suite executive, like a CEO, who is both very charismatic and manipulative, and cajoles people into doing things they know they shouldn’t be doing?

“There’s been research that shows that top executives tend to have more narcissistic qualities, tend to have more psychopathic tendencies,” Murphy said.

Kinda like some Big 4 partners, amirite?

She added: “When you take that to more of an extreme, those are definitely the recruiters.”

In addition, the researchers want to know what management controls were in place—and what controls weren’t in place—to deter a group fraud. Weak internal controls were a contributing factor in allowing 61% of frauds to occur and go undetected, according to KPMG’s report. And 27% of people who committed fraud did so because an opportunity presented itself due to weak controls or a lack thereof, up from 18% in 2013.

The researchers also want to know a little bit about the organization’s culture. During Murphy’s interview with the husband who was convicted of fraud, she asked him about the company’s culture at the time he was committing fraud with his wife. He said the culture was to “move very, very fast,” and that fast-paced environment drove him to do something illegal. In addition, he told Murphy that some of his C-suite colleagues were also doing suspicious things, such as bringing in a shredder and shredding a whole bunch of documents outside of the company’s regular shredding time.

As the interview with the husband concluded, Murphy said he sort of slumped down in his chair and said, “Fraud hits you in the head like a feather.”

How you can participate

If you’re interested in sharing your experience of refusing to participate in a group fraud or other unethical activity, you have two ways of helping out the researchers:

1. Interview: Fill out this form and the researchers will contact you for an interview. Use this form also if you’re not sure if you qualify for their study. Your responses will be kept confidential.

2. Answer survey questions: The survey will take about 30 minutes to complete. Your answers will be kept confidential. And for every 10 people who complete the survey, the researchers will draw a name, and if your name is chosen, they will make a $100 contribution to your favorite charity.

Thanks for helping them out, and please share the survey with anyone you know who may have been approached to participate in a fraud.

The post Have You Been Approached By a Colleague to Participate In a Fraud? appeared first on Going Concern.

Will accountants be plugged into a giant matrix, their bioelectricity used to power evil machine overlords, even though a human being is about the stupidest thing you could possibly use as a battery (sorry Wachowskis)?

We sat down with Pavan Satyaketu, a leader at consulting firm Advaion, to get some real answers. Then we did some research of our own to make sure Pavan knows what he’s talking about (turns out, he does!) and to create some more realistic projections on the future of accounting.

Here are four ways the accounting industry will (probably) change in the next 20 years. We’re pretty confident about these predictions, but if robots or zombies do rise up and destroy human civilization, you’re welcome to come back and tell us how wrong we were.

1. (Human) accountants will still be a thing …

With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer automation in recent years, large accounting firms have adapted to a much more IT-reliant work environment.

The Big 4 firms are quickly moving from rows of paper-filled drawers to bot-created computer files stored on invisible cloud servers—virtually eliminating the need for human data entry.

With all these automated changes in the world of accounting, many number-crunching experts have begun to ask the logical question: Are accountants a dying breed?

The quick answer: No. But in order to remain relevant and employed, future accountants and auditors will be forced to make better use of their interpersonal and analytical skills to supplement the continuous changes in automated technology. In other words, we don’t need Miss Cleo to tell us what we already know—human interaction still reigns.

2. … but accounting jobs will look a lot different

It wasn’t long ago that most of us were jumping for joy at the sight of two line graphs crossing on our TI-83 calculators. Today IBM, General Electric, and other tech giants are helping businesses save money and improve accuracy through the use of robot automation for routine tasks.

Due to these advances, many accounting firms are restructuring to remove administrative jobs and are now using AI for accounts payable and receivable. With basic accounting being outsourced to microchips, how much work is left for humans?

According to Satyaketu, a lot. An advisor and former Big 4 accountant, he believes the next generation must understand how the entire business works, not just the accounting department.

Satyaketu said that tomorrow’s accountants will be required to have plenty of advising and consulting skills, as they’ll be called upon to help clients forecast and evaluate financial decisions in ways a computer cannot. And as technology will automate more of the basic numbers tasks, accountants will also need to get better at dealing with *gasp* real people.

“In 20 years, we will have AI interpreting all of our work, but ultimately we’ll need to relay that information to the client,” he said. “You’re going to have to use your base knowledge and advisory skills, as well as interpersonal skills, to a much greater extent than today.”

3. Accounting basics will still be invaluable

Computers have never been perfect. And from what we learned from the Back to the Future series, there’s a good chance two decades won’t change that. Accountants will still need solid math and basic accounting skills to solve solutions that AI might misinterpret.

“Technology will make things much more efficient, but we’re still going to have to go into IT and pull out the anomalies and discrepancies and work through them,” Satyaketu said. “You’re going to have to have the knowledge to say, ‘Well, the computer is giving us an output of x, but I know that it should be y, and I can prove it.’ It will force us to be much more analytical in that regard.”

But again, tomorrow’s clients are going to want to see the faces behind those numbers. And that means accountants who can also deliver some good ol’ fashioned service with a smile will have a leg up on those who struggle to speak human.

“We’re going to have to sit down with clients and go through business processes,” Satyaketu said. “Accountants will be responsible for explaining to companies what they can fix and how they can reposition themselves to improve their business.”  

4. Robots will be our friends, not our overlords (at least not yet)

Why won’t robots take over the accounting world? Well, imagine Bender from Futurama running a client meeting. It’d be funny, sure, but about the fifth or sixth time he chugged a beer and burped fire across the conference table, the clients would run screaming for the hills.

AI is great for some things, but firms won’t want it at the forefront of the company. It won’t be responsible for key client interactions, and it won’t get the final say on business-critical decisions. We’ll still need people for that—preferably, people who are good at talking to and working with our robot buddies.

“I think accountants who understand technology will rise to the top,” Satyaketu said. “Yes, the robots are coming, but they aren’t going to take away our jobs.”

If the current market for accountants is any indication of what is in store for the industry, the future looks bright for those hoping to make it at a big firm. Despite automation, there will likely remain a high demand for those willing and able to adapt.

“Accounting will always be in demand,” Satyaketu said. “While we may change the way we do our jobs and interact with clients, the profession will not fade.”

Your accounting job future is now

As the accounting world continues to evolve, why not take advantage of the opportunity to grow with it? A career in advising gives you the skills accountants will need in 2040 today, exposing you to every part of the business and helping you grow your consulting and interpersonal skills.

And if you’re going to make the switch, there’s no better place to do it than at Satyaketu’s firm, Advaion. Lucky for you, it’s hiring now.

At Advaion, you’ll not only learn to become a better advisor, consultant, and client confidant, you’ll also get to work with cutting-edge technology like AI and business process automation. Forget 2040—at Advaion you can start living the future today.

Click one of the links below to apply for an open advising job at Advaion.

Accounting jobs in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Advaion Senior Consultant (New York City)

Advaion Senior Consultant (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)

The post Accounting in 2040: 4 Ways the Industry Will (Probably) Change in 20 Years appeared first on Going Concern.

But we’d prefer just about anything over being trapped in the figurative dungeon of boring, thankless accounting jobs.

Here’s something that’s more omg-so-awesome “Breaking Bad” finale than fade-to-black “Sopranos” finale: a list of the best open accounting jobs. These are jobs where you’ll enjoy flexible working options, real work/life balance, and fewer moments that make you feel like slashing your paperwork to shreds with a Valerian steel sword.

Through our partners at Accountingfly, we’re dedicated to helping you escape the dungeon. Head over to their site now to upload your resume and see more of the best open accounting jobs.

This quarter’s job list is sponsored by Aprio, which is looking for a Tax Experienced Associate in Atlanta (as well as some remote positions) and Advaion, which is hiring Financial Audit Consultants in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Top remote accounting jobs:

Remote NetSuite Technical Specialist
Aprio Cloud

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Remote Xero Accountant
Brenner

Brenner is a rapidly growing firm looking to hire a Remote Xero Accountant and for a number of other accounting jobs. If you’re an expert Xero user, enjoy performing end-to-end accounting, and like working directly with clients, this is the opportunity for you. Brenner is passionate about the future of outsourced accounting and is seeking candidates who exhibit that same passion.

Requirements:

• Mastery of Xero’s automation functions.
• Two-plus years experience championing Xero with clients.
• Two-plus years handling migrations.
• Two-plus years experience providing Xero third-party integration support.
• Three-plus years of cloud-based bookkeeping experience.
• Experience working directly with clients.
• Basic knowledge of income tax preparation.
• A working understanding of the current app ecosystem available to accountants.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Remote Sales and Use Tax Accountant
TaxConnex

TaxConnex prides itself in providing clients with the highest level of customer service and professionalism in the sales and use tax outsourcing market. The Remote Sales and Use Tax Accountant position is a fully remote and flexible work arrangement—you decide how many hours you want to work. Sales tax experience and tech experience are NOT required—TaxConnex will train you and provide technical support.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in accounting.
• Finance or master’s degree in business administration.
• CPA, CMI, or seven-plus years sales and use tax compliance experience.
• Liability insurance, including errors and omissions and malpractice insurance.
• Dedicated home-office workspace with high-speed internet connection.
• Active office or cellular telephone.
• Laptop with minimum i5 processor, 6GB RAM, 320GB hard drive.
• Printer, scanner, fax machine.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Remote VP of Technical Accounting
Kruze Consulting

Kruze provides CFO consulting to 175-plus startups, and its clients have raised more than $500 million in venture capital in the past 12 months.

As the Vice President of Technical Accounting, you’ll direct and manage all aspects of accounting operations for Kruze Consulting clients. You’ll work closely with the CEO/COO/CFO on each engagement to ensure accuracy, adherence to deadlines, and great client experiences.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree required, concentration in accounting or finance preferred.
• 10-plus years of relative experience.
• Big 4 experience preferred and CPA or qualified CPA track candidate.
• Strong knowledge of GAAP, accounting theory, principles, and practices.
• Proven work experience leading large teams (25-plus people).
• Proven work experience leading remote teams.
• In-depth knowledge of performance metrics.
• Degree in management or training in team leading is a plus.
• Preferably located in one of the following time zones: Pacific, Mountain, or Central.
• Deep technical experience with: QuickBooks Online, Bill.com, Expensify, Gusto, and/or Rippling.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Top location-specific accounting jobs:

New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. – Financial Audit Consultant
Advaion

Advaion believes it’s possible to be premier consultants and have a life. It’s hard to believe, but it’s really that simple. The financial advisory firm is looking to build its team, and its leadership is committed to helping you grow your career. Your personal success is Advaion’s most important goal.

Advaion is hiring Financial Audit Consultants with public accounting experience in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Its staff enjoys serious career development, challenging projects, limited travel, profit share, and bonuses while performing at an incredibly high level.

Requirements:

• Three-plus years of public accounting and/or external/internal audit experience.
• SEC reporting, SOX, and financial audit experience.
• Excellent communication skills (oral and written).

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter – New York City

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter – Fort Lauderdale

Atlanta – Information Assurance Services, Experienced or Senior Associate
Aprio

Submerge yourself in a workplace with creative innovators striving for excellence. Aprio is the 50th-largest CPA firm in the nation and has been honored as the “Best of the Best” accounting and forensic accounting firm by INSIDE Public Accounting. It was recently named one of the Top Places to Work in Atlanta by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Over 25 languages are spoken at Aprio, and 25% of its staff is foreign-born. The firm specializes in eight different industries. As an Information Assurance Services Associate, you’ll gain priceless experiences and skills that will help both you and the company grow. Aprio wants you to define its brand positioning, contribute to industry-leading innovation, and help its clients thrive.

Requirements:

• Certified or willingness to become certified within two years of employment.
• Certifications include one or more of the following: CISA, CRISC, CIPP, CISSP, CISM, QSA, ISO/IEC 27001, or PCI ISA.
• Undergraduate degree (required): preferably in MIS/IS or related concentration, minimum 3.3 GPA.
• Graduate degree (preferred): preferably in MIS, IS, or accounting information systems.
• Two to four years relevant accounting jobs work experience.
• Understanding of information technology risks and internal controls.
• Ability to write test procedures and execute tests of controls.
• Understanding of SOC, PCI, ISO, HITRUST, and/or similar information technology control frameworks.
• Ability to travel up to 40%.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Atlanta – Tax Experienced Associate
Aprio

If you want to read about what a great firm Aprio is in general, see the preceding job post.

