Blog Archives
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How Distributed Scanning Helps Streamline Accounting Workflow
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Wednesday May 15, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog : I’ve been doing a lot of work writing and consulting on the topics of document management and workflow, and had seriously written off the hardware side of those critical accounting functions. After all, what more could be said about buying printers and scanners. Mike O’Leary at Ambir Technologies changed my mind. Ambir makes scanners and software for document management and workflow, and he took strong exception to the idea that you simply buy a big, auto-feed scanner and put it somewhere in the office. Instead, he presented a concept of distributed scanning by accounting professionals that made strong economic sense. To be fair, Fujitsu , arguably the leader in the scanner market for... -
IRS Admits Targeting Conservative Groups Before 2012 Election
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Friday May 10, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog. In an awkward and unprecedented announcement this week, the Internal Revenue Service admitted that it targeted non-profits with “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names during the 2012 election year. The agency admitted they held up non-profit status for these groups, demanded lists of contributors to those organizations, and sought additional information about the groups. Mysteriously, no one in charge of anything at the IRS, the Treasury Department or the Administration will admit to have known anything about this. The abuse of IRS authority to target conservative groups, the agency insists, appears to have been done by career IRS employees with no political motivation at all. "That was... -
The Client Is [NOT] Always Right
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Wednesday May 8, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog . I’ll be the first to admit I have had a checkered career. From 18 years running the national trade association for the Internet in Washington…to eight years with the space shuttle program for BFGoodrich…to my years as a business consultant working with a range of problems common to small businesses. Including some assignments working with the client service departments of companies from General Electric to an accounting software firm named CPAids. In these assignments I learned, the hard way, that the client is not always right. In fact, sometimes the client is a pathological liar, a severely violent psychotic, or a passive-aggressive nitwit. You may adjudge that cruel, but hear me out... -
Strategies For Social Media
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Monday May 6, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog. Here’s your next best strategy for social media: Go home, go to bed, and try to forget you ever got suckered into spending untold thousands of dollars to some nitwit marketing firm to develop your “Social Media Strategy.” Sure, the social media scene seemed like the newest, hottest trend five years ago. Twitter was tweeting, Google was forcing companies to optimize their web sites for more hits, Facebook was liking, and MySpace was falling by the wayside as everyone scrambled to find a way to make social media a part of their firm’s marketing strategy. But for those of us who have been there, and done that, the whole social media scene was already dead as a cockroach on Raid. The signs were... -
The High Price of "Free"
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Thursday May 2, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog . In the very early days of the PC revolution, untold thousands of hobbyists and programmers spread their fledgling programs across the seven major online services (The Source, The Well, CompuServe, AOL, ZDNet, Prodigy and MSN) and thousands of Bulletin Board Systems. The programs were largely free to use, and in fact the few software authors who dared to try to charge money for their efforts were thoroughly castigated as being greedy. Eventually, people figured out that talented programmers could not afford to give away their products, any more than talented musicians or painters could. The market divided into three layers – major software programs that consumers paid for at one end of the... -
The Sad State of CyberSecurity
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Wednesday May 1, 2013
From CPA Practice Advisor's Bleeding Edge Blog . There is a lot of protection in being “off the grid” – in being so small and insignificant that no one even know you are there. And that is true even when it comes to CyberSecurity. I once ran a server connected to the Internet for three years, with mail server, web site, FTP site and more, without a single shred of protection. I did it to show that average users don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on elaborate firewalls, anti-virus schemes and other protections simply to access basic Internet services. Of course, the other part of this equation is that you must stay off of porn sites, social media, download sites, file-sharing sites or any other site that you do not know... -
Windows 8.1 is a Yawn
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Monday April 29, 2013From the "Bleeding Edge" blog . I’ve made no secret of the fact that Windows 8 – which I unceremoniously dubbed “the Frankensystem” – is a desperate effort by Microsoft to force people to buy things in their “store.” Seeing Apple and Google rake in oodles of cash with crippled cell phone apps and ringtone downloads, Microsoft decided to go them one better and convert their entire Windows operating system to something that looks and works like a cell phone screen. But the company has leaked that in late June it will release Windows 8.1, code named “Blue,” which will be every bit as exciting, and ground-breaking, and wonderful, as the original Windows 8 was. Yawn. Windows 8 has been an unmitigated disaster for... -
Taxing Internet Sales is Wrong and Doesn't Help Main Street
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Sunday April 28, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog . The U.S. Senate has passed a law to allow states to steal even more money out of your pocket by forcing web sites to charge you a sales tax, no matter where you live. Truth is, it was bound to happen. Remember, taxes are not what you pay for services from the state, as the original stated intent was. Today, they are just a way for a bloated and ineffective state or federal government to steal money from working Americans to give to the people who will vote to keep them in office. And so we get taxes on Internet sales. Yes, this will kill many small businesses that cannot afford to keep track of the tax filings for some 4,800 US taxing authorities. No, they cannot explain why web sites selling widgets... -
Licensing Tax Preparers: It's necessary, and it's going to happen soon
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Friday April 12, 2013From the "Bleeding Edge" blog : More than half of all tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service are prepared by professionals. That’s a substantial number of returns, so it is sad to see the number of preparers who make significant errors. And the number of software products for tax preparation that run into substantial problems by calculating taxes incorrectly. No need to name them – you can read the headlines for yourselves. The point is that the IRS wants to clean up this mess by licensing tax preparers, and I am all for it. The sad truth is that while many people can do their own taxes by self-directed online tax programs, the code is getting so complicated that half or more of the population and nearly all... -
Accounting's Disability Niche
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Friday April 12, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog. Tax and Accounting services are and always have been niche businesses. That is to say, firms become successful by identifying segments of their market that have accounting and tax needs, then serving that segment well. Which is why I’m surprised that more firms are not building their client base by serving the growing ranks of disabled Americans. By all accounts, there are some 8.8 million people in the United States today, and the numbers are increasing. In the year from November, 2011 to November, 2012, an additional 1.2 million Americans joined the ranks of the disabled. There are a host of reasons for this increase, but four factors are likely contributors: The Veteran’s Administration and...
