Read these tips to help you manage your growing business while also staying on top of your tech stack. Tips for Managing Your Growing Tech Stack with Limited Resources and Expertise discusses: How to understand your business process including client management and practice management How to map your tech stack to align with your business […]
Resource Category: Blogs & Articles
Should You Hire Temporary Workers for Tax Season?
Whether your firm is large or you’re the sole owner and staff member, tax season brings with it crushing pressure and a landslide of work. The onslaught often turns firm leaders’ attention to an important question they might not have seriously thought about all year: Should you hire temporary staff to help you get through […]
Take Cybersecurity in Your Business to the Next Level
Imagine sending an email to all of your clients with a subject line like this—” Attention, We Got Hacked!”—sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? It’s almost a guarantee that you’ll soon be inundated with anxious clients checking in to see if their information is compromised. Cyber-attacks aimed at firms that handle sensitive information are on the rise. […]
Taxpayers Expect Secure, Digital Services from their Tax Pro
Intuit’s 2022 Taxpayer Insights & Intelligence Brief summarizes the wants and needs of over 3,000 US taxpayers. Let’s take a deeper look at the core findings. How Do Taxpayers Prefer to Work with Tax Professionals? Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to abruptly move to remote work, people have realized the benefits of digital […]
What to Do if an Employee Quits Suddenly During Tax Season
When an employee quits, on top of handling your regular workload, you’re suddenly responsible for adding their workload to the pile of your other staff members. Or, if you’re a solo practitioner, it’s now up to you to shoulder everything alone. Either way, it’s not a scenario anybody wants to deal with. There are many […]
Why Every Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) & How to Write One
If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan (DRP), it may take you a while to figure out what’s next after a disaster disrupts your business operations. And the longer it takes you to get back to business, the more negative impacts you’ll see. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) for Businesses? A […]
SmartVault Wins Ease of Use Award from K2 Enterprises
K2 Enterprises is one of the most well-respected educational resources for accounting professionals in the United States. For the twenty-first year, they’ve selected 22 tech vendors in the industry to win the K2 Quality Award. The K2 Quality Award is one of the longest-standing awards in the accounting industry. It has 22 categories, including New […]
4 Key Steps to Moving Your Accounting Practice Online
Record keeping and tax reporting are now required to be digital, thanks to MTD. How are you getting on with it? Instead of grumbling and resisting the changes that are being forced upon you (and your clients), is there a way to make it the catalyst to a more efficient and profitable accounting firm? In […]
Accounting Software Secrets: Working Remotely with SmartVault
From the Accounting Software Secrets Blog – Posted by Bonnie Nagayama, McWilliams & Associates: How information flows through an organization is one of the ways that significant improvements in productivity can be achieved. We thought we were doing a pretty good job with our internal server that was accessed by everyone via terminal services, SourceLink […]
Are You Still Compliant by GDPR?
The General Data Protection Regulation came into force back in 2018. Understanding the risks of non-compliance, most of us scrambled to put systems and processes in place to comply with the law and protect the personal data we held. But how do you ensure that you are still compliant with GDPR and will be in […]
Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) of Going Paperless
This topic is brought to you by our friends at Totally Paperless. Consider for a moment that one four-drawer file cabinet: Holds 15K-20K pages of paper Costs $25,000 to fill Costs $2,000 per year to maintain How do you justify such a wide scale project in your office? Start by calculating the ROI of a […]
Client Folder Templates for Accounting Firms
SmartVault works with thousands of accounting firm customers, who service tens of thousands of clients every year via SmartVault’s secure client portal. Over the years of working with accountants, we’ve taken what we’ve learned from our accounting professional friends, and put together some easy-to-use folder templates that you can use to easily build out your […]
Client Portals: A Safe Bet for Secure Communication
From the August 2011 issue of Accounting Today AUGUST 30, 2011 BY KIM HOGAN AND MARK PRICCO In the wake of the scandal involving alleged phone and email hacking by News Corporation, many tax and accounting professionals are invariably questioning the security of their own client communications. Communicating with clients often involves conveying sensitive financial […]
Common Pitfalls to Business Security and How to Address Them
Simple things such as a lack of employee training can cause harm to your business without anyone expecting it. Educating yourself on common pitfalls to business security can help prevent this from happening. The Unknown Areas of Your Security Landscape: Common Pitfalls to Business Security and How to Address Them discusses issues such as: A […]
Digital File Sharing Is The Secret Sauce to Keeping Your Clients Happy
Digital file sharing helps ease the pain and is the “secret sauce” to keeping your clients happy. With digital file sharing, clients can easily keep track of their files and save time which will overall increase client satisfaction and keep them coming back to your practice. Why Digital File Sharing is the Secret Sauce to […]
Flexibility in Business Operations
Efficiency. Organization. Productivity. These things lead to a successful business; however, many people don’t realize that there’s more to this formula than these three concepts. Many small business owners are missing one of the most important concepts – Flexibility. People often dismiss the idea of flexibility because they assume it leads to chaos and disorganization. […]
How SmartVault Improved Efficiency for Powerful Accounting
How SmartVault Improved Efficiency for Powerful Accounting discusses: SmartVault’s cloud-based functionality and compliant security features How SmartVault’s tax and practice management integrations increase profitability How SmartVault can be a fundamental aspect of your tech stack
Javascript Namespace Collisions (and How to Avoid Them)
Writing Javascript to run within web browsers can be a lot of fun! It can also be mind-bendingly painful. I will mention two techniques that can save a lot of heartache when working within a Javascript environment where lots of code is playing (whether that be your own code or code you have pulled in […]
Measuring the Success of Client Portals
You’re Only as Good as Your Implementation… (as featured on AccountingToday.com) These days you’re not likely to pick up an accounting publication or surf the blogosphere without coming across an article on portals, or more specifically, client portals for secure file sharing. Client portals are a mainstay in the accounting profession and their value cannot […]
Open Banking, AI and the Future of Accounting
It’s 525 years since a monk called Luca Pacioli created the first written record of the double-entry bookkeeping process. Bookkeepers and accountants have been applying their numbers brain and their people skills to the problem of running businesses ever since, but it wasn’t until 1998 that the accounting industry would be changed forever by the emergence […]