Aprio’s Tax group provides the opportunity to work and form relationships with middle- to large-sized tax clients. If you prefer accounting jobs where you work with diverse and energetic teams, our Tax Department will be a perfect fit for you to thrive and build your career. As an Associate in Aprio’s Tax Department, a typical day might include: 1) interacting closely with clients to provide tax planning, consulting, and compliance services; and 2) working closely with seniors and managers on delivering innovative tax planning strategies.

Requirements:

• Recent work experience with an accounting firm.
• Two to three years experience in tax consulting and/or compliance experience in public accounting.
• Experience in C corporation and multistate highly preferred.
• Experience in technology/fintech industry preferred.
• Computer expertise, including knowledge of tax software and technology.
• Bachelor’s (four years) degree in accounting.
• Master’s degree in taxation preferred.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Philadelphia – Entry-Level Accountant
Kregel CPAs

Kregel & Company is an atypical accounting firm. It provides clients with a refreshing CPA experience, combining innovative technology with expertise and a deep sense of care. The firm offers accounting services, tax planning, payroll, and business consulting. More importantly, it offers peace of mind and the insights small business owners need to reach their goals.

If you’re looking for an entry-level accounting or bookkeeping job within a purpose-driven group, where you can grow as a person and a professional, check out Kregel.

Requirements:

• One to three years experience in an accounting/bookkeeper role.
• Experience in customer service or a customer-facing role (preferred).
• Diploma or degree in accounting (preferred).
• CPA (preferred).
• Payroll experience (preferred).
• Xero online accounting software experience (preferred).

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Manhattan Beach, California – Accounting Manager
Beach Cities Accounting

As Accounting Manager, you’ll be responsible for leading the accounting team and performing hands-on accounting work for Beach Cities Accounting’s clients. You’ll also work to strengthen ongoing operations for strategy and human resources and improve client outcomes.

The Accounting Manager will perform hands-on Controller work, recruit and onboard new clients, expand existing client relationships, manage accounts payable/receivable, account coding of bank feeds, reconcile balance sheets for clients, and manage and recruit top accounting talent for open accounting jobs.

Requirements:

• Proven experience as an accounting manager or a similar relevant role.
• At least five years experience in accounting.
• Experience working with multiple clients.
• Highly proficient with QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online.
• Tech-forward personality and strong interest in learning new technologies.
• Ability to develop client relationships.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

The post Escaping the Dungeon: The Hottest Accounting Jobs for Q2 2019 appeared first on Going Concern.

That’s exactly what Advaion’s Pavan Satyaketu, a managing director, did when he left the Big 4—arguably at near the top of his field—to enter the world of advising jobs and become a leader at an advisory firm in 2004. Despite his initial success in accounting, the 20-something immigrant realized his passion lay elsewhere, and took a career gamble at a time when the Office Space “Bobs” and Dilbert were still accountant synonyms.

We recently caught up with Satyaketu and asked him about his start, career switch to advising jobs, path to success, and words of wisdom to those accountants looking to make a transition into more of an advisory role.

Adolescent to accountant

Going Concern: First off, tell us a little bit about your background. Where’d you grow up, and how’d you get into accounting?

Pavan Satyaketu: I grew up as one of five boys in a three-bedroom house in the West Indies. We were a working-class family. My father suggested an accounting path, as he knew it would be a career with high demand. I started my career at Price Waterhouse, as they offered tuition loans in a position that allowed me to work full time and go to school part time, nights, and weekends.

GC: Where’d you go from there?

Satyaketu: I eventually followed my parents to Fort Lauderdale—moving to Miami in the late 1990s to work at a large pharmaceutical company. I soon realized I couldn’t stay there if I wanted to build my career, so I decided to go big and moved to New York without a job. After cold-calling, I landed interviews at a number of firms and ultimately decided to join KPMG.

From the Big 4 to advising jobs

GC: You rose quickly through the Big 4 ranks, but ultimately left after 10 years. What prompted the switch to the world of advising jobs?

Satyaketu: I think by the end of 2002, I started to see a shift in what I was doing. While I loved the company and team I worked with, my work kept me focused on numbers and away from business operations altogether.

GC: And you knew then you were ready to move?

Satyaketu: In the summer of 2003, I went on vacation with my younger brothers, and I saw that my daughter was more comfortable with them than with me. I realized then that I couldn’t take on a lot of travel and long hours at the office and have quality time with my daughter at the same time. My grandfather and uncle both died in their early 50s, and I knew I didn’t want to wait until I got older to start enjoying life with her.

Does Pavan sound like the type of guy you’d like to work with? He works at an advisory firm, Advaion, which is currently hiring. Scroll to the bottom of this post to apply for an open advising position.

GC: How were you able to successfully make the transition from the Big 4 to advising jobs

Satyaketu: After a decade of watching and helping great companies—nationally and internationally—and seeing just how passionate people were with their work, I found that my view was only from the outside as an auditor. I wasn’t part of the team that was growing a company. I wanted to be part of the team and drive success instead of just being the auditor who gave them an audit opinion on their financials.

Advice to the future advising jobs seeker

GC: What advice would you give to someone working at the Big 4 or another firm who is looking to transition into something else?

Satyaketu: It all depends on what they are trying to transition into. The Big 4 has so many smart people, and because those people work with so many different clients, they develop a lot of skill sets they use daily—project management, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, and analytical skills, to name a few. I think they really need to sit down and evaluate their skill sets to see what they do well and see where they fit in. A lot of times those skill sets fit into an advisory role.

GC: What are some mistakes people make when trying to transition from a big accounting firm

Satyaketu: Knee-jerk reactions. When you encounter something you don’t like—be it financial regulations or something in life—our human nature tends to cause us to react a little extreme. That’s the worst thing we can do to ourselves and our careers. Fortunately, I got a call from someone who needed help to get financials together, and I realized I had a lot of other skill sets people valued as a resource. When we try to get away from something, doing the opposite to the extreme is not often a good thing, and it can result in a disservice to ourselves.

Advaion: The perfect place to transition from accounting to advising jobs

Does Satyaketu’s story sound familiar? Can you relate to his frustrations with accounting jobs? Maybe it’s time you followed his path and made the switch from accounting to an advisory career.

For more than a decade, Advaion has served as a trusted advisor for clients in several industries. The independent consulting firm’s staff is comprised primarily of former Big 4 business professionals—so if you’re currently working at one of the Big 4, you may be exactly the recruit Advaion is looking for.

At Advaion, you’ll provide your clients with the most up-to-date information related to regulatory, compliance, management, and technology trends. You’ll foster a relationship of trust with your clients, helping them make smarter financial decisions and grow their businesses.

If you’re still reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve decided you don’t want to go to medical school to learn the difference between anaphase A and anaphase B, and are looking to make the transition from accounting to advising jobs. And just like Satyaketu, if you possess the skills and drive to succeed, Advaion may be a great fit for you.

Click one of the links below to apply for open advising jobs at Advaion now.

Advising jobs in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Financial Audit Consultant (New York City)

Financial Audit Consultant (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)

The post He Made the American Dream Real: From Foreign Lands to Big 4 Auditor to a Leader at an Advisory Firm appeared first on Going Concern.

The 30th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference will be June 23-28 in Austin, Texas. (Those who can’t make it to Austin are encouraged to attend the Virtual Conference online.) The event features more than 80 speakers who will recall their fraud experiences of working for some of the most prestigious private and public financial institutions in the world.

Here’s a preview of five of the juiciest ones—but if you want the full stories and more, you’ll have to attend the conference.

1. From Russia to financial fraud with Browder

While it may sound more like a campy James Bond plot than a real-life money-laundering scheme, the tax return fraud that pitted Hermitage Capital head Bill Browder against the Russian government is every bit as real as Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s obsession with Persian cats.

According to testimony given by Browder’s tax advisor Sergei Magnitsky in 2009, Russian police and tax officials tried to steal $230 million in Russian taxes paid by Browder’s Moscow-based investment firm, Hermitage Capital.

Here’s where things take a turn for the Orwellian: Shortly after Magnitsky reported his findings to authorities, he was jailed and ultimately killed in prison.

Browder will be on hand at this year’s ACFE Global Fraud Conference to talk about the mind-blowing investigation and the resulting death of his friend, his involvement in passing the Magnitsky Act, and Russia’s current efforts to put him behind bars.

2. An offshore drilling

In what has been lauded as one of the largest and most successful financial data combs in history, the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers would never have seen the light of day if not for German journalist Bastian Obermayer.

After receiving information from anonymous sources, he and a team of other journalists exposed companies as big as Apple and Nike for their illegal offshore tax havens.

Just how big is this speaker? Alex Winter, who played Bill in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, recently directed a Hulu documentary about Obermayer’s financial fraud bombshell. Air guitar solo!

3. Financial fraud presidential prowess

As the first female to serve as chief information officer for a White House administration, from 2006 to 2008 Theresa Payton was in charge of countering the most egregious cyberattacks on our nation’s financial sector during the dawn of a new age of computer hacking.

Today, she is the founder and CEO of Fortalice Solutions and the co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Dark Cubed. Payton is regarded as one of the top 50 IT security experts in the world. As a speaker at this year’s ACFE Global Fraud Conference, she’ll have plenty to talk about—including her stint as an actor on the CBS show “Hunted.”

4. Breaking bad guys

You might call Lisa Osofsky the Harvey Dent of the fraud world (minus the whole acid-in-the-face thing). As a former FBI lawyer in the U.S., she helped put away high-level mafia figures, predatory lenders, and other financial swindlers.

One of her most notable prosecutions came in 2012, when HSBC failed to act on the Mexican drug cartel money being laundered through its banks. Monitoring the group’s financial moves for months, Osofsky and her team sprang into action—helping the U.S. Department of Justice force a $1.9 billion settlement from the British company.

In 2018, she became the U.K.’s director of the Serious Fraud Office, bringing her no-nonsense Gotham-esque crime-fighting experience across the pond. You won’t want to miss her when she heads to Austin in June (register for the ACFE Global Fraud Conference now).

5. Being positive about bloody financial fraud

Known as the key whistleblower at the now-defunct Theranos healthcare group, Tyler Shultz exposed the company for its false claim that it had invented technology to minimize blood-testing practices. Subsequently, its founder Elizabeth Holmes was indicted on wire fraud and conspiracy charges, with much of the evidence against her derived from Shultz’s depositions and interviews.

Shultz is now the CEO and co-founder of Flux Biosciences Inc. and was named a “30 Under 30” by Forbes in 2017. He’ll be accepting an award at this year’s conference.

Hear the full financial fraud stories at the ACFE Global Fraud Conference

In addition to the distinguished speakers and keynote sessions, this year’s ACFE Global Fraud Conference will feature two new programs designed to help you earn the CFE credential.

Attendees will also have access to more than 100 educational sessions and can earn up to 40 CPE credits. On top of that, it’s a fun networking experience that gives you a competitive edge among your financial peers.

Don’t miss this opportunity to accelerate your finance or accounting career—and hear all of the exclusive details from this year’s biggest financial fraud stories. Plan to be in Austin, Texas, from June 23-28 to attend the 30th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference.

(If you can’t get to Austin but don’t want to miss out, you can still attend the Virtual Conference for access to live online sessions, on-demand videos, and the opportunity to earn up to 26 CPE credits.)

Learn more about the ACFE Global Fraud Conference.

Or go ahead and register for the ACFE Global Fraud Conference event now.

The post 5 Crazy Fraud Stories You Would Never Believe (If They Weren’t True) appeared first on Going Concern.

While they may have grown up texting in lieu of talking and “dancing” with headphones at silent discos, like it or not, millennials are now the largest and most prolific voice in the accounting world. And their attitudes and preferences are influencing every part of accounting office culture—particularly when it comes to new technology.

Some say millennials are “lazy.” We say they’re driven, just driven in their own way—a way that includes an insistence on embracing new ways of working. From artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud-based computing to project management software and social media platforms, millennials have evolved the accounting industry with technology.

Here are three ways they did it—and continue to do it today.

1. They initiated real-time reporting

By 2020, nearly half of the U.S. workforce will be made up of millennials. And that’s good news for the accounting industry, which needs their energy to spark plateauing firm growth.

Richard Kopelman, CEO and managing partner at Aprio, believes that having a younger, tech-savvy workforce not only benefits clients, but also challenges firms to work smarter through the use of new real-time software and different methods of problem solving.

