macpa

Here's the business plan at way too many professional service firms these days: (1) Take on as many clients as possible. (2) Never fire any of them. (3) Do anything they want by adding service after service after service. (4) Offer competitive rates, then cram in as many billable hours as possible. (4) Work yourself to the point of exhaustion. If that's your business model, congratulations: You're not doing anything that differentiates you from your competition. Seriously. You look like every other...

Still looking for social media's elusive return on investment? You should've been with me in Vegas last week. I found it at the AICPA's annual Practitioners' Symposium and Tech+ Conference. The event included a session titled "Face Time vs. Facebook: Building Client Loyalty in a Digital World," which examined the process of building relationships by pitting the old-school glad-handing concept against the new-school social-networking approach. "Which is better?" was the unasked question as attendees...

The AICPA's new Financial Reporting Framework for Small and Medium-Sized Entities was big news when it was released at the Institute's annual Practitioners' Symposium and Tech+ Conference … and it just keeps getting bigger. The framework is being touted as a financial-reporting alternative for small and mid-sized private companies that are not required to conform with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (or GAAP). The AICPA's position seems clear: Where GAAP is required, private companies...

What sets the best performing firms apart from the competition? Jennifer Warawa has some ideas. As vice president of partner programs and channel sales at Sage, Warawa has the research and insights on hand to know how the best firms become the best. The short answer: They challenge (a) the status quo, and (b) how they think. About everything. In a quick-hitting session at the AICPA's annual Practitioners' Symposium and Tech+ Conference in Las Vegas, Warawa offered up a checklist of attributes...

We're hanging out with more than 1,400 CPAs and friends of the profession at the AICPA's annual Practitioners' Symposium and Tech+ Conference in Las Vegas. It's an amazing show -- three days packed wall-to-wall with cutting-edge CPE and some of the most innovative vendors serving the profession today. It's almost overwhelming. Predictably, someone's going to find a way to blow off some steam. Usually, that someone is Jody Padar. For the past couple of years, Jody's New Vision CPA Group and a handful...