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Today's Features
Collaborative Wealth Management: Defining the Framework
Three key components for helping clients achieve financial success.
By Anthony Glomski
Just like starting a business or building a practice, most of your successful clients know that nothing truly valuable is free or easy. Same goes for their pursuit of financial freedom. It will take hard work, discipline and smart thinking to overcome and solve those challenges.
MORE: Protect Your Clients’ Assets | Even Entrepreneurs Must Diversify | When Clients Cash Out: Four Smart Financial Moves
Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.
But what most Type-A business owners, executives and professionals don’t realize is they don’t have to do it alone. That’s where you come in as your client’s most trusted advisor. Will you be ready when they reach out to you for help?
READ MORE →
Cultural Optimization: Making Mergers Successful
How to begin successful post-merger integration strategies before the contracts are written.
By R. Peter Fontaine
Newgate Law
Rereading The Rational Optimist by British author Matt Ridley revived my belief in “cultural optimization” when it comes to accounting firm acquisitions. Ridley’s perspective is quite simple – over the millennia, human cultures have only progressed when the interaction between societies was collaborative. People are better-off today because of the ancestral exchange and integration of ideas, language, beliefs, skills, customs, habits, technology and social structure; rather than as a result of isolation or cultural dominance and extinction.
MORE PETER FONTAINE: What to Ponder Before Issuing a Letter of Intent | Why Due Diligence is Done | The Four Ways 'Non-Competes' #FAIL in the Social Media Age |
While Ridley’s notion of optimizing cultural differences makes perfect sense, it does not seem to be regularly applied in the context of accounting firm M&A activity. READ MORE →
CPA Cathro Goes 90% Cannabiz in the Bay State
“I am making the industry better at following the rules.”
By CPA Trendlines Research
CannaBizCPA.Pro
Massachusetts has always been at the forefront of social and legal progress. It’s where the Pilgrims signed their Compact. It’s where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. In 1911, it became the first state to outlaw possession of “Indian hemp.”
MORE CannaBizCPA.Pro: Cannabis CPA Readies for When Maine ‘Goes Recreational’ | New to Cannabis? Maybe a Joint Venture Is the Answer | Cannabiz Meets Intellectual Property Protection | Green Bits: Helping Cannabis Retailers Stay Compliant | Silver Leaf CBC: An ERP Platform for Cannabis Companies | CohnReznick Goes National on Cannabis | Minorities, Women & Cannabis
And 101 years later, it became one of the first to allow sales of cannabis for medical purposes.
In that auspicious year of 2012, Charlotte Cathro was a CPA with a regional firm in Holyoke, an hour and a half west of Boston. The firm started getting inquiries and referrals from attorneys. They had clients applying to open dispensaries of medicinal weed, but they weren’t quite sure how the tax, finance and business entity rules were going to work.
And no wonder. It was complicated – a new frontier in accountancy.
Three Steps to Giving a Raise
If employees leave, find out if money is why.
By Barry J. Friedman, CPA
IndustryNewsletters
If you run a business with employees, you have at some point wondered how you should compensate them for good work. It's actually a much trickier task than people realize.
MORE: Seven Changes in the New Taxpayer First Act Clients Need to Know | How Manufacturers Can Use the R&D Tax Credit | The Latest Rules on Charitable Donations | How Clients Should Gather Their Papers for Taxes | The Latest Fraud Problem: Synthetic Identities | How to Challenge Property Taxes | Real Estate, IRAs & Clients | Percentage-Withholding for Clients | Bitcoin: What Clients Need to Know
You have to take into account employee morale, employee performance and market averages. To get a fuller picture of how to fairly distribute raises to your employees, keep reading.
READ MORE →
What Happens If You Don’t Use Airplane Mode in Flight?
Remember roaming charges?
By Rick Richardson
You hear the warning every time you fly: Please set all devices to airplane mode. But what happens if you don't?
It’s not that long ago that airlines stopped telling passengers to keep their mobile phones, tablets, e-readers and other devices turned off throughout the flight.
Why airplane mode?
We’re asked to turn our devices off or to put them in airplane mode because of electromagnetic interference from phones, tablets, e-readers, electronic headsets and more. Because some planes were built before these became a thing, it took a while for the industry to make sure it was entirely safe to use them.
How to Start (or Re-Start) Your Own Accounting Firm
Checklist: 18 Steps to Success.
By Brannon Poe
Are you exploring the idea of starting your own CPA firm? Or perhaps you are ready to re-invent the one you have? Either way, we’ve gathered some of the key focus areas to help you create your plans for the future.
More by Brannon Poe: Five Keys to Successfully Selling a CPA Firm | 10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Buying an Accounting Practice | Five Key Decisions for Your Exit Strategy | How to Transfer a Boomer-Owned CPA Practice to a Millennial |
1. Should you start your own CPA firm? This is a great place to start, don’t you think? Not everyone is cut out to own their own business. Starting a CPA firm takes a variety of different skills and talents.
In the meantime, here's a short list of what’s needed to thrive: READ MORE →
Gary Boomer: Mindsets Matter
Gary Boomer explains how the accounting business model will change over the next few years.