“We respect and are adapting to how millennials work and how they view things,” Kopelman said. “They have a different engagement level and bring different abilities that greatly contribute to our company.”

And that millennial focus is important, considering more than 90% of businesses now prefer a real-time accountant when dealing with their financial information.

Today’s more progressive firms are transitioning business clients from old-school desktop products like QuickBooks to online software like NetSuite and Xero where they can see their finances in real-time. And millennials are expediting this transition.

Just how beneficial is real-time software? It’s like going from a rotary phone to an iPhone X. No longer is a client stuck wondering about the status of their finances or forced to call their accountant to ask an important question during a sales meeting. (Also, it doesn’t take nearly as long to dial a 9.) Accountants and clients alike are always just a few clicks away from the most up-to-date information.

“It’s not about just doing compliance work anymore,” said Danielle Berg, Aprio chief marketing and communications officer. “Sometime soon, every employee will be able to come into work in the morning and know what’s going on real-time with clients. And that’s really exciting.”

2. They put their heads in the cloud

When Nintendo released its Power Glove roughly 30 years ago, the peripheral was supposed to revolutionize the gaming world. Instead, it bombed under the weight of its ill-conceived lagging hardware that had buyers desperately blowing air into their NES cartridges, hoping for a “fix” that would never come.

Accounting suffered a similar blow in the early 2000s. Firms were counting on emerging technology to help them deliver better service to clients, but the net effect of new tech was a negative one. Technology, along with a healthy dose of corporate consolidation, made it possible for many companies to perform more of their accounting work in-house. As a result, public accounting firms saw business growth begin to stagnate.

Then came millennials to the rescue—helping to revive the industry by moving mobile accounting software and advisory roles to the forefront and achieving the tech-driven higher levels of client service public accounting firms needed to spark new growth.

Much of this evolution is occurring in the cloud, with the average organization investing $1.62 million in cloud computing. While some industry staples continue to stay the course with yesterday’s economics, companies like Aprio understand the massive opportunity the cloud represents. These firms are implementing both public and private cloud technology, training and promoting millennials who know how to use it, and adapting their work styles to take advantage of everything the cloud offers.

With data-entry tasks pushed to automation, the cloud has allowed young accountants to provide clients with more detail-oriented work—at flexible hours—and enables them to easily collaborate with their teams on special projects.

Their heads always in the clouds, proverbially and literally, millennials can provide better client interactions and are setting up their firms for advancement in ways never thought possible 20 years ago.

“The pace of technology is going to make us run fast,” Berg said. “We as a company have to commit to being lifelong learners and understand all the new tech, from real-time to mobile to cloud to remote.”

3. They moved business away from the office

Thanks in large part to millennial interview inquiries, remote accounting jobs are growing faster than ever. That makes some managers nervous, but millennials are alleviating their stress by driving the use of Google Hangouts, Slack, and other mobile software that makes it easier for accountants to effectively work from anywhere.

With its millennial-majority workforce, Aprio has embraced the remote revolution—and that seems to be a good thing for employees and clients alike. Kopelman said the remote option fits hand-in-glove with what many clients are now demanding.

“We’re in a position to accelerate growth and serve that next generation of clients and meet them where they want to be met,” he said. “I think that means we will be more virtual in the future. Our people will be more effective when they work from anywhere rather than being tied down to an office all day.”

Aprio needs forward-thinking accountants like you

Is your employer behind the tech curve? Time and again, Aprio has separated itself from other global firms by committing more resources to cloud accounting, AI/ML, remote work, analytics, and forward-looking insights based on data.

If you want to work at a firm with a progressive approach to technology—where you can improve your skills, advance your career and compensation, enjoy more work/life flexibility, and connect with clients to feel the direct impact of your work—you should consider an accounting job at Aprio. Click one of the links below to apply now.

Remote accounting jobs (work from anywhere)

Remote Implementation Associate

Virtual Ecosystems Solutions Architect

Remote Senior Accountant, eCommerce

Atlanta, Georgia accounting jobs

SALT Associate

Recruiter

R&D Senior Associate

Audit Senior Associate

The post 3 Ways Millennials Changed the Accounting Industry with Technology appeared first on Going Concern.

Even with the complication of buyouts and mergers, top 100 CPA firms have historically been named after founders. In fact, some states even require it—solidifying a tradition that many partners still prefer.

That’s why when Habif, Arogeti & Wynne (HA&W) defied the norm and changed its name to Aprio in 2017, it was seen by many industry experts as a bold move.

But bold is nothing new to the folks at Aprio, who for years have redefined what it means to be a successful mid-market, top 100 firm—aiming for the future when others have stuck to their traditional accounting guns.

Aprio Chief Marketing Officer Danielle Berg spent more than a year working on the rebranding campaign that led to the eventual name change.

“As a company, we like being disruptive in a very traditional industry,” Berg said. “I think a lot of firms want to do this but just aren’t ready to make the leap.”

Berg said it was vital for the 65-year-old firm to develop a brand that was as fresh and forward-thinking as its strategy—noting that the company will continue to transition into more advisory services and focus on additional business acquisitions.

Along with the name change came a newly-minted tagline: “Passionate for what’s next.”

“Our tagline is all about helping our clients look forward. That’s where the value is for firms like Aprio,” Berg said.

Branding from the inside out

Having previously worked at IBM and various consulting firms, Berg was a greenhorn to the CPA world when she joined HA&W in 2014. In an effort to better understand the firm’s culture and how to brand the business for the future, she spent her first 100 days asking employees one simple question: “What does HA&W stand for?”

“Every time I’d ask the question, I’d get a different answer,” Berg said. “Which meant that the brand didn’t stand for anything outside of the three founders.”

After months of interviews of both team members and clients, the issue of the firm’s name continued to crop up. So when Berg began to work with CEO Richard Kopelman on the company’s 2020 vision, they both knew they needed a name that would position the firm for the future. Less than a year later, “Aprio” topped the firm’s letterhead.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I envision changing the firm’s name. But through the process, we realized we needed to do it, and we were open-minded enough to make the change,” Berg said.

Interested in working at Aprio, a firm that combines the flexibility of a startup with the global resources and prestige of a big enterprise? Scroll to the bottom of the article to apply for open accounting jobs now—both remote and in-office accounting jobs are available.

A firm reflection of the future

The name “Aprio” was not an overnight brainstorm—it’s rooted from two words: cap (head) and aria (song for the heart). Berg said the idea is that the best client experience comes from both the head (the technical expertise) and the heart (the deep care and genuine engagement of Aprio team members).

“One of the most gratifying things is when employees tell me our name now embodies who we are,” Berg said. “Their excitement was more important to me than even the client reaction initially.”

And that excitement has resonated into the firm’s recruiting process, helping brand its workplace as one that’s poised to face industry changes head-on—most notably the switch to AI auditing and human advising.

“Our company is now running a program called STAR that teaches accountants how to be advisors,” Berg said. “It’s all part of our commitment to look ahead, to grow our advisory practice and help our team members develop the skills they’ll need for the future. If you’re an accounting student looking for career options, I don’t think you can do much better than Aprio.”

Get an accounting job at a progressive firm

A successful company not only needs a great brand to attract new clients, but also one that attracts great talent to work for it. At Aprio, employees are given the keys to their career success and the tools to make a difference with their clients each and every day.

Structured with an entrepreneurial mindset, the 450-person Atlanta firm encourages remote work and shared ideas—no matter your experience level.

“With 50% of our workforce being millennials, we believe the best ideas come from everyone, not just the top,” Berg said.

Aprio needs your accounting skills

Ready to join a firm that offers the perfect balance of progressive flexibility and global resources? Join Aprio, where you can fast-track your compensation and career development, enjoy great work/life flexibility, and connect with clients to feel the direct impact of your work. Click one of the links below to apply now.

Remote accounting jobs (work from anywhere)

Remote Implementation Associate

Virtual Ecosystems Solutions Architect

Remote Senior Accountant

Remote Senior Tax Accountant

Atlanta, Georgia accounting jobs

Recruiter

Wealth Advisor

R&D Senior Associate

Audit Senior Associate

Transaction Advisory Senior Manager

The post Why Is Aprio the Only Top 100 CPA Firm with a Non-Traditional Name? appeared first on Going Concern.

Let’s pause our narrative here for a moment and do a little exercise. Try to remember what you were doing three days ago at 11:14 a.m.

If you can answer accurately without checking your calendar or digging through your emails, you’re either: a) Will Hunting, or b) a sentient machine sent back in time to assassinate John Connor, ensure the success of the robot uprising, and then become governor of California for some reason.

And yet, as ridiculous as it sounds on its surface, this exercise is pretty much what the poor fee earners from our story will be asked to do before they can end their workweeks.

Now, these employees will have the benefit of using their calendars, emails, and notes as points of reference, but let’s be real—few accounting and consulting professionals can reconstruct exactly what they were working on every hour of every week.

But a new generation of AI-powered technology is breathing life back into the timesheet, absconding manual entry in favor of digital assistants that capture activity in real-time, dig through various network resources to estimate how time was spent, make smart predictions about future project scale, and even generate automatically-prepared timesheets.

We reached out to an industry expert and did some research of our own to determine why embracing these new timesheet processes is important and how those changes can benefit firms. Here are four reasons the accounting firm timesheet must evolve in 2019:

1. Smarter pricing

Let’s say there’s a particular accounting or consulting process that your firm has been performing relatively the same way for years. We’ll call it Process Alpha, because that kind of sounds like the title of a James Bond film, and we all know accountants are basically the same thing as swashbuckling British super spies.

You charge your clients $50,000 for Process Alpha. Why $50,000? Because that’s what you’ve always charged, and that’s close to what your competitors charge.

But how many man-hours does it truly take to complete Process Alpha? You have a general idea, but because you’re relying on manual timesheet data that may contain inaccuracies, you can’t be sure.

With intelligent, automated timesheet software, the picture becomes clearer. Now that you know the exact amount of labor required to complete Process Alpha, you may learn that it has a low profit margin or is even a money loser, and you need to either adjust your price or quit offering it altogether.

Conversely, you could discover that Process Alpha is a cash cow. You could then lower the price to become more competitive, or just instruct your sales team to start pushing it harder.

“Timesheet software that uses AI and activity capture makes it easier for fee earners to report their time more accurately,” Mike Marubio, vice president of business development at Intapp, said. “The resulting data is wildly valuable for management. The things you can do with it are astounding. You can start pricing your engagements correctly, and that’s just the beginning.”

Free white paper from Intapp: Accelerate acceptance and continuance with automation

2. More efficient project management

In a scene from Return of the Jedi, Rebel Alliance Chancellor Mon Mothma outlines a two-pronged plan to destroy the Empire’s second Death Star. First, a ground assault team, led by Han “probably still has frostbite” Solo, will infiltrate the forest moon of Endor to deactivate the shield generator.

After sufficient time has passed for Han’s unit to complete this objective, a squadron of starfighters—led by Lando “sorry about that whole betrayal thing” Calrissian—will fly into the Death Star and blast its reactor core with a proton torpedo, causing an explosive chain reaction that will take out the entire station.

We don’t know how long Han is given to complete the ground mission, but for the sake of whatever, let’s call it 36 hours. What we do know is that, thanks in part to the interference of an indigenous race of merchandise-friendly teddy bears, Han fails to complete the mission on time. When Lando begins his assault, the Death Star’s shield is still up, forcing the Rebel fleet to hold off the attack and causing the deaths of countless pilots and crew.

Of course Han does eventually get the shield down, allowing the Rebels to successfully blow up the Death Star (again). But that’s beside the point. The real takeaway here is—Mon Mothma’s project management skills need some serious improvement. This was a project that required very precise timing, and Ms. Mothma dropped the ball big time.

Maybe it wasn’t entirely Ms. Mothma’s fault, though. What if she was relying on data from manual timesheets, and saw that Han (and other handsome, roguish space captains like him) always completed shield generator detonations within 36 hours?

If she’d had intelligent, automated time management software, she might have seen that the process actually takes an average of 42 hours, and would have thus planned out the project more effectively. Think how much the Rebels could’ve saved in X-Wing repair costs (and, y’know, lives)!

OK, so that was about the nerdiest illustration possible of proper timesheet data improving project management, but the principle still holds true in accounting and consulting. If you know exactly how long it takes your team to complete certain tasks, you can create smarter project plans that maximize productivity, putting the right resources in the right places at the right times. And that can lead to big financial returns for your firm.

