In this memorable and surprisingly emotional episode of the Accounting Technology Lab, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, CGMA, reflect on the “dead pool” of accounting and business software — products that have already disappeared or are approaching end-of-life support. The conversation blends humor, nostalgia, and serious operational warnings for accounting firms still relying on aging technology.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript (Note: Some errors may appear due to automated transcription.)
SPEAKERS: Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the Accounting Technology Lab, brought to you by CPA Practice Advisor, with your host Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley. Welcome, the Accounting Technology Lab. This is a sad day. We’re here to celebrate the dead pool that products that have been deceased and products that are on the end hospice right now that are going to be deceased, it’s products nearing the end of support, and you know, Randy, you think about it, and we have, you know, if we’re looking at all of this, there are we all benefited from those that went before us, and you know, given that we’re hopefully releasing this around Memorial Day, you know, we had, we have so many people that are their gold star families who had a family member that made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, but let’s remind ourselves that these software products and the people that gave their lives to these products to work 80 hours a week to make them work. These people made those sacrifices for our firms, and so we need to recognize those, you know, we need to recognize that it’s not nearly as much of a sacrifice as those Gold Star families or even the Blue Star families make, but it is a sacrifice, and it does need to be acknowledged. So, I’ll turn it over to you now.
Randy Johnston 01:27
Well, actually, let’s have a moment of silence for all these departed products. If you’re an audio listener, we’ll talk about them in a moment,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:42
do Amen.
Randy Johnston 01:46
So, that said, you know, there were a lot of great products historically. In fact, I presented in Nashville just the day before we’re recording this, and one of the attendees said, “You may not remember ATB, and I said, “Oh, ATB for sure, Steve Blundell miss him dearly, you know. So, there’s a lot of people that created products that were really great people, and so things like.. and I am going to read them from the slide, just for the audio listeners, but Creative Solutions Accounting, Peachtree for DOS, which, by the way, I deployed in 1981 on an IBM PC, QuickBooks Pro and Premier Pro system ethics document on premises is now gone. The old Thomson Reuters CVS client bookkeeping system, what an interesting way to handle remote bookkeeping, and of course personal accounting with Quicken, which actually is kind of still available, but no longer an Intuit, and of course, Mint went, you know, way Great Plains, of course, the Doug Burgum Company, and you know, you see Doug Burgum in the public eye now, but Great Plains acquired by
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:00
Great Plains to being the Secretary of Interior, who saw that coming.
Randy Johnston 03:04
Yeah, you know, he always wanted to be president, so that’s probably his stepping stone, because he’s got his governor deal in. But Cougar Mountain Denali, you know, SAP are three boy. I did a lot of work on that, of course, Pro Series Basic, and Intuits Lacerte tax analyzer, and frankly, the whole advisory platform that Intuit built was really a good one, and I was just so sad to see that die. One that you know we spent a lot of effort on, and it was interesting to see how it went was Microsoft Office County. Look, think we’re reading the tombstone right now. It was around from 2003 through 2009 It was just getting market share when Microsoft pulled the plug on it. They were actually effectively competing against QuickBooks. The inscription on the tombstone says, “Beloved brother of Clippy, son of Excel and Word, being right and accurate isn’t always enough. What an interesting epitaph, if you will, for that particular product. And the guy that was behind that, Bob Lewis, did a lot of work, and the product was really working beautifully, but yet Dak Easy Accounting, and of course, visual practice management, which was, you know, purchased by CCA, became their practice management product, but the visual plan, right up, and you know, since we’re talking about a holiday here with Memorial Day, you know, my family goes to all of our local cemeteries, and we put flags properly on the graves. Many people do not understand the respect for the flag. Now we do, and we’re quite adamant about doing things right. That probably comes from my sister being in the Navy, and you know all of my uncles and father serving World War Two, but we get it, and in any case. When I think about visual practice management, so forth, the founder of that company’s birthday is the fourth of July, which I always send him a message around that holiday, but QuickBooks point of sale going down Microsoft Office 2003 which was such a solid version of the product, and of course XP Vista Seven, and you know the great news, Brian, as we’re thinking about those departed, we can look for the ones that are coming, because I noticed today that Microsoft is building a new version of Windows called k2 which is pretty interesting, they’re after quality in their next version of Windows, and they named it k2 and of course,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 05:43
Why wouldn’t you name a quality product k2
Randy Johnston 05:46
