Taking Your Practice Online

For accountants and outside bookkeeping services, this solution could revolutionize your practice just as PayCycle brought efficiency to how you provide payroll services. If you provide bill paying services, you can set up a Bill.com account and have several of your clients set up so that you can quickly go online, switch between clients, process their vendor invoices, route the bills to approvers, and schedule the bill payments all from the comfort of your own office. You won’t have to order stacks of checks for each client and keep them separate (or use blank checks with MICR ink in the toner cartridge), and of course you’ll get all the time savings, paper savings and postage savings listed above.

In June of 2008, Bill.com and CPA2Biz (the marketing and technology subsidiary of the AICPA) announced that CPA2Biz has become the exclusive distributor of Bill.com to accountants. This partnership allows accountants to get free access to the Bill.com service, and accountants can set up clients on Bill.com for a 10 percent discount. Go to www.cpa2biz.com for more information.

SmartVault
SmartVault is a brand new document management solution just coming to market. While I believe the document management space is getting very crowded, I am highlighting this solution because of some unique twists they’ve put into the product.

It’s getting difficult to know what “document management” really means, so for some good background on the various types of document management systems, read John Higgins’ 2008 Review of Document Management Systems from the June/July issue (www.CPATechAdvisor.com/go/1966).

One of the initial steps for implementing a document management system is to go paperless. And since so many of the documents we deal with as bookkeepers are on paper, most of the “input” into the document management system will involve scanning paper documents. But it’s important to think about documents more generally by including your electronic documents (Word, Excel, QuickBooks data file, etc.) in your management system, as well.

What SmartVault does for the business is provide an online, secure management system for all of your company documents. You can store your documents, share them with others (members of your team or between accountant and client), and secure all your information (QuickBooks data file, correspondence, contracts, etc.) with offsite backups. And what I like most is that you can associate documents stored online with transactions in your QuickBooks file. As you enter a transaction in QuickBooks, you can scan paper documents or attach disk-based files to the transaction, thereby linking the documents to the QuickBooks transaction. This is a new product that is really worth checking into. Go to www.smartvault.com for more information.