“We deployed our timesheet software for a large global accounting firm in the U.K, and the results have been astonishing,” Marubio said. “They’ve accrued tens of millions of pounds in additional fees since partnering with us.”

Wicket the Ewok, who reportedly uses Intapp timesheet software for his Etsy rope snare trap business, could not be reached for comment.

3. Informed personnel decisions

Here’s one aspect of automated timesheet software that’s a bit “icky,” but it’s still very valuable for firms.

Let’s be clear: We’re not suggesting that automation software should be used as some kind of Big Brother (the symbol of an always-watching totalitarian government from 1984, not the CBS reality TV show, come on guys) that monitors everything employees do and punishes them for every minute not spent working. If you use it that way, morale at your firm will suffer, and the net effect of the upgrade will be negative.

What we are saying is that the software can lead to smarter personnel decisions, so you can elevate your rockstars and provide help to those who need it. For instance, if you see one worker is completing a task in two hours that takes most people four, that guy or gal might deserve a raise—or should maybe be moved to more prestigious accounts. If a worker is taking six hours to do that task, it’s probably smart to invest in some additional training to help that person be more efficient and productive.

“Every firm has questions about personnel and how they’re performing. But if you have hundreds or thousands of employees and you’re not sure their timesheet data is exactly accurate, those questions are hard to answer. Products like Intapp Time make it so you can finally ask those questions—and trust the answers you get,” Marubio said.

Having an accurate record of employee time can also help you put together smarter, more effective teams for larger projects. You can see which employees complete these types of projects fastest and most effectively, then team them all up to create a supergroup that’ll put Christina Aguilera and the rest of the “Lady Marmalade” singers to shame.

Free white paper from Intapp: Turn global independence into a growth opportunity

4. Defensible overage charges

No client likes receiving a bill for an overage. As you well know, sometimes they will ask for a detailed account of the work that was done and what led to the overage, occasionally to absurd degrees (“Can you tell us precisely what work this accountant performed from 3:04 to 3:06 p.m. on Jan. 12?”). If they don’t like the answers they get, the consequences may be severe.

With accurate data from automated timesheet software, it’s much easier to make a solid case for an overage. You actually can see what that accountant was doing from 3:04 to 3:06 p.m., or what anyone else on your team was doing at any given time.

“Automated timesheets give you a strong defense for overages. You can say, ‘Here’s everything that was done, here was the problem area where we couldn’t reconcile your books, this is why we need to add some overtime,’” Marubio said.

The result is a lot less client heartburn due to overages, and ultimately better client/firm relationships. Plus, because you’ll now be pricing your engagements more accurately, you’ll probably have fewer overages in the first place.

Evolve now with automated accounting timesheets

Hopefully by now you have a better understanding of why the accounting timesheet must evolve in 2019—and how automated timesheet solutions like Intapp Time can make that evolution possible.

Intapp Time is the only enterprise-grade time capture and analysis product specifically designed for large accounting firms. It’s easy and intuitive enough for your front-line professionals, yet powerful enough to provide actionable insights to business managers and CFOs.

And now we know what that means for your firm—smarter pricing, efficient project management, informed personnel decisions, defensible overages, and so much more.

For accounting timesheet evolution, the time is now. Working with partners like Intapp makes the change easier and maximizes your results. See how Intapp can help your accounting firm meet the challenges of 2019 and beyond now.

Learn more about Intapp >

Access free white papers from Intapp on accelerating acceptance and continuance with automation and turning global independence into a growth opportunity.

The post 4 Reasons the Accounting Firm Timesheet Must Evolve in 2019 appeared first on Going Concern.

Digital nomads—aka those who work remotely abroad—are now a fixture in today’s business world. U.S. companies large and small have continued to invest in remote work programs that are designed to broaden their talent pools and give greater flexibility to their younger employees.

But while remote workers might bend their work schedules around global adventures, they can’t escape an often tricky set of homeland tax codes and accounting issues. And because country hopping is a relatively new business idea, it requires an accountant who understands the culture.

That presents a unique opportunity for today’s accountants. The digital nomads of the world need your numbers skills to successfully continue their migratory lifestyles. And if you yourself are a digital nomad, or want to become one, even better—as you hop about the globe, you’ll grow to understand the needs of the roaming workforce more than someone chained to a desk in Idaho. You can use that advantage to land digital nomad accounting clients as a freelancer or small firm startup.

Enter digital nomad accounting

That’s exactly what Krystal Pino, CPA, PFS, is doing today with her firm Nomad Tax. Pino, as she’s known by in her communities, started her accounting career at a large firm in the southern U.S., but she had a change of heart about her corporate path following a year-long, international, 12-city work abroad program.

After deciding to permanently work abroad in 2017, Pino founded Nomad Tax to help a “community that I felt was being underserved by the current tax and accountant consulting offerings.”

Now that she’s running her own digital nomad accounting business remotely across the world, she said she’s happier and more productive than she’s ever been—and is helping others fulfill their dreams.

“Starting my own business as a digital nomad was the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m so glad I did it,” Pino said. “And now I want to show people that this can be done. It’s easy. It’s fun. And it’s a wonderful way of life if you understand what you’re doing.”

Birth of the digital nomad community

Although the term “digital nomad” was coined more than 20 years ago by author Tsugio Makimoto (in a book that looks really boring and has exactly one Amazon review), the concept was largely considered science fiction until the late 2000s, when a new wave of business professionals entered the workforce.

Armed with worldwide internet and Instagram, millennials took their penchant for adventure and made it profitable. It made us wonder: How many digital nomads are out there, anyway?

The internet, in all its wisdom, has yet to give us a clear answer, but here’s what we were able to dig up. A 2014 survey by oDesk or Upwork or whatever they call themselves reported that 39% of its freelancer client base considered themselves to be digital nomads. We assume that number has grown in the last five years, but we don’t have anything to back that up.

FlexJobs has no idea how many digital nomads there are either, but it still uncovered some fun data in a 2018 study. We were surprised to find that 70% of digital nomads are women, which then made us wonder if finding that surprising makes us sexist, and then we gave up and drank some Diet Coke. Also 18% of nomads earn more than six figures a year, which is pretty rad.

Whatever the exact figures are, digital nomads are a group that businesses are going to have to deal with soon, if not now.

“Companies now have to ask themselves if remote people hurt or help their business,” Pino said. “More and more are finding that the positives of employing digital nomads far outweigh the negatives. With Wi-Fi and secure networks that you can find almost anywhere today, companies need to embrace the concept and reap the rewards.”

Pino said that being part of the ever-growing digital nomad community—both online and through meet-ups in various cities—has been key for her accounting business’s growth. But she cited her biggest goal as visiting global digital nomad hubs where she can talk to people face-to-face about their financial and business goals.

“Ultimately, we’re in the people business,” she said. “I want to know what my clients’ goals are. Are they planning on hiring another employee? Aiming for a million-dollar revenue next year? Just looking to make sure they comply with the rules that give them the best tax savings? I don’t want to be just their accountant, I want to be on their team, helping them achieve what they’re setting out to do.”

Caring is sharing nomad advice

The boom of online forums such as Workfrom and Coworker have given nomads a community where they can find answers to a variety of questions on issues such as housing, cafes and cheap internet, and finding new clients.

Pino said having that community backbone has not only been vital to her accounting business, but it also encourages others looking to branch from their desk jobs to start their own businesses.

“Clients come to me all the time and say they’ve had an accountant for years but now want to use us because we understand what this life entails,” she said. “We face unique challenges, things that you just don’t get if you’ve never embraced this life. You see people collaborating and coming together in the community who understand what your day-to-day is really like.”

Digital nomad accounting is critical

There’s no easy way around it: bookkeeping, accounting, and taxes are a serious pain in the bidet hole for digital nomads. Combine multicountry laws and they’ve got themselves a headache no amount of Caribbean moonshine, homemade sake, or Eastern Bloc beet wine can crush.

That’s why so many of them are leaving their books to professionals like those at Nomad Tax—a firm that understands digital nomad businesses because, well, it is one.

“Digital nomads are increasingly looking for accountants who know how to meet their needs,” Pino said. “That’s why we started Nomad Tax, to help nomads improve financial outcomes while embracing the fun and freedom of the nomad lifestyle ourselves.”

The digital nomad community is growing, but if the businesses and individuals within that group don’t get their accounting practices in order, their success will be limited. Thankfully, people like Pino are around to help them keep their books together, do their taxes right, and maximize financial opportunities.

If you’re an accountant and are thinking about breaking the chains and embarking on the digital nomad lifestyle, now might be the perfect time to do it. It works for Pino—so why not you?

Still not inspired? Read more about Pino’s digital nomad accountant journey here.

The post Why Accounting Is the Key to Expanding the Digital Nomad Movement appeared first on Going Concern.

That’s great advice for video games but pretty useless if you’re stuck in the dungeon of a boring, thankless accounting job. Here’s something that is useful, however: a list of the best accounting job openings. These are jobs where you’ll enjoy flexible working options, real work/life balance, and fewer moments that make you feel like setting your computer on fire and unleashing a blizzard of profanity upon your coworkers.

Through our partners at Accountingfly, we’re dedicated to helping you escape the dungeon. Head over to their site now to upload your resume and see more of the best accounting job openings.

This quarter’s job list is sponsored by Advaion, which is looking for Financial Audit Consultants in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Aprio, which is hiring Audit Seniors in Atlanta. 

Top remote jobs:

Remote Sales Tax Accountant
TaxButler

TaxButler is looking for a Sales Tax Accountant to help its clients eliminate the hassle and risk of sales tax. As a team member of a growing startup, you’ll work closely with the Filing Manager and Client Onboarding Manager to ensure that sales tax filings are submitted accurately and on time, every time. Reporting to the Founder and Filing Manager, you will use your keen eye and attention to detail to submit sales tax returns, onboard new clients, solve time-critical problems, and continue to help build internal documentation. You are a self-starter, willing to learn on the job, inquisitive, and take ownership and pride over your work. The ideal candidate has experience working remotely, is not afraid to learn new technology, and has some sales tax experience.

Requirements:

• Remote work experience.
• Attention to detail and interpersonal skills.
• Comfortable working one-on-one with clients.
• Willing to learn new skills on the job.
• Comfortable with a fast-moving environment, strict deadlines, and/or uncertainty.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Remote Senior Tax Accountant
Monheit Zongolowicz Frisch CPAs (MRZ)

This 47-year-old Arizona-based firm is looking for a Remote Senior Tax Accountant ASAP.  

MRZ offers comprehensive wealth management and tax services to a diverse clientele. Its team understands the complex yet vitally important relationship between tax and wealth management. The firm’s knowledge, experience, and strategic approach enables it to truly make a difference in the financial lives of its clients.

Requirements:

• Three to five years experience as a tax accountant in a public accounting firm.
• Bachelor’s degree in accounting, finance, or business.
• CPA, CPA candidate, or EA.
• Experience with estate and trust work with a strong desire to learn more.
• Desire to become an estate and trust subject-matter expert.
• Experience with CCH.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Full Charge Remote Bookkeeper
Accountingprose

Accountingprose is a fast-paced cloud accounting service that provides full-cycle accounting and payroll services to some of the most interesting, innovative, and fun small business owners on the planet. They are developers, designers, creatives, gym owners, lawyers, and so much more. The firm has two main locations, Denver and Phoenix, yet clients and employees are located all over the United States. With a focus on interaction and relationship-building, Accountingprose creates a unique experience that is the driving force of its attitude and commitment to team members and clients alike. 

Requirements:

• You’re an accounting superhero with a firm grasp of GAAP.
• You’re a “Chatty Cathy” who likes to hop on a call with a client at a moment’s notice.
• You’re a spreadsheet wizard who can easily make sense of lots of information.
• You can adapt to ever-changing technology.
• You’re familiar with Xero, Bill.com, Gusto, Receipt Bank, Hubdoc, and other cloud accounting software.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Top location-specific jobs:

New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. – Financial Audit Consultant
Advaion

Advaion believes it’s possible to be premier consultants and have a life. It’s hard to believe but it’s really that simple. The financial advisory firm is looking to build its team, and its leadership is committed to helping you grow your career. Your personal success is Advaion’s most important goal.

Advaion is hiring Senior Consultants with public accounting experience in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Its staff enjoys serious career development, challenging projects, limited travel, profit share, and bonuses while performing at an incredibly high level.

