An Accidental Discovery

From the Dec. 2006 Issue

Alexander Fleming’s World War I battlefront experience had shown him how serious killer bacteria could be. It could be much worse than enemy artillery, and he wanted to find a way to stop such infections. In 1928, as he was cleaning Petri dishes in the lab, he noticed a peculiar one before tossing it into the cleaning solution. Mold was growing on it, but all around the mold the bacteria had been killed. The sample of mold proved to be penicillin. The first antibiotic had been discovered!!! His “accidental discovery” changed medicine dramatically. While I’m not sure that the tax workflow products discussed below rise to the same level of importance to mankind as penicillin, there is most certainly a similarity in how the two came to be. Both were basically “accidental discoveries.”

Technology has been hammering away at the base business practices in public accounting firms for nearly 30 years, and it still is today. The “paperless” revolution is now rolling through the profession, and one of the major effects, in addition to a profound impact on productivity and job satisfaction, is a formalization of workflow processes. That formalization has allowed firms to “right-source” by delegating keypunch tasks to the most appropriate level FOR THAT FIRM – either in their own office, a branch office, to a remote employee or to a contractor, and either on-shore or off-shore. Several years ago, when some larger firms and a few upstart software vendors began looking at outsourcing, they quickly discovered that they collectively lacked the processes and discipline to handle large numbers of electronic tax files efficiently. Thus, a new genre of software was born.

Dave Wyle, father of “the product formerly known as ePace” (now CCH’s ProSystem fx Engagement), formed California-based SurePrep and began developing SurePrep Express and its DreamWorkpapers. Meanwhile, 3,000 miles to the east, Mark Albrecht and his Boston-based Xpitax group was busy developing XCM Workflow. Both vendors had visions of their “processes” being the conduit to hundreds of thousands of returns being processed in India. Along came the 2004 Presidential election, and suddenly “outsourcing” wasn’t about process and cost control. It was about patriotism! California passed what can only be termed “punitive” legislation demanding a firm have affirmative permission from every client before “outsourcing.” The move to India stopped dead in its tracks. But over the next few years an interesting thing happened as the profession began to notice those new tools – SurePrep Express, XCM and a few others. While unequivocally turning its back on “outsourcing,” the profession began to pick up those new workflow tools saying, “We can use these to better our process regardless of WHERE we accomplish keypunch.” And the vendors listened and quickly adapted what had been an “outsourcing tool” to be a “workflow tool.”

Now, just a few years later, these tools are maturing and being joined by CCH’s ProSystem fx Scan, Thomson GoFileRoom’s TaxFlow and ScanFlow, and Doc-It’s forms recognition system. These products are pushing the bounds of both technology and the profession’s ability (read: willingness) to quickly adapt business practices to take advantage of available technology. Many advanced firms today are employing workflow tools that convert a completely unorganized set of client documents – literally a “bag of crap” (description borrowed from the words forming the acronym-named product BOCDIP that was recently purchased by CCH and renamed ProSystem fx Scan) – into an organized and bookmarked *.PDF file, ready for the tax return preparation process. Now, SurePrep Express 1040Scan PDF has moved even further, pairing scan and organize with OCR and forms recognition. The result is an astonishing 70 percent “fill rate” as the process examines each document and, when identified, pulls the actual numbers and automatically and correctly (no transposition errors here, folks!) drops them onto the tax return. Now that’s OUTSOURCING! Well, technically, I guess it’s not really “outsourcing,” but rather “right-sourcing.” In either case, it accomplishes what the profession is seeking: eliminating high-cost professional time spent performing tasks easily done by other, lower-cost people … or machines … or maybe … not done at all.