I think it’s hilarious. Many of you know that I’m the owner of k2 Enterprises, and that’s how Brian and I met, was through our k2 CPA courses, but watch for Windows k2 the new quality version of Windows, and that was just announced the day before we recorded this, but you know, Brian came up with an idea some time ago called the Dead Pool, and really, these are products that are in software hospice, if you will, the vendors have announced that they’re going to kill the products, and we need to be thoughtful about that, and you know, I actually sent a message to all of my team members about Microsoft Publisher, whose death date is projected to be october 13 of 2026 You know, in my mind, when I see these, it’s unfortunately like going to the oncologist and saying you got six months to live, but in this particular case it’s not a variable date, it is a pure drop dead date, and you know in this particular case the Microsoft Publisher files will not be readable by the surviving products, you can convert them now, but Microsoft says don’t plan on being able to convert them at the dead day. Somebody will come up with a way, I suspect, but you know, just from an operational perspective, you’ve got to start thinking about how you get this change. So, Brian, you might speak to some of the other products in the list.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:15
Sure. So, believe it or not, Office 2021 end of support is in October, so if you bought the on-premises version of it, there will be no security updates after October, which is, you know, based on some of the previous podcasts we’ve done, is a pretty big deal. Um, I was actually working on some workstations for a small business that I do some work with, and they had somebody that was on 24 h2 when is 1124 h2 and that ends in October. Windows 11 Enterprise and Education 23 h2 ends in November of this year. Windows 10 Home Extended Support ends october 13, 2026 with no extension. Windows Pro and Enterprise Business Support is available into the second, even a second and a third year, starting in October, but it’ll be 122 per seat in year two, and 244 a seat in year three, and again it’s the idea will be Elvis dead on October the 14th of 2028
Randy Johnston 08:14
and you know that’s hard to believe, that’s only two and a half years out, friends, so for those of you that said, oh, I’ll just stay on Windows 10, and you know, be a real strong person. It’s like, yeah, no, that’s not
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:25
the way you work, and you’re going to be $400 lighter in the wallet for Windows. I mean, you know, I feel like that’s, you know, wouldn’t you be better off just buying a whole new computer?
Randy Johnston 08:37
Yeah,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:38
you know, Dynamics 365 Business Central on premises is going to 2024 release wave two is out as of now and the.net nine as we report as you know at the time by the time this is released.net nine will also have crossed the rainbow bridge into the next world
Randy Johnston 08:59
well now you might be stay with us, friends, because you might be saying, well, what’s your point, guys, and the point is coming up because there are products that are broadly used in the profession. An example here is File Cabinet CS from Thompson Reuters, which has an official end of life of December 31 of 2027 and the day before we recorded this, I was asked by a managing partner who said, “Hey, I’m on file cabinet CS. What’s my alternatives? So I had that question in a live group of managing partners just yesterday, and that firm was not the only firm on this product. So, Brian, what can you tell our listeners about file cabinets? Yes,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:45
well, you know, it’s there’s 12,000 firms on this platform, so it’s a, you know, it’s a tool that is very popular. It has been very successful in the market, however, there are some issues with it, you know, so much of the software that. We work with today is stuff that was written pre yk and this is no exception, and the problem with that is that we didn’t store data in the way we then in the format that we need that we store it now. Okay, and so the problem is now that the ability, the tools, you know, with 12,000 firms on the platform, the tools are not, you know, they’re probably not going to spend a whole lot of money writing a lot of tools to do this, and there’s it, this is a very laborious process, for some reasons that we’ll talk about here in a second, you know, one one consultant estimated that 500 client manual export, four to eight weeks of staff time, eight to $15,000 in loaded labor. Part of the problem is that the files are stored are broken up to individual pages, and so you have to basically assemble the images of each of the pages into a PDF file or some other format, so that’s the, it’s a restructuring of data problem in there, and there’s not really a great tool for that. Again, it consultants are going to charge 10 to $50,000 for this. Now, again, this export does require restructuring files. The files are stored one page at a time as images, and it’s data stored, and they have to be recombined. And there’s, of course, the page, the number of pages is variable, and this is not a simple process. Now you can go in and open up each individual file, export it to PDF, and then reload it, but then you’ve got to get – you’ve also got to gather all that indexing data that you have that you use to file this in here, and I’ve got a couple of blog posts that were written by Chris at Lycio, Chris Farrell, who actually is their founder and CEO. He actually has spent quite a bit of time converting stuff out of here, but there’s also a guy named Kevin Anderson that’s a CPA out of Utah that has done this, but it is a, it is act pro an inexact process, and the problem with this is that you know, if you start thinking about layering, I may need to take five weeks of staff time or something like that to make this conversion. You know, you’re running out of daylight, is what we would say in the farming world. You know, I have bees, and I didn’t get my mite treatments done last fall, and there are a lot of reasons I didn’t get them done. I’m not making any excuses, but we had a lot of calamity last fall, and I didn’t get my mite treatments done, and I lost half my bee colonies this winter. Okay, because I didn’t get out and do the chores that I should have done. Now, the lesson for you is that the thing here is that there isn’t as much time as you think before 1231 2027 You know, you