Requirements:

• Three-plus years of public accounting and/or external/internal audit experience.
• SEC reporting, SOX, and financial audit experience.
• Excellent communication skills (oral and written).

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Atlanta – Audit Senior Associate
Aprio

Submerge yourself in a workplace with creative innovators striving for excellence. Aprio is the 50th-largest CPA firm in the nation and has been honored as the “Best of the Best” accounting and forensic accounting firm by INSIDE Public Accounting. It was recently named one of the Top Places to Work in Atlanta by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Over 25 languages are spoken at Aprio, and 25% of its staff is foreign-born. The firm specializes in eight different industries. As the Audit Senior Associate, you’ll gain priceless experiences and skills that will help both you and the company grow. Aprio wants you to define its brand positioning, contribute to industry-leading innovation, and help its clients thrive.

Requirements:

• Four-year bachelor’s degree in accounting (master’s preferred).
• Licensed CPA preferred.
• Three to five years of experience working for a public accounting firm.
• Developed specialties in manufacturing and/or technology.
• Understanding and applying Excel skills.
• Successfully using CaseWare or other audit software.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Philadelphia – Accountant
Kregel CPAs

Kregel & Company is an atypical accounting firm. It provides clients with a refreshing CPA experience, combining innovative technology with expertise and a deep sense of care. The firm offers accounting services, tax planning, payroll, and business consulting. More importantly, it provides peace of mind and the insights small business owners need to reach their goals.

If you’re looking for an accounting/cloud bookkeeping role with a purpose-driven group, where you can grow as a person and a professional, check out Kregel.

Requirements:

• Accounting role experience.
• Desire to work at a startup.
• Experience and interest in financial software tools.
• Customer service or a customer-facing role experience.
• Diploma or degree in accounting (CPA an asset).
• Business tax return experience.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

The post Escaping the Dungeon: The Hottest Accounting Jobs for Q1 2019 appeared first on Going Concern.

Businesses are increasingly viewing cryptocurrency as a viable investment. New tokens are gaining steam, and Bitcoin, the OG crypto cash, continues to trade at a frenzied pace. More than 200,000 Bitcoin transactions occur every day, and investors like the Winklevoss twins and even the U.S. government are staking millions on the currency’s future.

But when it comes to the tax, regulatory, and accounting impacts of cryptocurrency, many questions remain unanswered. In 2014, the U.S. government declared that cryptocurrencies are subject to the capital gains tax, and although many other laws and rules have since been enacted, there’s been little in the way of additional concrete legislation.

Businesses investing in cryptocurrency are turning to their accounting firms for help. This has given rise to a new career path for accountants: cryptocurrency consulting.

In a previous article, we explored the topic of blockchain consulting. As blockchain is the underpinning technology that makes cryptocurrency work, there are some similarities between the duties of a blockchain consultant and a cryptocurrency consultant. But in this article, we’ll focus more on the specific accounting and tax issues surrounding cryptocurrency—and how, as a consultant, you’ll be asked to help your clients navigate them.

We’ll try to get to the bottom of two key questions: What does a cryptocurrency consultant do? And, more importantly, should you consider cryptocurrency consulting as a path for your accounting career?

A (very) brief overview of cryptocurrency

We could easily write a 10,000-word missive on the history and current status of cryptocurrency, but we won’t, as you can find all that information any number of other places online (plus we’re deathly afraid of carpal tunnel.) Just for the sake of clarification, however, let’s crash through a quick overview of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is “a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets.” (Yes, we just quoted Wikipedia. It’s accurate … usually.)

The first known successful cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was created in 2009 by a person or group of people known only by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin’s prosperity stemmed mostly from the concurrent creation of blockchain, the structural technology that holds Bitcoin together through a secure and anonymous digital ledger.

In July 2010, one Bitcoin was valued at $0.08. As of this article’s publication, Bitcoin is trading at $3,606 per coin. While Bitcoin’s value initially surged, its price has experienced extreme volatility over the last year. Bitcoin peaked at nearly $20,000 per coin in mid-December 2017 before crashing to less than $13,000 just two weeks later, setting the stage for what became a wild and turbulent 2018 for investors.

Despite the risks, many companies continue to invest in Bitcoin and are optimistic about its outlook.

Along the way, blockchain has opened the door for the creation of new digital tokens outside of Bitcoin. It’s estimated that there are more than 2,500 cryptocurrencies currently in circulation. This stat is a little misleading, however, as it would imply that there are a lot of cryptocurrencies with a significant market presence. In reality, the top 20 cryptocurrencies account for 89% of the total market.

“The cryptocurrency market is still in its infancy,” said Mitchell Kopelman, partner-in-charge of technology and blockchain at Aprio, a global accounting firm based in Atlanta. “I think it will probably be five years before you see the average business using crypto and blockchain. But the development process has been very fast. There’s already been some big winners and losers, and there will be many more as the market evolves.”

This concludes today’s crypto lesson (be sure to do the odd-numbered problems at the end of chapter 3 for your homework). Let’s get back to the purpose of this article—exploring the newly created career path of cryptocurrency consulting.

What does a cryptocurrency consultant do?

The short answer to this question is “a lot.”

A longer answer: As a cryptocurrency consultant, you’ll take on a wide array of duties that will vary from day to day and client to client. No two workdays will be the same. And thanks to the rapidly evolving nature of the cryptocurrency market, your tasks next year may be completely different from the ones you can expect at present.

Regardless of fluctuations and changes, however, all of your work will come back to one central goal: guiding your clients toward successful, compliant cryptocurrency transactions and practices across accounting and tax functions.

In this article, we’ll take a look at four of the most common categories of work today’s cryptocurrency consultants undertake:

1. Ensuring regulatory and tax compliance.
2. Encouraging and implementing tractable, efficient crypto accounting practices.
3. Assisting with initial coin offerings (ICOs)/security token offerings (STOs).
4. Protecting clients and the firm from unethical or illegal crypto practices.

Navigating cryptocurrency taxes and regulations

As a cryptocurrency consultant, you’ll be expected to guide clients through the laws, restrictions, and tax implications of mining, trading, and creating cryptocurrencies. Unfortunately, the regulatory status of cryptocurrency remains in limbo, so you may find many of your clients’ questions difficult to answer.

One place to start is with the proposed Cryptocurrency Tax Fairness Act. The law would essentially require the IRS to provide more guidance about the tax status of cryptocurrency transactions. While this legislation has yet to pass—and probably never will in its current form—it at least reveals some of the legislators’ intentions regarding cryptocurrency regulation.

Other rules and restrictions impacting cryptocurrency include:

• Evolving GAAP standards;
• Numerous aspects of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including the new foreign-derived intangible income (FDII) deduction and global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI);
• Variable interest entity (VIE) rule; and
• ASC 606, Revenue from Contracts with Customers.

To prepare for upcoming changes, ensure compliance with current regulations, and minimize tax costs, a cryptocurrency consultant might help his clients:

• Determine whether the issuance in exchange for cryptocurrencies or fiat currency should be recognized as revenue, liability, or equity.
• Save significant income tax by adjusting fiscal year-end.
• Account for the tax and GAAP consequences of transferring virtual currency to employees and non-employees.
• Carefully review tax and regulatory implications before trading one cryptocurrency for another.
• Determine eligibility for a reduced tax rate when selling tokens to non-U.S. buyers.
• Reduce U.S. effective corporate tax rate with state and federal research and development tax credits.
• Position foreign subsidiaries participating in token sales for U.S. income tax purposes.

“There are unique tax consequences for transactions occurring with tokens,” Kopelman said. “Businesses might be receiving tokens for payment or giving tokens as rewards, and there are complex thoughts around how those transactions should be accounted for. The global nature of the economy makes things even more complicated, as the laws for international cryptocurrency exchange haven’t really been standardized.”

Does cryptocurrency consulting sound like an intriguing career path? Scroll to the bottom of this article to learn more about cryptocurrency consulting and other job opportunities at Aprio.

Accounting for cryptocurrency

On the accounting side, cryptocurrency consultants are expected to help their clients seamlessly incorporate crypto transactions into existing ledgers while creating new processes when necessary.

Some of the accounting duties of a cryptocurrency consultant might include:

• Establishing a recordkeeping system with separate wallets for short-term trading, long-term buy-and-hold positions, and personal spending.
• Implementing approaches to track crypto transactions and calculate realized and unrealized gain/loss.
• Tracking costs through third-party exchanges or wallet services.
• Generating and enforcing a schedule for regularly converting cryptocurrency to dollars.
• Creating a cost-benefit analysis of issuing tokens as a limited liability company versus a C-corporation.

And as the technology evolves, cryptocurrency consultants may also be asked to help transition some accounting tasks onto one or more blockchains.

“Right now, accounting technology is well behind the actual blockchain technology,” Kopelman said. “But before too long, there will likely be a lot of accounting functions that will be able to move to the blockchain.”

Demystifying ICOs and STOs

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are an increasingly common way businesses are using cryptocurrency. As you know, businesses that need a cash injection (typically startups, but not always) often trade company equity for cash investments, or take the company public and begin selling shares through an initial public offering.

But with an ICO, instead of equity, the business trades tokens for investor money. These tokens usually represent a new cryptocurrency, one that is created by and specific to the company seeking investments.

“In some cases, ICOs are used to essentially pre-sell access to a new product, typically an app,” Kopelman said.

Security token offerings (STOs) are another popular fundraising tool you’ll need to help clients navigate as a cryptocurrency consultant. Like ICOs, STOs exchange digital tokens for investments. But the tokens issued, generally designated as “security tokens,” are subject to numerous federal regulations designed to help legitimize and secure their value.

Security tokens need to “derive their value from an external, tradable asset,” and are thus subject to the same federal regulations as all securities. Many investors view STOs as a safer, more liquidable, more traditional entry point into the crypto market—and this belief is driving rapidly mounting interest, with Nasdaq proclaiming that “2019 will belong to the security token.”

STOs and ICOs are big business, and working as a cryptocurrency consultant will put you at the heart of an exploding new market. Businesses launched 1,257 ICOs in 2018, raising more than $7.8 billion in total funds.

As a crypto consultant, you’ll need to help your clients determine if an STO or an ICO is right for them. If your client decides to move forward with an STO or ICO, you’ll be asked to help prepare for the offering, execute it successfully, and ensure positive results moving forward.

STO and ICO tax and legal concerns

One reason STOs and ICOs are so popular is that they are good ways for companies to raise money outside the strictly regulated fundraising process required by banks and venture capitalists. Unfortunately, this gives rise to a host of ethical and legal concerns.

Should the company register the sale of their tokens with one or more U.S. states, or with the Securities and Exchange Commission? How should these token proceeds be taxed? What are the rules for cashing them in?

And which is better for business, an STO or an ICO? Right now, the answers to these and other considerations are unclear—but we do expect to see more STOs and less ICOs in 2019.

“There’s this whole issue going on with the SEC as to whether the sale of the token and the STO or ICO is considered a security or not. The SEC has been clear that they didn’t change the security laws. There are a variety of different legal opinions,” Kopelman said.

In some cases, criminals are soliciting funds for bogus ICOs in an attempt to defraud investors. The SEC is taking great steps to help investors avoid this—and in one instance, it’s doing so with an uncharacteristic sense of humor.

The STO and ICO Howey test

To demonstrate how easy it is to fake an ICO, the SEC created a website promoting HoweyCoins, a fictional digital currency. The page looks legit, complete with assurances of regulatory compliance, discount programs, a white paper, and headshots of executive and engineer “team members.” Clicking deeper into the site redirects the user to an Investor.gov page that details the perils of ICO scams.  

As a cryptocurrency consultant, you definitely won’t want your firm or your clients associating with anyone trying to pull off a scam, or to be held liable for a crypto investment that doesn’t work out. But Kopelman says you won’t have to worry about that too much—at least not if you take a job at Aprio.

“There are certainly bad actors,” Kopelman said. “But everyone that’s doing an STO or ICO is not a bad character. To protect ourselves and our clients, we don’t advise people to buy or trade tokens. We don’t give investment advice. We provide tax, accounting, and consultant advice. And we are very particular about who we choose to work with.”  

Averting the cryptocurrency dark side

Speaking of the dark side of crypto, it’s no secret that cryptocurrency has a polarizing reputation. Thanks to its anonymity, Bitcoin is the payment of choice for illegal online transactions. And some businesses do use cryptocurrency as a way to skirt regulations and avoid paying taxes.

