Author: Navaal Mahdi

By Jonathan Rivlin, CPA

Everyone seems to love a good tech prognosticator.  The web is chock full of breathless articles touting how great things will be in 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 years from now – better living through technology.  Does anyone ever go back and read some of those predictions from years past?

I remember how the 90’s were supposed to be when we went paperless.  We even got the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN – ahh the government and their acronyms) –  though this came in mid 2000.

It was a brave new world back in the 90’s.  My cathode ray tube based monitor bathed me and my 13 column paper in a sickly glow while the cooling fan from my 33 Mhz tower blazed away like a jet engine.  (As an aside, why did computers back then come with a “speed boost” button; who would ever choose for their computer to run slow?)

In all seriousness, we may never be 100% paperless, but with the tech we’ll be profiling in this column, we can get pretty darn close.  But that’s not the main reason for considering this particular tech.

In this column, we’ll be profiling 2 apps called “SurePrep” and “TaxCaddy”.

SurePrep offers a suite of tools for tax return preparation, among other things.  Together with their client facing app called “TaxCaddy”, we preparers can dispense with sending out those bulky tax organizers (that – if they come back at all – are never filled out, or even opened).

Clients download TaxCaddy to their smart phone or other device.  They can then either drag and drop PDFs (and a few other file types) from the computer direct to their TaxCaddy profile, or they can snap a picture with their mobile device.

As with my previous column on Xero (if you haven’t signed up yet, you’re missing out!), we can’t talk about SurePrep and TaxCaddy without mentioning Intuit and their related offering, Intuit Link.

We used the Link for the 2017 tax season.  Our clients HATED it.  We HATED it.  It seemed designed to cause us to make mistakes.  I remember distinctly one return from a client that insisted on using paper that year.  He actually requested a full organizer print out bless his heart.  When I worked through his tax organizer and matched them up with the various W-2’s, 1099’s, etc, I actually cried because it was painfully apparent just how difficult Intuit Link was to deal with – from the client’s side through to the reviewer’s side.

After tax season 2017 came mercifully to a close, we researched other options.  That’s when we discovered SurePrep and TaxCaddy.

We rolled this out for the 2018 tax season and it was a much better experience – for us and our clients.

Internally, we used SurePrep to replace our paper workpapers.  SurePrep made documentation and annotation easier.  AND, the killer feature here is that when the client uploads their docs through TaxCaddy, those docs get converted into an image that can then be seemlessly entered into your tax software.

Let me say this again – you don’t have to enter your clients’ W-2’s and 1099’s.  The client takes a picture, it goes into the TaxCaddy/SurePrep app, and then you click a button and it goes into your tax software.

As in my previous column on Xero (seriously, sign up for it and get your life back!), you can’t walk into the future with rose colored glasses.  Nothing is perfect; there is a learning curve.

But I will tell you this:  I had some returns that would easily take me 8+ hours to work through.  With this new software, it took me 3 hours.  In tax seasons past, we’d hire a seasonal person to help us with data entry; we didn’t need to do that this year.  The software isn’t cheap, but dollar for dollar it costs less than a staff and it doesn’t get tired or make mistakes*.

I don’t want to oversell you here; you’ll still need to check that the data comes through to your tax software correctly.  But any errors we discovered were on the Intuit side (we use Lacerte in our firm).  Even with that said, the data bridge not only saves time, it saves your body; less eye strain, wrist strain, finger strain – over the course of a brutal tax season, this adds up!

Review is easier too; all the source docs and preparer’s notes are in one place.  The reviewer can focus on theory and less on data.

Completion and delivery of the return is easier too.  No more print, assembly, and a call for pickup or mailing.  You make a PDF of the return and post it to the client’s TaxCaddy profile.  Our secure portal gets two files, the final return PDF and the SurePrep file as a PDF.  Think about what is missing here:  envelopes, toner, postage, admin staff time, paper – headache.

The financial case for these apps, SurePrep/TaxCaddy, Xero, and the like are that they allow small firms (which many taxpayers prefer) to punch above their weight.  We are a small firm, but we can handle a lot more work – a lot more complex work – without exploding our staff and overhead – just by using these apps.

By Jonathan Rivlin

Payroll.  Just the word alone can make any accountant cringe.  Except for rookies fresh out of school.  So innocent.  So naive.  I would hope this is no longer the case, but your humble Tech Tips never had any exposure to payroll, or sales tax for that matter, in school.  For something so intrinsic to our society, it’s not well covered in academia.

