Combined, the firms will have 16 partners and 250 employees.
Wahington, D.C.-based Raffa — which handles over 500, mostly nonprofit, clients — is absorbing Rockville, Md.-based Friedkin Matrone & Horn. Freidkin, a 35-year-old women-owned CPA firm, employs about 30 people.
“By expanding our ability to help businesses and individuals better manage and leverage their finances through sophisticated tax planning, we believe the firm can have a larger, more significant impact on our work in the community,” said CEO Tom Raffa, who established the namesake firm in 1984.
FREE DOWNLOAD: Raffa recently held an “economic summit” for its nonprofit clients. Download the presentation here (PDF, 136 pages)
25 new features aimed at accountants to help clients with bookkeeping.
Upstart Bill.com appears to be riding out the economic hurricane with a formula that helps growth-minded small business take advantage of the power of the SaaS cloud.
Here’s the latest news release from Bill.com
Palo Alto, CA – Bill.com Inc., a leader in on-demand accounts payable applications, is offering improved cash flow and paperless workflow capabilities, including tighter integration to back-end accounting systems from Intuit (QuickBooks) and Intacct, and a more intuitive user interface.
READ MORE →
Rowbotham
U.S. clients can’t ignore “the largest economy in the world and access to a highly motivated and educated workforce.”
via CalCPA
“There is no cookie-cutter approach for a U.S. business looking to expand into China,” says the managing partner at Rowbotham & Company LLP, citing “the fluid nature of tax and legal issues, and industries that are subject to special tax concessions.
The Cultural Revolution essentially banned scholars, lawyers and capitalists until they were welcomed back in the late 1970s. As one lawyer from China recently told me, you will not find many lawyers in their 60s and 70s, which means strategies that are well established in the West are still in their early stages in China.
In the CalCPA post, Rowbotham covers:
- Legal forms of doing business in China
- New Tax Regime
- VAT and Business Taxes
- Issues Unrelated to Tax System
- Foreign Holding Structures
See original at: Going Global: Doing Business in China
David Albrecht
Come international convergence, LIFO’s days are numbered.
“Many internationals consider U.S. use of LIFO for financial reporting purposes to be ridiculous and absurd,” says Prof. David Albrecht here. “Their dislike is of it seems to be so strongly held that it approaches religious fervor.”
Albrecht goes to the history:
LIFO was initially put forth as a way of minimizing taxes after the imposition of the first federal income tax. The baseline rate of 1% met with much complaint on the part of American citizens. U.S. law insists that use of the tax deduction be mirrored in financial reporting. Except for that, there is no hue and cry on the part of U.S. corporations for its continued use in financial reporting. The law could be changed (and I have heard that a change is reasonably possible) to permit continued use of the tax deduction but no longer require its mirrored use in financial statements if IFRS are adopted by the SEC.
“Personally, I think that perpetual LIFO is the single most ridiculous part of financial reporting,” Albrecht says, adding:
It is also reasonably possible that LIFO could be discontinued for tax purposes. If it is discontinued, it will be because some governmental officials have decided not to offer that particular deduction any more. Given that Prez Obama is about to ring up a nearly 2 trillion deficit and is about to hike taxes up to the nanosphere, perhaps he will move for LIFO elimination.  The timing has never been better to discontinue LIFO in the United States.
via The Summa
The increase in Software as a Service and remote working options has meant accountants are in constant demand, according to research by the ICAEW and Research in Motion.
Of the 566 accountants in England and Wales that were surveyed, 75% said that due to the economic climate it was vital that their clients are able to contact them at all times, even when out of the office, says the AccountancyAge report.
More than 90% of accountants are mobile during working hours with 35% spending at least 11 hours a week out of the office. Accountants are even winning business via remote technology as 53% said they had won clients when on the move.
The U.K. study parallels our own Bay Street Group Research, which shows:
- the forces driving firms to adopt wireless connectivity and mobility strategies;
- when the right smartphone solution can make money for an accounting firm;
- how smartphones can improve productivity, client service, and client satisfaction;
- key criteria for choosing the best smartphone solution for the firm.
Bay Street Group estimates that the added productivity provided by a best-in-class smartphone solution could yield over $32,000 a year in increased realization for a partner at a small and medium-sized firm.
Get the FREE DOWNLOAD NOW — PDF, 17 Pages (free registration) | Learn more
From Mrs. CPA:
A few weeks ago at work, we discovered that a schedule prepared during our year end close had an error in it.
I was the manager who reviewed that schedule first. My boss reviewed it and it was used in several different places during our close process. We determined that the error in the schedule, when carried through all of our work, caused a seven million dollar mistake in an expense. (This was not $7 million in cash, however.)
I was very worried because of the error, but since it seemed to not be a big deal during conversations I was a part of, and conversations that were relayed to me, I thought it was taken care of and we were moving on. Our work might be subjected to increased scrutiny in subsequent periods, but the issue was basically dropped as far as I knew. This was almost three weeks ago.
Obviously not.
Continued at… Mrs. CPA: Fired. A True Story.
ADP came out with its monthly jobs report report this morning — a 697,000 loss for the economy last month, including 262,000 cutbacks in small business.
The data, according to ADP’s economist, “clearly indicates that the recession is spreading aggressively beyond manufacturing and housing-related activities.”
Meanwhile yesterday, SurePayroll, with an admittedly much smaller and skewed sampling, says it’s showing “strength in small business hiring.”
“In a world where every economic indicator is bringing us bad news, our SurePayroll Hiring Index shows strength in small business hiring,” says CEO Michael Alter. “Our February data indicates small business hiring increased by 0.3 percent over January.”
And RHI’s Accountemps is reporting a net 2 percent of CFOs predict decreases in accounting and finance personnel in the second quarter of 2009, with 86 percent reporting a desire to maintain current staff levels for the next three months. Five percent of respondents indicated they plan to add full-time employees while 7 percent expect staff reductions.
Tomorrow we get the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for last month. For sure: It’ll be a while before we hear some good news regularly.
More at SurePayoll, Accountemps and ADP