Therefore, it’s imperative that cryptocurrency consultants practice tremendous discretion when choosing their clients.

“You’ve got to be a little more selective of who you’re working with,” Kopelman said. “We’ve turned down the same amount of crypto clients we’ve taken on in the last year.”

Like all forms of technology, cryptocurrency is neither inherently good nor evil—it all depends on how it’s used. As a cryptocurrency consultant, you’ll be on the frontlines of a bold new frontier, shaping the future of the digital economy and helping clients harness the power of crypto for good.

Join the cryptocurrency consulting team at Aprio

One of the earliest firms to accept Bitcoin as payment, Aprio is a prominent leader and innovator in the crypto space—and an employer you should definitely consider if you’re interested in becoming a cryptocurrency consultant.

“At Aprio, you’ll help clients understand how to account for their token transactions from a number of financial and tax standpoints. You’ll be guiding people in what we believe are our best practices for internal control, addressing issues like privacy and security,” Kopelman said.

The big question remains: Is cryptocurrency consulting right for you? Hopefully by now you have a better idea of your answer.

“Cryptocurrency consulting is a really exciting career path, and those who get in now will have a big advantage over those who wait around. It takes an adventurous mindset, but the potential rewards are substantial. And it’s never, ever boring,” Kopelman said.

If you want to become a cryptocurrency consultant at Aprio, a full-service accounting firm operating out of Atlanta, Ga., contact Mitchell Kopelman to get the ball rolling. Or if you just think Aprio sounds like a great place to work and want to get your foot in the door now, click on one of the links below to apply for an open position.

Atlanta, Georgia accounting jobs

R&D Senior Associate

Transaction Advisory Senior Manager

Transaction Advisory Director

Audit Senior Associate

The post Should Cryptocurrency Consulting Be the Next Phase in Your Accounting Career? appeared first on Going Concern.

If you’re an accountant or if you work on a corporate finance team, becoming a master in data analysis is a big step forward.

But why? And what does data analytics have to do with accounting?

Accountants use data analytics to help businesses uncover valuable insights within their financials, identify process improvements that can increase efficiency, and better manage risk.

“Accountants will be increasingly expected to add value to the business decision-making within their organizations and for their clients,” says Associate Professor Wendell Gilland, who teaches “Data Analytics for Accountants” at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. “A strong facility with data analytics gives them the toolset to help strengthen their partnership with business leaders.”

Here are a few examples:

Auditors, both those working internally and externally, can shift from a sample-based model to employ continuous monitoring where much larger data sets are analyzed and verified. The result: less margin of error, resulting in more precise recommendations.

Tax accountants use data science to quickly analyze complex taxation questions related to investment scenarios. In turn, investment decisions can be expedited, which allows companies to respond faster to opportunities to beat their competition—and the market—to the punch.

Accountants who assist, or act as, investment advisors use big data to find behavioral patterns in consumers and the market. These patterns can help businesses build analytic models that, in turn, help them identify investment opportunities and generate higher profit margins.

Four types of data analytics

To get a better handle on big data, it’s important to understand four key types of data analytics:

1. Descriptive analytics = “What is happening?” This is used most often and includes the categorization and classification of information. Accountants report on the flow of money through their organizations: revenue and expenses, inventory counts, sales tax collected. Accurate reporting is a hallmark of solid accounting practices. Compiling and verifying large amounts of data is important to this accurate reporting.

2. Diagnostic analytics = “Why did it happen?” Diagnostics are used to monitor changes in data. Accountants regularly analyze variances and calculate historical performance. Because historical precedent is often an excellent indicator of future performance, these calculations are critical to build reasonable forecasts.

3. Predictive analytics = “What’s going to happen?” Here, data is used to assess the likelihood of future outcomes. Accountants are instrumental in building forecasts and identifying patterns that shape those forecasts. When accountants act as trusted advisors and build forecasts, business leaders grow increasingly confident in following them.

4. Prescriptive analytics = “What should happen?” Tangible actions—and critical business decisions—arise from prescriptive analytics. Accountants use the forecasts they create to make recommendations for future growth opportunities or, in some cases, raise an alert on poor choices. This insight is an example of the significant impact that accountants make in the business world.

Three reasons why accountants make excellent data scientists

1. Accountants have outstanding technical skills. Gilland notes, “Accountants are used to aggregating information to create a picture of an organization that summarizes the details contained in each transaction. Working with descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics comes more easily to people who already possess excellent quantitative skills.”

2. Accountants are natural-born problem solvers. The jump from descriptive and diagnostic analytics to predictive and prescriptive analytics requires that one shift from an organizational mindset to an inquisitive mindset; a shift from stacking and sorting information to figuring out how to use that information to make key business decisions. Accountants are experts at making this jump.

3. Accountants see the larger context and business implications. The true value of data analysis comes not at the point when the data is compiled, but rather when decisions are made using insights derived from the data. To uncover these insights, a data scientist must first understand the business context. Not only do accountants understand this context, they live it.

David Byers, VP controller for Coca-Cola North America, discusses the importance of “getting out there and asking questions” and how accountants can help drive business results.

How can you become more data savvy?

Build your skills. Strong graduate-level accounting programs, for example, will expand your knowledge of data analytics, often through specific courses that cover the topic. In other cases, data analytics is infused into the overall curriculum so that students can acquire this critical training in context with many other key topics.

Interested in data analytics? Here are a couple things to try

Complete the “What would the accountant say?” worksheet, attempting to solve a common business problem through the lens of an accounting data scientist.

Take the Business IQ quiz, a self-evaluation tool that measures numerous aspects of your business savvy, including, of course, your penchant for data and your analytics mindset.

Want to add skills in data analysis to your toolkit? Consider the #1-ranked online Master of Accounting degree from the University of North Carolina. With flexible schedules, evening courses delivered by world-class faculty, and a career services team dedicated to the needs of working professionals, the program can give your career the boost it needs.

The post Mastering Data Analytics Can Make You a More Valuable Accountant appeared first on Going Concern.

This has created an opportunity for today’s accountants, one that some will find alluring, provocative, and potentially lucrative. But for many, it presents a challenging question: Should you keep your career on a traditional accounting or auditing path, or should you move to a job with more of an advisory function?

This is one of those questions akin to “What do you call that sweet carbonated stuff people drink out of a can?” Some will say soda, some pop. And neither of them are wrong. (Except for those weird people in the South who call everything “Coke,” regardless of the brand of the drink. “You want a Coke? What flavor do you want, Sprite?” They’re wrong. So very wrong.)

Much of the decision between accounting and advisory will be based on your individual wants, needs, and personality. Do you want to play the background singer, providing the harmonies and rhythms that make the group shine? Or do you want to be more of a lead singer, belting out solos that make the crowd go wild?

If you’re feeling like Malcolm, still stuck somewhere in the middle, we’ve got you covered. We’re going to look at some of the advantages of taking an advisory role. And hopefully, by the time we’re done, you’ll have a better idea if an advisory job is right for you.

(Sidenote: Did you know we never learned the family’s last name in Malcolm in the Middle? OR where they live? That’s weird, right? And which is weirder, that the show’s creators made that choice and stuck by it through seven seasons, or that most people never noticed? These are questions we’ll never answer, so we better get back to accounting versus advisory.)

1. Feel the impact of your work

In a traditional accounting or auditing job, especially at large firms, it’s often difficult to see the concrete impact of your labor. Yes, the books are closed or the audit is complete, but who did that help? And how?

“At a big accounting firm, as an auditor you’re really only in there to give clients an opinion on their financials,” said Pavan Satyaketu, managing director and founder of Advaion, a fast-growing consulting firm with offices in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “You’re doing an audit. Now especially, you can’t even make formal suggestions as to how they can improve their business operations.”

At an advisory job, however, you’ll work directly with clients to enhance their decision-making and help them grow. You’ll see the results of your labor every day as you watch your clients make smarter transactions, enter new markets, add staff, and overtake their competitors.

Like Obi-Wan, you’ll guide them away from the dark side and teach them to use their powers for good.

“We’re enacting change, and we’re more forward-looking as opposed to backward-looking. We’re actually working with our clients to make changes to their businesses and we often function as an extension of their management teams rather than as third parties,” Satyaketu said.

When your client brings on customers faster, expands its locations, or successfully launches an initial public offering, you can point to that and say, “I helped with that. My hard work made that happen.” And that’s a feeling you won’t often have if you stick to traditional accounting and audit work.

2. Expand your skill set

In a traditional accounting or audit role, it can be easy to get complacent about your skill set. Sure, you need to keep up with the latest advances in technology and regulatory changes, but numbers are numbers. If you’re going to do accounting or auditing work for the rest of your life, why learn any new skills, like marketing or enterprise technology?

And that’s perfectly fine for accountants who want to take that path. But if you’re unsure what the future of your career holds, it’s smart to develop as many skills as you possibly can. Doing so broadens your future possibilities and puts you in the driver’s seat to be a world-class leader. Moving to an advisory job will help you expand your skill set, exposing you to tasks and departments you’d never be involved with in a traditional accounting or auditing role.

It’s like when Marty refuses to race Needles at the end of Back to the Future Part III. He erases his bitter future as a broken-down middle manager and opens a new destiny of unlimited possibilities. (We’re not saying sticking to traditional accounting will give you a sad, old-Marty future, just that advisory can enable you to take a lot of different paths.)

As an advisor, you’ll be asked to help improve your clients’ operations, enhance their financial reporting, and implement new systems. This will require you to develop a host of new skills, but it will also expose you to business functions and larger management strategies that will be hugely beneficial to your career.

“If you work at Advaion, you actually get to see the big picture of each company,” Satyaketu said. “Working with the different departments in the client organization gives you a sense of how a company operates. If you want to become a leader, that knowledge will be invaluable, as it allows you to understand an organization as a whole rather that just one silo.”

Ready to make the leap to an advisory job? Advaion is currently hiring. Scroll to the bottom of this article to apply for an open advisory job at Advaion now.

3. Enjoy a friendly client dynamic

Most clients love hearing from their advisors. You’ll often get to be the bearer of good news. And in cases where you have to tell them something negative, they’ll know you’re just looking out for their best interests and will usually take it in stride.

That’s because, as an advisor, you’ll be working synergistically with clients to help them move their business forward. They’ll see you as an enabler of success rather than a regulatory requirement. Over time, you’ll develop a cheerful rapport with your clients—and perhaps even build friendships.

“We are our clients’ advocates. This leads to immediate connections, immediate relationships. And it’s not adversarial or anything like that—it’s collaborative. They want us there. Our clients get excited when they know we’re coming to see them,” Satyaketu said.

Advaion: The perfect place to begin or expand your advisory career

If you’ve decided a job with an advisory or consulting function may be right for you, consider applying for a job at Advaion. (Links to open positions at Advaion are available at the bottom of this article.)

For more than a decade, Advaion has served as a trusted advisor for clients in several industries. The independent consulting firm’s staff is comprised primarily of former Big 4 business professionals—so if you’re currently working at one of the Big 4, you may be exactly the recruit Advaion is looking for.

At Advaion, you’ll provide your clients with the most up-to-date information related to regulatory, compliance, management, and technology trends. You’ll foster a relationship of trust with your clients, helping them make smarter financial decisions and grow their businesses.

Many of Advaion’s clients are going through significant growth, looking to update their systems, seeking investor funding, preparing for an IPO, and/or struggling to maintain compliance. As an advisor at Advaion, you’ll give your clients a competitive edge by identifying opportunities, making data-based recommendations, and guiding them through complex situations.

And if that isn’t enough to entice you, Advaion also treats its employees with respect and kindness, helping them succeed in both their work lives and personal lives.

“We pay 100% of our health benefits to our employees. We allow employees to contribute to vest in their 401(k) on day one—no waiting periods. We try not to have anyone work over 45 hours a week. We monitor that continuously. We really believe that to be successful as a business, we need to take care of our employees first and everything else will fall into place,” Satyaketu said.

Advaion is dedicated to employee advancement, empowering its staff through mentoring, education, meaningful project work, and employee growth planning.

If you’re worried you’ll struggle to make the transition from accounting to advisory work, don’t fret—Advaion has your back.

“Onboarding is fast. As an accountant or auditor, you already understand the basics of how advisory works. We’ll start you on projects that are similar to what you were already doing, and then slowly move you into other things. It’s a very natural transition,” Satyaketu said.