Accountant’s Accelerator Rolls Out Marketing Videos for Accounting Firms
Professional videos to add to firms' marketing mix.
Accountant's Accelerator, a provider of practice development tools and education for tax and accounting firms, is rolling out a line of pre-made videos for firms to add to their marketing mix.
Find out more here: https://acceleratorvideos.com/
Caragher Becomes Certified Instructor in Advanced Pricing Methods
Free webinar on advanced pricing strategies set for Oct. 21.
Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing and a CPA Trendlines expert author, is now a certified instructor of Fore LLC Advanced Pricing MethodsSM.
The fundamentals of Advanced Pricing MethodsSM
will be presented in a joint Fore-Capstone webinar:
Monday, Oct. 21
2 p.m. ET
Accounting firm partners, managers, and marketers can register at
http://go.capstonemarketing.com/apm-webinar
Eligible for 1 CPE credit
Accountants: Unleash Your Secret Superpower
It's Time for the Super-Heroes of Ethical Behavior and the Public Trust to Help Save the World.
By Donny C. Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA
It seems like every day there is either news of a new scandal or additional “discoveries” about an on-going scandal. It’s quite depressing.
I finally took a step back to ask myself: “Why is this happening? Are we just doomed to a world that is just becoming more and more corrupt? Or is there something that can be done to stop this degeneration of society?”
Are Accountants Natively Ethical?
As I pondered how to solve the corruption problem, I asked myself, “how do we get more people to behave more ethically—more like us accountants?”
This then caused me to ask…
- What is it that makes accountants more ethical?
- Is it something that is inborn in us?
- Does being an accountant make us more ethical?
- Or is it an inborn belief in ethical behavior that makes accounting attractive to us?
Large Clients We Landed from QuickBooks Consulting
Sometimes small bait catches big fish.
By Ed Mendlowitz
Call Me Before You Do Anything: The Art of Accounting
I’ve written about QuickBooks and how we became the largest QB consultants in New Jersey along with receiving a few clients with very substantial fees. I’ve gotten some calls asking about them and what we did, so here is a description of three of them.
MORE: Why We Train on Excel, Word and Adobe | I Used to Hate QuickBooks | Things Change | How to Be ’the Other Guy’s Accountant’ | Why We ‘Kill’ to Get Partnership Returns Out Quickly | My First Thought Is to Never Turn Down Business | Becoming an Expert in IRS Collections
The first client was someone who called asking to spend only one hour with us. At the time our minimum was five hours. We figured we would do him a favor and we told him the hourly rate if he would come to our office. He was a very nice, well-dressed man and spent the hour. He called us about a month later and asked if he could “buy another hour.”
READ MORE →
Expensify Launches Corporate Spending Card
With the Expensify Card, employees no longer need receipts for business purchases, admins save time processing expenses with continuous reconciliation and realtime compliance notifications.
via Expensify
Expensify is launching the Expensify Card, a free corporate card for companies of all sizes.
The company says the corporate card is a natural extension of the Expensify platform, which it says is used by more companies than any other expense software in the world. READ MORE →
The Holy Grail: Finding the Right Talent
There are 3 basic elements.
By Steven E. Sacks
We get so hung up on generational labels: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and now Gen Z. As a result, we ascribe certain characteristics or behaviors to each one – whether fair or not.
MORE: Strengthen Your Firm’s Screening Practices | The Job Interview: A Make or Break Proposition | 10 Elements to Balancing Shareholders’ Needs | A Leader’s Guide to Ending Entitlement | Performance Reviews: No Need for Teeth Pulling
Adherence to the labels can cause a hiring manager or an executive to overlook the contributions each cohort can make to an organization. Potential stars are overlooked, and the usual reliance on outdated search approaches continues unabated.
READ MORE →
Referrals, Referrals, Referrals
Trend Watch: Referrals are the top three ways firms get new clients, and professional referrals have increased notably.
Cannabis CPA Readies for When Maine ‘Goes Recreational’
Karla Brannen spends a lot of time explaining §280E to cannabis clients.
By CPA Trendlines Research
cannabizcpa.pro
Maine, a.k.a. Vacationland, is gearing up to “go recreational,” and CPA Karla J. Brannen, senior tax manager at Albin, Randall & Bennet CPAs, is on the crest of the cannabis wave.
MORE at CannaBizCPA.pro: New to Cannabis? Maybe a Joint Venture Is the Answer | Zach Gordon CPA: “The level of guidance out there is just nonexistent.” | Why Jax Wheatley Shifted from LBGTQ to Cannabis Clients | Ron Seigneur Blazes New Trails in Cannabis | More
Nobody knows quite yet when the Pine Tree State will allow the sale of recreational marijuana. In 2016, the people of Maine approved a referendum to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana. The governor signed the recreational marijuana rules on June 20, 2019. On September 19, 2019, LD719, an Act to Amend the Adult Use Marijuana Law, went into effect. Final adoption of these rules will happen within the next 60 days.
Cannabis products have been legal in Maine for medicinal purposes for years. Licensed medical cardholders are allowed to purchase cannabis through a registered dispensary or through certified caregivers. Almost four years ago – even before the referendum – Brannen predicted a need for better accountancy in an industry that comes with its own set of complications. READ MORE →