Early in my career, I learned the finer points of payroll in an apprentice-like manner.  Ever the technologist, I built my first payroll “module” in Excel ’95.  As that old School House Rock song went, “Mother necessity” was my muse.  Or laziness.  I got tired of typing – yes, actually typing on a typewriter all the various paystubs for our client’s employees.  So, I figured out how to create this in Excel.  And, using a dot matrix tractor style continuous feed printer (yes, they still make and sell these), my run of paystubs would look some what professional.

By the end of the 90’s, we had referred most of our payroll work out to the 8000 pound gorilla, ADPaychex.  Their company reps would “make the rounds” delivering US Master Tax Guide round about December and a basket of junk food in early April.  How lovely of them.

This arrangement never sat well with Tech Tips.  Noting that these firms started as smaller CPA firms that once did tax work, the question always loomed in the back of my mind:  What’s keeping them from resuming their tax practices on top of their payroll side?  And yet, it really was a matter of economics.  The clients couldn’t be trusted to do their own payroll; the stakes were just too high, and small firms just couldn’t devote the resources to make this time sensitive operation profitable.

We kept a few payroll projects for long time clients but refused any new payroll engagements – for a time.

And then, we took on a new client as a close referral whose CPA (that we’d be replacing) was farther ahead of us on the cloud tech implementation curve.  She had setup bank feeds (Oh so promissing, and yet so disappointing) in the client’s QB Desktop file and created a cloud based payroll practice.  One of the ADPaychex firms (remaining “nameless” for this post) had created a wholesale part of their web based payroll system.  We could sign on as an accounting partner and then onboard our clients as we saw fit.

This was 2012 and it seemed like a win.  Though the system was clunky and annoying to use, once it was setup and the learning curve attained, we were able to offer payroll under our own firm’s umbrella without having to deal with filings or tax deposits.

Payroll then, was the part of the industry that got us into the cloud; we just didn’t have the presence of mind to think of it that way back then.  Think about this; this was only 5.5 years ago, but things really have changed that much in this short a time.

Things went along; we added some more clients to the platform.  And then, it went bad – operatically bad.  This part of the story will be visited in another post; want to keep this particular post focused on payroll solutions.  But suffice to say, this story touches on so many challenges that we face:  managing clients, managing technology, setting expectations, not getting sued…

To say that ADPaychex screwed up is an understatement.  The client left the practice, my stomach almost ate a whole through itself, and our malpractice carrier took things up to 11.  As an accountant, I strive to be accountable; and I don’t mean to come across as if I’m shirking that responsibility, but in going over this issue (over and over) in my head; we really did everything we could to prevent this slow rolling train wreck of a dumpster fire.

The client wanted to cancel a payroll.  We called our dedicated rep at ADPaychex.  Cancellation confirmed – and double checked.  Of course the payroll went through as if we hadn’t cancelled it.  The client freaked and called their bank and told them to block the transaction.  I received frantic text messages.  I called my dedicated rep to find out what was going on.  “Nothing; there’s no payroll today sir.”  Clearly the large beast of this particular national payroll processor wasn’t setup properly for the cloud.  It goes on and on, like a case of poison ivy…that got infected…that turned gangrenous.

I would have loved to have gotten rid of all the payroll work after that “incident.”  But the reality is that we practitioners need to offer this service.

So we looked at options.  I even created a beefed up version of my earlier payroll module in Excel (’16 this time) – was preparing to go full manual.  Then we found a company called Gusto.

Like Xero, and Bill.com, and Futrli, and all, this company has a clean easy to use interface.  There are trainings (though nothing counting towards CPE), an accounting partners program, a dedicated rep, fanatic customer support, and the pricing structure is transparent and lower cost than the national players.

We transitioned our clients off of the other platform and onto Gusto in short order – they provided special tech support for this.  They even included a free account for our firm’s payroll.

Getting ADPaychex to stop charging us has been another frustration…

Setup on Gusto is simple; the employee (and contractor) gets invited to create their own profile on Gusto and they complete their own W-4 and I-9 through the site.  Gusto makes employee onboarding effortless.  They handle paystub delivery, direct deposit, eFiling returns, tax payments, and they address any notices.  They offer discounts once a certain level of clients are put on the platform.

Gusto syncs with Xero (and QBO).  You can map the various payroll elements to specific accounts and tracking categories (and QB classes).  Every time you run a payroll, it automatically appears in Xero.  When the payroll transactions clear the bank, reconciliation is a breeze. 