So ultimately, how do you know if an advisory job at Advaion is right for you?

“If you want to do day-to-day accounting, closing the books, doing debits and credits, this is not for you,” Satyaketu said. “But if you want to do bigger-picture stuff, if you want to build those broader skill sets, if you want to help take a company to the next level, come work at Advaion. We’d be glad to have you, and we’re betting you’ll be glad you joined.”

Click one of the links below to apply for an open advisory job at Advaion now.

Accounting jobs in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Advaion Senior Consultant (New York City)

Advaion Senior Consultant (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)

The post 3 Reasons Why Accountants Should Move to an Advisory Job appeared first on Going Concern.

Let’s take a look at some of the areas in which midsize firms can offer more enticing advantages in transaction advisory, and how taking a job at one of these firms can lead to better compensation and an accelerated career path you might find difficult to achieve outside the walls of the Big 4 firms.

A transaction what now?

If you’re unfamiliar with transaction advising, here’s a quick intro course as to what the job entails. Already familiar with the position or currently working in transaction advisory? Feel free to skip this section—there’s plenty of juicy information for you further below.

The roles of a transaction advisor will probably be a bit different every day—which is one of the things that makes it a compelling career path when compared to traditional number-crunching accounting or compliance-only advising. Keeping that in mind, here are some typical duties a transaction advisor might perform:

• Help clients understand and consider normalized cash flows and balance sheet/working capital matters in buying or selling transactions, including mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
• Assist clients in evaluating the financial impact of a transaction by highlighting profitability trends, flagging overly aggressive accounting policies, and examining regulatory restrictions.
• Assist with tax due diligence (international, federal, state, and sales taxes) and structuring.
• Gain an understanding of opportunities for tax efficiencies and quantify potential tax risks, ensuring that tax exposures are considered in transaction documents through tax due diligence and structuring services.
• Provide recommendations as to how/when/if the client should move ahead with a given transaction.
• If the client chooses to execute a transaction, aid the client in substantiating and structuring a sale or a purchase price.
• Compile and analyze historical financial data/financial statements and conduct interviews with buyers and/or sellers.
• Participate in new and existing client proposal processes and build client relationships.

Midsize firm benefit #1: Potential for rewarding compensation and faster career development

Moving up in a larger firm can be difficult. No matter how much you prove your worth, you’ll have to run through evaluations by multiple bosses and skirt around an endless army of brown-nosers to get the job and compensation you deserve.

The path tends to be much easier at midsize firms. With a lower headcount and a greater supervisor/employee ratio, you’ll get more of the direct attention you need to have your accomplishments recognized and rewarded appropriately.

“We want to facilitate our transaction advisory employees toward moving their careers up and potentially becoming a partner at our firm. We’re not hiring to find someone to keep the same position for life,” said Michael Levy, partner-in-charge of the Transaction Advisory Group at midsize accounting firm Aprio.

At Atlanta-based Aprio specifically, the opportunity to make partner quickly is an enticingly open one.

“We’re understaffed at the partner level. We want more partners in the practice. We want to provide our people with entrepreneurial opportunities to grow a practice,” Levy said.

And when it comes to compensation, midsize firms like Aprio offer incentive packages that larger firms just can’t match.

“If an employee brings a new client to the firm or sells work to a client, we currently compensate them by paying them 10% of any revenue we collect from that client. That could be huge. Additionally, if you work over a certain number of hours, we compensate you for your chargeability,” Levy said.

Does landing a new client or cross-selling an existing one feel like it’s a bit outside your wheelhouse? Not to worry—firms like Aprio give you the tools you need to help you get there.

“We give our prospective partners a marketing budget so they can go out and foster new client relationships while enhancing existing ones. We send our folks to outside training—not just for accounting disciplines, but for overall business skills as well. We feel like those opportunities create a pathway for employees to get to partnership as fast as they’d like,” Levy said.

Already sold? Scroll down to the bottom of this article to apply for the open Transaction Advisory Senior Manager and/or Director position at Aprio now.

Midsize firm benefit #2: More flexibility, more time for your life

While the Big 4 firms offer a number of benefits, work flexibility usually isn’t one of them. But you’ll generally find more expansive working options elsewhere, leaving you with more time for family, friends, fun, and—y’know—life. At a midsize firm, for instance, your workload will likely be significantly lower than at the Big 4.

“We want our people to have better work/life balance. Most of our people work on clients anywhere between 30 to 45 hours a week,” Levy said.

It’s hard to accurately measure workload at the Big 4, as they tend to be shy about releasing those types of numbers. But anecdotally we’ve heard that your workweek will generally be much longer than at Aprio. An extremely unscientific blog post from Acuity Mag estimates a variance of 40 to 80 hours of weekly work at the Big 4, with an average of 50 to 60 hours/week.

You’ll also be asked to travel less, allowing you to spend even more time with friends and family.

“Our people probably spend 10 to 15% of their time traveling, compared to something more like 30 to 50% at the Big 4,” Levy said.

And you’ll have more flexibility to spend time on nonprofit, charity, and community efforts—provided you’re into that sort of thing.

“If our employees want to get out there and do not-for-profit work or work in the community, we absolutely encourage that and help make time for it,” Levy said.

Midsize firm benefit #3: Connecting with clients and feeling the impact of your work

One of the biggest complaints we hear from our readers who are currently working at the Big 4 is that they sit at their desks crunching numbers and creating reports all day, never (or rarely) getting to interact with a client directly or feel the impact of their work on the client’s life and business.

This is a much smaller problem at a midsize firm, especially when you work in a transaction advisory role. You’ll connect directly with clients, working to agree on scope of work, communicating the results once the work has been executed, and acting as their friend and trusted advisor for all their transactional needs.

And you’ll be out in the field, engaging with and selling to prospective clients while fostering existing client relationships and looking for mutually beneficial cross-sell opportunities.

“At a Big 4 firm, you’re one of tens of thousands of people. Whereas here, you’re coming into our practice that has 12 full-time transactional professionals in a firm of 450 people. And you really do have the opportunity to not only be a leader in the practice, but also to directly influence the trajectory of the firm,” Levy said.

Apply for the Transaction Advisory Senior Manager/Director job at Aprio now

Aprio advises private-equity funds, middle-market companies, and large corporations with middle-market investments in transactions up to $250 million. Its clients receive the benefit of Big 4 experience, delivered with personalized service and senior-level attention specifically crafted for the middle market.

Ready to join a midsize firm with a global reach, where you can fast-track your compensation and career development, enjoy more work/life flexibility, and connect with clients to feel the direct impact of your work? Click one of the links below to apply now.

Atlanta, Georgia accounting job openings

Transaction Advisory Senior Manager

Transaction Advisory Director

The post 3 Reasons You Should Look Beyond the Big 4 for a Transaction Advisory Accounting Job appeared first on Going Concern.

But many businesses aren’t limiting their diversity efforts to simply hiring more minorities. They’re striving to change the culture, creating workplaces where all employees feel valued and safe, and everyone can compete for promotions, raises, and leadership positions on truly equal footing.

While there is more work to be done, progress has been made. For instance, U.S. women still earn 18% less than men when comparing median incomes—but the gender pay gap has been roughly cut in half since 1980, when women made 36% less than men.

As you evaluate employers for the next step in your accounting career, you’ll definitely want to consider the company’s commitment to diversity as a key factor in your decision. Forbes and research firm Statista recently released a guide that will help you identify diverse organizations: the 2018 Best Employers for Diversity.

In this article, we’ll explore the advantages of working for one of those companies and highlight the benefits of corporate diversity for minority and majority employees alike. But first, let’s take a look at the state of diversity in the accounting industry to see where things currently stand.

Diversity in accounting

The accounting industry has long suffered from a lack of diversity. Racial and gender uniformity plagues every aspect of the profession, but the problem starts with education. According to a 2017 AICPA Trends report, only 9% of students enrolled in college accounting programs are black/African-American and 11% are Hispanic/Latino.

Diversity issues intensify as they flow from college and into the accounting industry itself. The same AICPA study showed that 1% of public accounting CPAs are black/African-American and 3% are Hispanic/Latino.

The scene is a bit better for women, who make up 40% of public accounting CPAs. But that number shrinks to 23% when looking at demographics for firm partners.

And let’s not even talk about ethnic minorities at the partner level—they’re practically non-existent.

While some firms have engaged in diversity and inclusion initiatives to alleviate these problems, many accounting practices are still very much boys’ clubs—or more accurately, heterosexual white boys’ clubs.

Looking for an accounting job at a diverse company? Scroll to the bottom of this article to apply for open accounting jobs at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, based in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Diverse businesses make more money

The lack of diversity in the accounting industry raises obvious ethical questions regarding corporate culture and policy. But the impact of a non-diverse workforce could be financial as well.

In a 2015 study, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that “companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.”

We chatted with Trey White, vice president, controller, and chief accounting officer at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (No. 33 nationally on Forbes’ Best Employers for Diversity and the highest-ranked company in Tennessee.) He shared his thoughts with us about diversity in accounting and in the business world in general.  

“We recognize that the accounting profession is not historically known to be ethnically diverse,” White said. “That’s why we are committed to investing our resources to support a more inclusive accounting culture. We recently started an Employee Resource Group (ERG) aimed at increasing alignment between our corporate diversity strategies and our Accounting and Financial Reporting Division.”

According to White, if accounting is going to improve equality, it’s going to need to look outward as well as inward.

“We’re also extending our efforts beyond our walls and into the community to address the disparity of minority students enrolled in accounting programs. Our goal is to identify minorities who show an aptitude for an accounting-related field and help introduce them to the profession,” White said.

Diversity promotes creativity and boosts productivity

It’s been proven that diverse corporate teams generate more creative ideas and solve problems faster than their homogenous counterparts. We’re going a little old school here, but a 1996 study found that, when confronted with the same business challenge, ethnically and gender-diverse groups devised solutions that were more feasible and more effective than those proposed by homogenous groups.

Going even more old school, a 1993 research paper examined the effect of diversity on overall business performance. Citing infighting and cultural differences, this study reported that diverse groups initially struggled to analyze and solve business cases, while homogenous groups performed better. But the diverse groups’ results improved over time. They took the lead over the homogenous groups at the 17-week mark and continued to outperform them for the remainder of the experiment.

This data seems to suggest that, while diversity may initially cause inefficiency due to disparate attitudes, over time those distinctions become a business advantage.

We don’t yet know exactly why diversity improves performance. But one logical guess would be that assembling people with differing perspectives and mindsets results in a wider variety of ideas—thus creating a larger probability that the team will arrive at the “best” solution.

“The differences in our backgrounds and experiences open up many gateways for fresh ideas, creativity, and better checks and balances,” White said. “Additionally, when everyone feels valued—not just accepted or tolerated but valued—I believe that the engagement and productivity meter goes way up.”

Diverse businesses have happier clients

The accounting sector may be behind in matters of equality, but the industries it serves often aren’t. Everyone needs an accountant, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference.

Businesses with diverse talent pools will naturally look for diversity when choosing an accounting firm. And diverse internal accounting departments can better meet the needs within their companies and for their customers by providing a wider range of viewpoints and solutions.

In her book Crafting the Customer Experience For People Not Like You, Kathy McDonald argues that today’s businesses “must understand and cater to customers’ racial, ethnic, religious, generational, and geographic differences” in order to remain competitive in a global marketplace.

Creating a new culture

Unfortunately, many corporate diversity programs are created as knee-jerk reactions to political stimuli. They’re often cynical PR stunts that fade away before making any real impact on the business.

For equality to become the norm in the business world, the entire corporate culture needs to shift. Businesses must go beyond hiring initiatives and find ways to embrace inclusiveness in everything they do.

“At BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, we have been intentional about cultivating a diverse and inclusive workforce, and that begins by making these efforts a core part of our strategy and mission,” White said. “We realize that the needs of a diverse workforce are ever-changing, and that’s why we have made a long-term commitment to this effort.”

Diversity in action

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST) is a great example of a company that’s walking the diversity walk, and one you should consider working at if diversity is important to you.

“We want our workforce to mirror the people we serve,” White said. “It starts with a diverse board of directors and executive team. From there, our efforts carry through all levels of management with diversity goals tied to executive incentive packages. We believe this is the right way to do business.”

BCBST offers a number of benefits for LGBTQ workers, including domestic partner healthcare benefits and transgender benefits. The company was recently ranked as one of the best places to work for LGBTQ employees, scoring a 95% on the 2018 Corporate Equality Index (CEI) for corporate policies and practices relating to LGBTQ workplace equality.

