2011 Readers Choice Awards

Analytical/Forecasting/Budgeting
Insight: Many professionals turn to specialty tools for helping clients better understand their financial condition and plan for future growth, economic conditions and other events. Most popular are financial analysis systems that help bring meaning to bottom line numbers, and benchmarking and budgeting programs. This year’s most popular in this category was the Financial Analysis CS program from Thomson Reuters, with WizSoft, WhiteBirch, Reinvent Data and SageWorks rounding out the top five.

Business Valuation
Insight: Whether planning for a sale, generational ownership transfer or in support of litigation, business valuation is a specialty in which many professionals find success. There are several programs designed specifically for assessing business value, and this year’s winner is again the PPC Business Valuation Specialist from Thomson Reuters. Other programs receiving notable vote counts include products from ValuSource, NACVA and MoneySoft.

Practice Management/Time & Billing Systems
Insight: Are the trains running on time in your office? When workflow processes get hampered, hit snags or don’t follow best practice steps, efficiency and productivity goes down. And with them, follows profitability. Whether billing by flat rate or by the hour, managing time, staff and other resources is critical in the modern practice, and management software can help maximize your output. The vote getting leader this year is CCH ProSystem fx Practice Management, followed by programs from Thomson Reuters, Sage and BQE Software.

Time Tracking & Attendance Tools
Insight: This category is new for this year, and while it may seem related to practice management, it’s actually focused on systems that a client business would use in-house for employee time management and attendance monitoring. The leading vote winners were CountMeIn and Chrometa.

Document Management & Document Storage
Insight: This is the second largest category in this year’s Awards voting, with more than 40 products on the market designed to help accountants and businesses better manage their documents through digital file cabinet and management systems. More than 60 percent of this year’s voters cited use of document management or storage system, with Drake’s Document Manager, which is included with their tax package, receiving the most votes by far. Once again, their customers are loyal and eager to spread the news.

Document Management Utilities
Insight: This is another new category this year, and one that goes alongside document management and storage. The difference being that these systems are designed to work with document management systems and strategies by providing hardware or software to help scan, store and organize digital files. Scanners from HP and Fujitsu led the pack, with Nuance, ABBYY, Kofax and cPaperless rounding out the top six.

Tax Document Automation
Insight: Part of the new workflow paradigm for many tax practices is automating the scanning of client source documents and data-entry functions associated with 1040 returns. These systems are often designed to either produce entry/review-ready digital client work folders and have the ability to recognize what forms are being scanned in. Some can even automatically populate a client’s return with data from the scanned documents. This year’s leading vote-getter was SurePrep for its 1040 SCAN, which was first to market in this field about five years ago. Following was the Scan & Fill utility for the ATX and TaxWise compliance systems from CCH Small Firm Services, and systems from Thomson Reuters, Copanion and CCH.

Workflow Optimization
Insight: What is workflow? It varies in every practice, which is why this year we’ve split this category into two groups — this one and Workflow - Other Tools (see full article online). For firms looking to streamline functions practice-wide, these comprehensive end-to-end systems provide highly effective management tools for optimizing productivity. Leading in votes was Office Tools Pro, followed by XCM, CCH, Thomson Reuters and Autonomy.

Other Workflow Tools
Insight: There are also many technology tools on the market that are geared toward enhancing specific areas of a practice. The top vote receivers in this category were Drake, for the Document Manager it includes with its tax program, followed by SurePrep, Intuit and CCH.

Website Builders for Accounting Firms
Insight: You need a website. Really. Most of you know this, but there are still more than 40 percent of firms that don’t bother. It doesn’t have to be hard or expensive to at least have a basic one, which is why for the third year in a row, the free websites and easy-to-use tools that Drake Software gives to users of its tax and accounting system are the overwhelming favorite. Well, that and because Drake’s users love the vendor so much that they always vote en masse. Following them were other website development tools designed specifically for tax and accounting practices, with CPASiteSolutions, AccountantsWorld and CCH taking the next three spots.

Client Portals
Insight: Professional firms continue to adopt client portals as an important and secure way to collaborate and communicate with clients. No more sending things by email, no more mailing, no more couriers … portals are a natural extension of the paperless office. Leading in votes this year was XCM, followed by portal offerings from Intuit, CCH, AccountantsWorld and Thomson Reuters. Of note is that more than 50 percent of this year’s voters claimed use of client portals.