Now we have to take off the rose colored glasses.  Gusto is great; it’s the way of the future.  But there are a few cons to be aware of.  Gusto only prepares direct deposit paychecks.  If you want to cut a paper check, you need to prepare that net check manually – one could use Bill.com to deliver the check.  (Gusto will still prepare and deliver the paystub and send the payroll tax electronically.)

Also, and this shouldn’t be the deal killer you may think it is, Gusto has a 4 business day lead time.  Meaning that if you have a paydate on a Friday, you need to submit it by Monday.  After 90 days, some businesses can qualify for a 2 day lead time.

I’ll admit that ADPaychex wins on this one count with a 1 day lead time, but for us anyway, making the change was worth it.  And forcing the client to stay on top of their payroll info (hours worked, any new hires/terminations, bonuses, etc) to meet the earlier timeframe has actually helped in other areas of accounting practice.  It’s like putting the client on notice to keep their payroll records in a certain way by a certain time filtered into other parts of their business.

On those occassions where we had questions, Gusto tech support was available, almost instantly, and worked to manage our issue until resolution.  They offer live chat through their website, email, and phone support.

We occassionally still get sales calls from our old ADPaychex reps.  After choking on my rage, I politely decline “my current complementary edition of the US Master Tax Guide” (You do know that stuff’s available on the internet now, right?) 

We’ll be onboarding two more clients to Gusto over the next few months.  Costs less, easier to use, better support, syncs to the cloud, and they offer other HR solutions.  It’s a no brainer.

We’d like to hear from you! Please submit your own tech tips to us at techtips@msatp.org! We will award a free subscription to The Tax Book to the person who submits the best tip.

Thanks, and catch you next time!

TT

By Jonathan Rivlin

In today’s post we’re going to cover the last part of the data management chain: Getting that data out. Hubdoc, Bill.com, Gusto, bank feeds – all deal with data going in, and Xero manages that data once in the system. But how can we get that data out again?

Historically, as a 20 year QuickBooks user, I had my go to reports that I’d create for all my clients – being sure to add, “These statements have not been subject to an audit, review, or compilation, and no assurance is provided” as a footer on each statement. True that irritated the client, but they never figured out how to remove them!

Xero also offers a similar reporting feature. In some ways, Xero’s reporting feature is cooler and has more bells and whistles than QuickBooks. But, I do respect the simplicity of QuickBooks’ reporting.

But this post is about a specialized reporting app that integrates with Xero called, “Futrli”

Maybe this is a generational thing, but I don’t get what today’s folks have against vowels.

Anyway, let’s get into the details with Futrli.

It’s a cloud based app coming to us from across the pond in the UK. The app, as discussed above, integrates with Xero. Futrli pulls data in real time and presents that data in a fashion that is customized to each client’s unqiue concerns.

Before continuing with the details, I can’t emphasize this enough: The cloud, every article you’ve ever read about it, is all about this one item concept: We’re not bookkeepers or tax preparers anymore; we’re high level trusted advisors. The ability to deliver real time, meaningful insights into our clients’ business, as through Futrli, is what the cloud is all about.

We love all the apps in our tech stack, but when it comes to Futrli – it can’t be overstated – the entire purpose of the cloud is borne out in apps like Futrli.

For those practitioners who want to offer additional services, for those who want to strengthen their business if they are under threat due to changes in the tax rules and/or practice requirements, an app like Futrli is what you’re looking for. While it certainly works faster and more efficient if your client’s accounting is in the cloud, Futrli can work with your client’s data even if they are not in the cloud. You just need to distill the client’s data down to a *.CSV format and upload it to Futrli (We’ll cover *.CSV in a future posting.)

Before we added Futrli to our firm’s tech stack, I thought that such dedicated reporting apps were something like “icing on a cake”; the native reports in the general ledger system should be enough; even the customizable reports in Xero. After looking into Futrli, I realized that this is not an accurate comparison. Futrli (and any reporting app really) is not some dispensable fluff that’s “nice to have”; it’s a critical piece – THE critical piece of your tech offering. It is a business model. It is a means to provide real world, real time, meaningful insights to our clients that can help them steer their ship.

A more accurate comparison would be to this quote from the Russian navigator out of the movie, “The Hunt for Red October” when he boasted, “If I had a stop watch and a map, I could fly through the alps in a plane with no windows.” We are the navigator and Futrli is the stopwatch and the map.

Our clients look to us as advisors; not just tax preparers. We can customize the reports on Futrli to give our clients insights into their business that they wouldn’t even know to look for and previously were out of our reach to offer.