The company has also been lauded for its efforts in creating opportunity for women. It ranked No. 30 nationally on Forbes’ 2018 “Best Employers for Women” list, making it the highest-ranked Tennessee-based company and the second-highest-ranked company in the insurance sector. Its inclusion on the list was well-deserved, as 73% of the BCBST workforce and nearly 60% of its management team are comprised of women.

One area that’s often left out of the equality discussion is physical ability. Not so at BCBST, which provides special accessibility features and accommodations for those who self-identify as differently-abled and actively works to recruit and retain those employees.

It’s clear that BCBST is fully committed to creating a diverse work environment that goes beyond the simple objective of tolerance, striving instead to build a company that truly values people of all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds.

“We don’t just talk about diversity—we put our words into actions with measurable goals,” White said. “We have made a long-term commitment to create a culturally competent workforce where everyone is valued and respected.”

Accounting job openings at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

Want to join the diverse team at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee? Click one of the links below to apply for an open job.

Chattanooga, Tennessee accounting jobs

Financial Analyst, External Financial Reporting

Principal Consultant, Accounting Research & Policy

The post The Advantages of Being an Accountant at a ‘Best Employer for Diversity’ appeared first on Going Concern.

This quarter’s job list is sponsored by Aprio, which is hiring a Transaction Advisory Supervisor/Director.

Through our partners at Accountingfly, we’re dedicated to helping you escape the dungeon. Accountingfly connects outstanding talent to the most innovative firms in the world, so check out the jobs below and more at Accountingfly. Don’t see a job you like? Chat with the recruiters at Accountingfly.com and we’ll introduce you to your ideal firm.

Top remote jobs:

Remote Tax Manager
Murray Stok CPAs

Murray, Stok & Company was founded in 1991 offering services to clients in three main areas: tax planning and preparation, accounting and bookkeeping services, and management consulting services. At Murray, Stok & Company, we take care to balance the needs of clients with the needs of our employees. As a result, we have built a robust tax firm that is also a pleasant place to work.

Requirements:

• Candidates should possess strong communication and analytical skills. The employee is expected to stay up-to-date with industry and governmental regulations and also possess strong technology skills, including expertise with Microsoft Excel, database applications, and enterprise resource planning systems.
• Knowledge and experience with CCH ProSystem fx Tax and other CCH products a plus.
• Candidates should have at least five years of tax accounting or public accounting experience. A bachelor’s degree in accounting is required, and candidates must be a licensed CPA.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Remote U.S. Expat Tax Accountant (CPA or EA)
Greenback Expat Tax Services

Greenback Expat Tax Services is a company that specializes in preparing tax returns for Americans living overseas. We are a highly energetic, positive, resourceful team working virtually across the globe. We believe that executional excellence is key to success.

This is not a traditional JOB—it’s more like a business partnership—and is ideally suited for those folks who love the idea of their earning potential being tied to their individual accomplishments, are obsessively organized, and have a natural flair for customer care.

Requirements:

• CPAs or EAs with three to five years of experience preparing U.S. expat tax returns, including specific experience with the additional forms and schedules required for expats (1116, 2555, FinCEN 114, 5471, 3520, etc.).
• People who are comfortable managing their own schedule and workload. There are no set hours—you get paid for the work you do and your results. You take on as many customers as you choose (we pre-agree annual targets).
• People who see technology as an enabler and embrace it fully. We use state-of-the-art systems (Salesforce, Box, ProSeries, and Lacerte).

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Remote Payroll Accountant
HPC

HPC CPA is trailblazing the way forward in cloud accounting and advisory services. As early adopters of Xero cloud accounting, our experience sets the bar when it comes to industry standards. Several years ago, we shut the doors of our physical offices for good. Now we work remotely from all over the United States.

Requirements:

• Three to five years experience working in a public accounting firm or payroll processing company.
• Knowledge of state-specific filing requirements and tax notices.
• Previous experience with multistate tax work.
• Ability to communicate directly with clients and to field general payroll/HR questions.
• Ability to prioritize when working with multiple clients.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Top location-specific jobs:

Atlanta – Transaction Advisory Supervisor/Director
Aprio

Submerge yourself in a workplace with creative innovators striving for excellence. Aprio is the 50th-largest CPA firm in the nation and has been honored as the “Best of the Best” accounting and forensic accounting firm by INSIDE Public Accounting. It was recently named one of the Top Places to Work in Atlanta by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Over 25 languages are spoken at Aprio, and 25% of its staff is foreign-born. The firm specializes in eight different industries. As the Transaction Advisory Supervisor or Director, you’ll gain priceless experiences and skills that will help both you and the company grow. Aprio wants you to define its brand positioning, contribute to industry-leading innovation, and help its clients thrive.

Requirements:

• Big 4 or other consulting backgrounds.
• Bachelor’s degree.
• Approximately 10 years of related work experience.
• Successful track record of building and growing a financial due diligence practice.
• Knowledge of the private equity groups.
• Demonstrates thorough abilities to identify and address client needs, including developing and sustaining meaningful client relationships and understand the client’s business.
• Excellent written, oral, presentation skills.
• Must be willing and able to travel when necessary (20% average).

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

Augusta, GA – Tax Manager
Lawhorn-Baird CPA Group

We are looking for a tax professional to join the Lawhorn T.E.A.M. in Augusta, GA. Is it hot and humid in Augusta? Count on it. But what will make it all worth it is the opportunity to provide leadership in a firm that’s a little out of the ordinary. Don’t like keying time? Great, we don’t either. Don’t like reviewing billing each month? Guess what, we don’t either and have been leaders in value-based billing since 2003.

We acquired the Augusta location in January 2017. The last of the partner group there is transitioning out and we are looking for leadership for this office, which has been in Augusta since 1927. Ninety-plus years goodwill.

This is what we need from you:

• At least seven years recent public accounting experience.
• MAcc in Taxation preferred (but not required if you’re just naturally awesome at tax).
• CPA license (of course).
• A genuine interest in developing those around you as well as the firm.
• You thrive on the bleeding edge of technology.
• You love change and you love challenges.
• Your No. 1 goal in life is to never stop learning and to continually grow as a professional.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

New York City – Senior Auditor
Prager Metis

Respected top 100 CPA firm seeks a Senior Auditor for our New York, N.Y. location. We seek a self-motivated professional with a genuine desire to embrace this challenging career opportunity to work in a team-oriented environment while taking on a variety of assignments. Qualified individuals will have the opportunity to join our employee-friendly corporate culture, which also offers excellent career growth and mobility.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree with a major in accounting or comparable subject.
• CPA license a plus.
• Minimum of five years of public accounting experience.
• A thorough understanding of GAAP and statutory accounting principles.
• Outstanding communication skills—both oral and written.
• Knowledge of SEC and PCAOB auditing standards a plus.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

New York City – Senior Consultant
Advaion

Advaion provides accounting, technology, and management consulting services. When you work at Advaion, you are part of a team that is known for performance. We are an efficiency-driven group of professionals who focus on delivering outstanding results. We also recognize the importance of learning and development and offer our employees a variety of benefits to continue their growth and career development.

Job duties:

• Perform financial, operational, and compliance-related audits.
• Perform business process re-engineering and process improvement engagements.
• Assist in developing and preparing corporate risk assessments, audit plans, and compliance plans.
• Execute audit plans, prepare work papers, document findings, and communicate results.
• Prepare written recommendations to management to improve reporting processes, control environment, and business management.
• Keep current with respect to changes in accounting pronouncements, auditing standards, SEC regulations, and PCAOB rules.

Requirements:

• Must have three-plus years of public accounting and/or external/internal audit experience.
• Must have SEC reporting, SOX, and financial audit experience.
• Must have excellent communication skills (oral and written).
• (Preferred) Bachelor’s and/or master’s degree in accounting.
• (Preferred) CPA or CIA.
• (Preferred) Familiarity with Microsoft Office applications and accounting software systems.
• (Preferred) Familiarity with audit software, automated work program applications, and SOX software.

Click here to apply or chat with a recruiter

The post Escaping the Dungeon: The Hottest Accounting Jobs for Q4 2018 appeared first on Going Concern.

But working from home is old school. The next step is working from anywhere, crossing borders and boundaries as you see fit, with the freedom to take your work with you wherever you go. Americans working as expats in other countries is already a growing trend—for fiscal year 2016, the U.S. State Department estimates there were 9 million Americans living abroad, a significant increase from 4 million in 1999.

Imagine working as you dig your toes into the white sands of a Bora Bora beach. Sitting on a stone bench surrounded by monks at Angkor Wat. Watching lovers on gondolas drift down the Canale Grande through the window of your Venice apartment. Staring skyward at the grandeur of the Swiss Alps from a cozy outdoor cafe. Work from anywhere—WFA, let’s call it—that’s the future.

Why “remote” and “work from anywhere” aren’t the same thing

While allowing employees to work remotely is a growing trend for U.S. accounting firms, most prefer their workers to stay within the 50 states. That’s not because accounting firm managers are a bunch of meanies—time zone differences, language barriers, and connectivity issues create headaches that firms don’t want to deal with. They’d rather avoid those troubles by sticking with strictly domestic accounting talent.

There are a few firms, however, where worker flexibility is valued above those concerns, and where an accountant can treat the entire world as his or her personal office.

One such company is Greenback Expat Tax Services. If you’ve got a CPA or EA, three to five years experience preparing U.S. expat tax returns, and a desire to work anywhere, anytime with unlimited earning potential, you’re in luck. Greenback is currently looking to contract seven (count ’em, seven) remote U.S. expat tax accountants. These U.S. expat tax accounting jobs can be worked from anywhere—and we mean anywhere.

“I love the flexibility that working with Greenback brings. Not only do you get to work with an AMAZING team and clients, but you can literally do so from anywhere in the world. I have lived in five cities across two countries all while having a steady job—such a great feeling!”

Tabitha P.
Michigan, USA

Already sold? Scroll to the bottom of this article to apply for an open position now. Or read on to learn more about the benefits of a WFA job with Greenback.

Make extra cash or earn a six-figure living

As a remote U.S. expat tax accountant at Greenback, you’ll have the freedom to supplement your regular income, collect a full-time salary, or anything in-between.

Your contract will require you to prepare taxes for a minimum of 150 expats. You won’t have to look for these clients or market yourself—Greenback will deliver them to you.

You’ll get paid a flat fee by the form, not by the hour, so you’ll be rewarded for working quickly rather than penalized like you might be at other firms. Some clients may only earn you a few hundred bucks, but others can net you upwards of $5,000 for a single return.

Greenback has no shortage of expats needing tax help. They’ll give you as many additional clients as you want with no upward limit, and discretionary bonuses and referral programs can boost your revenue even higher.

That means your earning potential is essentially unlimited. And while WFA is great, unlimited cash may be the greatest freedom of all.

“It’s a little big world out there and I love helping clients from different countries! Not only do I have the independent career I love, I also have opportunities to continuously expand my knowledge.”

Christie T.
Virginia, USA

Flexibility that goes way beyond work-from-home

Greenback takes flexibility seriously. The company characterizes its structure as “franchise without the buy-in.” It’s an apt description, as working with Greenback gives you all the benefits of running your own business without the tedious tasks and financial obligations that normally come with that territory.

Greenback offers its tax accountants:

• Full ability to set their own schedules, as long as deadlines are met;
• Zero commute and the freedom to move—spend tax season at home and the offseason in the Bahamas;
• No need to manage business logistics like marketing, customer acquisition, billing, customer service, web development, software changes, etc.;
• Knowledge sharing through intranet resources; and
• Opportunities for indefinite contract renewal.

What makes Greenback different?

While U.S. expat tax returns are nothing new, Greenback was one of the first companies to adopt a pay-by-form model and work-from-anywhere culture. These decisions helped the company attract the best tax accountants in the world and rapidly expand its business.

Greenback is now one of the top players in the U.S. expat tax accounting space. The firm has filed more than 26,000 tax returns for nearly 9,000 expats across 213 countries and territories.

Greenback stands apart from its competitors because it offers a platform that’s easy for expats to use, and its 256-bit encryption ensures sensitive financial data remains secure as the information travels from server to server across the globe.

Customers also love Greenback’s flat fee structure. Each service and form has a flat-fee cost, with no hidden fees or surprises for the customer.