Microsoft Office Accounting Customers:

Transition your business with Intuit QuickBooks!

QuickBooks has been the leader in small business finance software for more than 25 years and welcomes Office Accounting customers to the Intuit family. Now is your opportunity to change how you manage your business finances and take advantage of several new features in QuickBooks to help grow your business and make key insights to protect the bottom line.

QuickBooks 2010 can transfer your data from Microsoft Office Accounting easily allowing you to leverage the new features and connected services of QuickBooks to meet your unique needs.

If you need assistance in transitioning to Quickbooks, contact me: Info@Lisakhayyatcpa.com.

Article provided by: emochila - Websites for Professionals emochila

Why should your site have a File Exchange Portal?
As an increasing number of tax and accounting professionals begin to develop a web presence, they may be overlooking the inclusion of a simple and valuable web-based tool—secure file exchange. Sometimes referred to as an “online file cabinet,” a file exchange portal is of particular interest in our current time of economic difficulty as it’s an inexpensive technology investment that improves productivity, client service, and saves YOU time and money.

In its simplest terms, a file exchange portal is a quick and efficient method of securely transferring bookkeeping documents, tax returns, and other financial documents from one computer to another.

Often, accountants run into problems transferring client information for 2 main reasons. First, current bookkeeping software files like QuickBooks or Peachtree are notorious for becoming larger and larger with each fiscal year. As such, these files quickly become too large for you to send or receive them through traditional email providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL. However, file exchange portals are specifically designed to transfer very large file sizes with ease.

Second, in the event that these bookkeeping files are small enough to send via email, many clients are reluctant to do so because of the lack of security. File exchange portals require users to log on to an encrypted third-party server, ensuring a security level comparable to that of online banking (B of A, Chase, etc). Last year, Massachusetts and Nevada were the first states to pass legislation requiring the encryption of sensitive information transfers between accountants and their clients: a move that will, no doubt, be copied by other proactive states.

So, how does this translate into increased productivity and improved client services? For one, a file exchange portal is an important step towards a paperless office. Being able to access documents online saves money on mailing costs, but more importantly, it saves you time. Many tax professionals find themselves hounded for old tax returns, but with online storage, old returns can be quickly uploaded and stored on the portal to be retrieved at your clients’ convenience. Also, with a portal capable of large file exchange your clients are no longer inconvenienced by having to copy bookkeeping files to a CD or flash drive to get them to you. They can simply upload them for you to access when you want.

Some web-developers that work within the accounting industry provide a file exchange portal as part of their basic services, while others require them to be purchased as a separate service.

Taking into consideration their ease of use and potential to streamline your existing practice, a file transfer portal is undoubtedly a smart addition to your site.

Article provided by: emochila - Websites for Professionals emochila

It depends. SEO is used by companies that want to get prospects through their website and convert them into new clients. If you have a full practice and don’t want new clients, SEO is not necessary!

However, if you are looking to build your practice, SEO is a great resource that will only become more and more relevant in the future.

Definition: SEO is a way to optimize your website’s performance on search engine rankings like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. There is a lot of intensive programming that goes in to it, but SEO companies take care of that for you and its all “back-end,” meaning that the appearance and content of your website will be unaffected. They will build links that go to your website, submit your site to all the major search engines, submit your site to directories and use many other strategies to gradually bring up your ranking.

Google and the other search engines have algorithms that decide which sites should be ranked at the top for certain keywords. They send out robots (or “spiders”) to crawl all the sites on the World Wide Web to gather information. Your website is usually crawled once every few months. Thus an SEO campaign takes at least a few months to be effective and sometimes 6 months to a year to get your website up to the top of the rankings. Because of this, most SEO providers have a minimum of a 3-6 month contract.

The pricing usually starts around $200/month and goes up from there. Pricing depends on your competition and location. If you are in New York City, it will be much harder to get ranked high for a search like “CPA New York” compared to a local market with less competition like “CPA Tucson.” This is because SEO is becoming increasingly popular and in large metro areas like NYC, there are going to be many other competing firms who are also using SEO.

Your SEO provider will give you performance reports that will allow you to see who is coming to your website, where they went on the site, what search engines are crawling your site, and other useful info that allows you to track the success of the SEO campaign.

SEO is not to be confused with adwords or Pay-Per-Click. These are also effective ways to market online, but SEO is for improving your ranking in the organic or “natural” results, not within the sponsored links. Studies have shown that 70% of people click on the organic results, as opposed to the sponsored links. Thus SEO is used as a long-term solution for gaining clients.

Chad Brubaker, CEO, www.emochila.com

Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks and other popular business technology solutions have put together a small business report that is authored by The Institute for the Future. This is a three part study that examines trends for small business over the next 10 years. Part one of the study was released in January 2007 and it focuses on “Demographic Trends and Small Business”. Part two of this study was just recently released and it focuses on “Technology Trends and Small Business”.

The link to both parts of the Study and to the Intuit site: http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness

According to Hoovers, the top technology trends for small business in 2007 are:

• SEO or Search Engine Optimizaton: To ensure a strong web presence that gives your web site maximum exposure on the net, a significant amount of time and resources are needed to develop SEO strategies.
• Marketing Partnerships: In order to cut the costs of generating new business, many small businesses are turning to marketing partnerships to generate new leads.
• Computer Security: All businesses must put in place certain safeguards to ensure that their confidential information is protected at all times. At the very least a small business should protect their proprietary databases from competitors, former employees, would be hackers and all types of malware. There should also be regular daily or twice daily backing up of data. Web based backup services are fairly new and should be looked into. Then of course having a formal, written contingency plan such as a plan in the event of a natural disaster should be the ultimate goal of all small businesses.

Many accountants have already embraced web based technology solutions. They have done their homework. Many more accountants are still holding on to their desktop based systems oblivious to what is going on all around them. Who will fare better in the months and years ahead? Gone are the days when moms and dads get stuck at the office unable to attend to the needs of their families. With web based software solutions, these same professionals can work from virtually anywhere there is an internet connection.