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Client-Side Accounting

Insight: If ever there was proof that what your clients do affects how you run your practice, QuickBooks is it. Those who’ve been in practice since the mid-1990s probably remember well that the program wasn’t exactly the favorite among professionals. But within a decade, accountants had started to join the bandwagon, even if they weren’t yet drinking the Kool-Aid. Add a few more years to that and, well, almost all accountants have purple-stained lips. Why the change? Well, accountants didn’t necessarily fall in love with the program itself, but they absolutely appreciated having most, if not all, of their small business clients using the same program. It made it easier to get data, made it easier to work with that data, and made it easier to find qualified bookkeepers.

Small Business Accounting	Mid-Range Accounting
Retail Accounting	Not-for-Profit
Construction Accounting

QuickBooks Paperless
Insight: Going paperless is a continuing evolution, even for practices that may have been early adapters of document management systems. One of the next big hurdles in this ongoing quest is to get your clients to join the movement, because as long as they are burdened with paper-based processes, they won’t be as efficient as possible, and that will affect your relationship with them. The main focus in this market, thus far, has been on systems that help businesses using QuickBooks, by letting them attach documents to transactions, paperlessly process payables and perform other digital-focused functions. This year’s leading vote receiver was again SmartVault, followed by Bill.com, PaperSave and Cabinet NG.

Fixed Asset Management
Insight: Fixed Asset Management is directly related to client taxation, but is often more complex than many small and mid-sized businesses have the expertise to appropriately manage. So it makes sense that for small businesses with fewer assets, their tax professionals often provide this function as a service. For those with larger asset bases and more complex needs, the professional will often recommend a system for use in-house. The Fixed Asset Management add-on to Intuit’s ProSeries tax package was this year’s top vote receiver in this category, followed by programs from Thomson Reuters, Sage, CCH, ProWare, BNA and AccountantsWorld.

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General Business Technologies

Outsourced Technology Services
Insight: Sometimes, it makes sense to hire a specialist for certain tasks with which they may be more experienced efficient. This is true of some tax and accounting functions, as well as many other business processes, and it doesn’t mean outsourcing it to another country. Just as accountants and estate lawyers often work together, so too do businesses often find value in using an external resource or technology for specialized functions. This year’s winner in this category is Xcentric, which offers cloud computing consulting and services to accounting firms, followed by Earth Class Mail, Network Management Group, eFax and Postini.

Laptop & Desktop Computers
Insight: Many professionals have a preference, if not loyalty, to specific technologies … even the brand of computer they use. While this is very noticeable among Mac users, it’s also true of those who prefer PCs. Over the past few years, the Apple brand has been on fire even in the professional accounting market, and this has been reflected year-after-year in the Readers’ Choice Awards. Once again, Dell came in first this year, with HP, Toshiba, Compaq and Apple rounding out the top five.

Smart Phone
Insight: Pretty much every phone is a “smart phone” these days, a testament to the ever-increasing need of professionals to stay in contact with their mobile apps, email, internet, work data and clients almost 24/7, but also because the devices are increasingly becoming central to our entertainment, combining music, video, games and, yes, even a phone. At this time last year, almost nobody even knew what an Android was and it didn’t even appear in our polling. Which makes it notable that the new smart phone platform has jumped immediately to third, behind still-in-first Blackberry and second place iPhones.

Printers & Scanners
Insight: Scanners are quickly becoming as important, if not more so, than printers … especially in the modern “paperless” office. Of course, even in these practices, there is a need for printing, but scanners are gaining because of their role in other productivity-enhancing changes, such as workflow optimization and tax document automation. Readers were able to select multiple choices from a list of scanners and printers, with HP soundly leading the pack, followed by Brother, Cannon, Fujitsu, Dell and several other brands.

Office Supply Store
Insight: Just like almost every other kind of business, your practice uses toner, binders, staplers, paper, pens and many other supplies, some that you plan purchases of, but others that you rely on a local store. Of our voters who selected from a list of nationally-known office supply retailers, Staples just edged out Office Depot for the second year in a row.




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