have remaining in 2026 second busy season, and then you have, you know, october 15 and september 15, and then you have first busy season next year, and you have second busy season next year, and notice how little, how compressed the spots are in between, and so I want you to start thinking about that now. You know, if you’re on that product, I would try to get something. I would try to get something selected and at least piloted this year, so that next year you can go at it really hard. Honestly, I’d like to see you convert to do that conversion maybe before the end of the year. Okay, because the problem you’re going to have is that the talent to do the conversion is you’re gonna have to throw lots and lots of staff hours at it, if you don’t have an automation, if you do have an automation, you know it’s going to cost big money, and you don’t have a whole lot of margin for error there, and you’re talking about really your entire library of working papers, which is your practice, and so this is not an asset that you want to gamble with,
Randy Johnston 13:46
so you know we’re talking about file cabinet CS, but in my mind this represents a much bigger picture, because there are many products that you use where you really need to do a migration, and the timeframes that you have to do it when you see an end of life date is as compressed as Brian is laying out. If you’re in public practice, you’ve really only got a few flexible months in any given year, and if you have a culture of tax extensions where you used to have downtime in the summer, you no longer have that, so you may have very little time available. So that’s kind of point 1.2. Thomson Reuters, of course, would like to have you convert file cabinet CST to go file room, but I believe that Thompson is likely to be constrained in the resources. Now, I’m not speaking for Thompson, I don’t know that. In fact, I’m just saying, if you have 12,000 firms and you’re trying to move them, even with utility, that’s just a group of work, so kind of be thoughtful about how that all plays out. And in a separate accounting technology lab, we’re discussing new generation document management products, which we certainly would like you to listen in on that if you’re faced with a document. Conversion issue. Now, all of that said, note there’s a few other interesting facts that we can talk about here, and we have been watching vendors create utilities to try to do some of this work. So, Brian started step in, but I’ll hit it back to you for a moment.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:20
Well, I mean, there are two. There are people that are coming up with ways to do this. One thing that Chris and Lisio are doing is they have tool sets that will, that will identify document classifications, will automatically classify and automatically name documents. There are tools like Paperless Plus out there that will index things, you know, I actually installed a photo application just the other day in a container that did facial recognition on all of my legacy photos, and it was running on premises, and it actually did a remarkably good job. And so, you know, the tools are getting better, but the problem again is, is that you don’t know what you don’t know about the data structures and the files in these things, and I wanted to, we, I wanted to call this to you here, because this is an IED that can blow up your entire, you know, this can blow up your season next year if you don’t address it sooner rather than later, you know. We need to go out and scout and find out what the issues are, and what the conversion issues are. If you have one of these legacy products, because you might be walking into something like this, where you have to completely restructure every doc, literally every document that’s in your, that’s in your client files that you want to retain in the new format. Now, again, I’ll tell you that again. If you think about the Randy’s, we’re absolutely right about the amount of time you have. My normal rules, when I was an accounting firm tech manager, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, one of the things I would always do is I was locked down from about December the 15th to April the 20th. Okay, and nothing major could happen during that four month period, okay. And then we locked down again, about, you know, about august 15 until october 15, okay. And so you’re literally knocking out six months of the year there, okay. And then in those six months, you also have to do any summer audits that you have to do, you have to do your CPA, you have to do your vacations, you have staff turnover, and you have to train new employees, and so what I’m telling you here is, you know, to use one of Randy’s favorite savings from the farm folks, you’re burning daylight if you’re not looking at this right now. It’s time to address this, and you need to address it sooner rather than later, because this is one of the major assets of your practice, is your working papers.
Randy Johnston 17:57
So, that said, friends, you can see that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. These conversion tools will help us, but I’m going to caution you on one other key item. The cost of using AI to do these conversions is high if you use the general models, and many are going to try to use ChatGPT or Claude or whatever to get that job done, and number one, they don’t have the best document recognition, and number two, they’re quite expensive to do the job on a per page or per token basis, so we’re going to try to identify tools that will help you with these types of conversions. We suspect many of you will wind up in Teams and SharePoint, or in other platforms. Again, we have another lab on new generation document management. We’d invite you there, but you know we wanted to remember those that had gone before us, because we have learned from many and stood on the shoulders of giants. You have a good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:11
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the Technology Lab from CPA Practice Advisor. Have a great week.
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