True, there are other reporting apps out there, and many have been around for a while – but we chose this company because they make it easy – both to use the app and to do business with them.

For training, they require accounting partners to go through a series of modules that take about 10 hours to complete – though I was able to work through it in about 8 1/2 hours.

They also have a program where for a onetime setup fee, your firm can put its own branding on the reports. That way, your client associates you with the amazing business intel you’re giving them. If you were so inclined, you could build an entire practice solely on advisory services using Futrli as your backbone.

Futrli comes with some pre-made templates – or we can customize our own with their in-app report builder. Once the templates are set, they can be easily applied to all the clients you bring on to this platform. In other words, you invest a little time on setup and learning curve in the beginning and then you leverage those efficiencies with each new client.

You can set the system to track any list of financial or non-financial items – provided that the data is collected and entered into the system. This makes the setup and integration – and training of staff and clients – critical to making Futrli work. The information that comes out is only as good as the data that goes in.

If you have staff or clients that have multiple vendors for say, Wells Fargo Bank NA, WF Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank, they need to stop being so sloppy – yesterday.

Part and parcel to adopting this, or really any cloud app is for the firm to adopt a series of naming conventions and then rigidly enforce it. This isn’t just a requirement of the cloud; it’s something we should have been doing all along.

Finally, once you get the visuals and graphics set, the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) that your client cares about configured, and the reporting templates implemented, then it’s time to print and deliver your professional looking reports – with your logo on them (and that AR-C Section 70 compliant legend) to your client.

How often have you put a report out there you put so much time and effort into but felt it was missing something to make it “pop”? Futrli’s reports look professional and eye catching, and thanks to our diligence, their content is useful. These are reports that will actually get read and used.

Putting all that work into the various other parts of the cloud ecosystem and neglecting the reporting side is like eating a steamed crab without any Old Bay – why would anyone do that?

Check out Futrli and make your practice indispensable!

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We’d like to hear from you! Please submit your own tech tips to us at techtips@msatp.org! We will award a free subscription to The Tax Book to the person who submits the best tip.

Thanks, and catch you next time!

TT

By Jonathan Rivlin

In our continuing series on apps, we’re now going to turn our attention to document management.

Have you ever had the joyful experience of asking your clients for bank and credit card statements? Let’s be brutally honest here: it’s been my experience that such requests often cover multiple years. For clients with multiple bank and credit card accounts we can be talking about quite a few PDFs if you’re lucky; usually it’s reams of paper.

And then there’s that additional joy of having to ask for copies of cancelled checks, or check stubs (many companies still have paper checks). Sometimes you need to ask your client (I’m sure they’d say pester: CPA = Certified Pain in the Ascot) for additional documents, invoices, receipts, etc. The key here, which was not as apparent in the analog age, is that we need a uniform and efficient method of capturing data. If we’re moving away from “bookkeeping” towards “data science,” then the data capture portion of this cycle is mission critical.

We started this series on apps with Xero. Think of Xero as the hub of a wheel. Hubdoc is an app that should be the first spoke on that wheel.

Hubdoc is an app that integrates with Xero specifically designed for capturing bank and credit card statements — including check images — bills and receipts, auto sorts those bills, in real time, with OCR and assists with internal control.

Hubdoc is one of the apps that finally puts internal control into the hands of our small business clients. Take a moment and let that sink in.

In the same vein as in Jerry Maguire’s “You Had Me At Hello,” Hubdoc Had Me At Check Images. Internal control is the icing on the cake.

The key here is automation, a concept that is one of the primary drivers of the Cloud way of accounting. Automation in Hubdoc is accomplished when your client provides their login credentials (without needing to disclose them to you) during the setup phase and that’s it. They never need to enter them again, unless they change their password. AND, you never need to ask your client for statements, cancelled checks, and other items again. Talk about a time saver.

If Xero is the center for how you manage your clients’ data, Hubdoc is the means for how you collect that data. You can’t have one without the other.

Peanut butter and chocolate, steak and potatoes, steamed crabs and old bay (I was hungry when I wrote this post), and Xero and Hubdoc — the cloud based AI equipped general ledger app and the automated secure data gathering app.

Future posts will feature additional apps to snap into our cloud based framework.

Remember the point of all these apps isn’t to make our lives more complex — these apps make our lives easier! It’s a different way of thinking.

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We’d like to hear from you! Please submit your own tech tips to us at techtips@msatp.org! We will award a free subscription to The Tax Book to the person who submits the best tip.

Thanks, and catch you next time!

TT