Help Your Clients with the Latest Tools

iLumen — www.ilumen.com
The iLumen Portfolio Connection collects data from the client’s trial balance and the firm’s practice management systems, standardizes it and makes it available at the desktop of the firm’s partners. This information is used to analyze the portfolio of clients of the firm, determine the best clients for service opportunities and generate customized presentations for the client. Portfolio Connection allows the firm to sort and data mine the client portfolio to identify new project opportunities, such as consulting and tax planning projects. Portfolio Connection provides visibility into the entire client base, including views of the aggregate client portfolio performance by industry expertise and performance by geography, office and partner. Firms using Customer Connection find that their audit and other business clients submit financial information on an interim basis, allowing for a more dynamic look at these clients’ business trends and profiles in addition to increased engagements.

iLumen differentiates the firm to win new business, leverages industry expertise across the entire firm, identifies new service opportunities to generate incremental revenue, improves client meetings, and compares clients to their industry peers. iLumen also streamlines audit analytics and helps partners better manage the firm’s book of business. Portfolio Connection allows the firm to move away from traditional audit presentations to ones that have charts and graphs that summarize financial trends and engage the clients. Portfolio Connection creates audit analytic reports that compare the client’s interim and rolling 12 months performance to prior fiscal years. The auditor can see trends each month to proactively spot trends and identify risk. When the trends are compared to last year’s audit, the tax and accounting professional can gather intelligence about the movement of the business and appropriately advise the client.

Profit Solver by Fee Technology — www.feetech.net
Profit Solver is a software product that allows you to calculate fees for every service of your client’s business based on actual costs, and it shows you how to charge out billable labor in order to achieve a desired profit. This is particularly valuable to businesses that have labor and production costs, such as medical and veterinarian practices where competition or regulation dictates the price of some services and there is flexibility in setting the charges for other tests or services. The product has enough flexibility to make each piece of equipment, inventory and employee an individual profit center. Profit Solver calculates the appropriate mark-ups for all profit centers. The costs are fairly allocated based on each usage.

Profit Solver is designed for a wide range of industries and consulting. You can use this tool for business consulting services in many industries doing something that clients value highly — making more money for their business with no additional effort.

SmartVault — www.smartvault.com
SmartVault was specifically designed for use with QuickBooks and provides faster, easier and more secure document management. Simplify document management for both you and your clients by scanning and attaching documents directly to Quick-Books transactions. SmartVault’s seamless QuickBooks integration makes document management easy. It also ensures that your clients have a secure, off-site backup of all their data.
SmartVault provides qualified practicing public accounting professionals who do work for outside clients with a free copy of the product for their own internal use. SmartVault takes the hassle out of sharing QuickBooks database files with your clients by creating the easiest way to share the most recent copies of these files.

Bill.com — www.bill.com
Bill.com allows end users to enter bills and then e-mail, fax, upload and approve the bills. Tax and accounting firms can use the product at no charge with their clients. This product lets you pay or schedule bills for online payments, and you can route them to multiple approvers. You can add clients; manage multiple clients from the dashboard; centralize billing; import accounts, vendors and departments; and export payables and payments.

The BizExcelerator from BizNet Software — www.biznetsoftware.com
The BizExcelerator, an Excel-based financial reporting and analytics product, provides simple, yet powerful financial reporting and business intelligence capabilities to help accountants do their jobs more efficiently. Businesses with investments in Excel or those who wish to do custom financials easily should consider this product. BizExcelerator ensures that data in Excel is accurate, reduces month-end close time, leverages time in existing spreadsheet reports, and has multi-dimensional drilldown for rapid detail transaction access. The BizExcelerator is delivered by a network of GL partners who provide personalized service. Your company can choose the extent of services needed for implementation.