There’s been a lot of press recently about privacy on Facebook, Google and other websites.
When you install new software it is always important to read the screens as some software will automatically install additional toolbars or other things that might compromise your privacy or slow down your system. When you use the web there are things you can do to minimize the invasions into your privacy – like turning off cookies, clearing history and even using software that “hides” your identify. Some of these steps are easy and others more difficult.
Certain websites / companies have access to much more of your information than you may want. The May 2012 PCWorld (TM) magazine included an article on controlling your privacy within Google. PCWorld often makes these articles available on their website after a period of time (www.pcworld.com) or you can buy the magazine in the store. If you are concerned about google privacy the purchase of this edition is a small price to pay.
If you have questions, please call me or contact your IT professional.
Amicus Attorney Cloud Edition and Feedback from the Consultants Conference
In March I traveled to Toronto to attend the annual Gavel & Gown Certified Consultants Conference. While Amicus 2012 has been out for a while, it was interesting to get additional perspective on the new features.
So what did I learn that can help you?
- Amicus Premium billing including the link with QuickBooks and the power of reporting
- The new document manager in Amicus 2012
- The power to use custom fields in reports
- Amicus Attorney Cloud Edition
Probably the most exciting part of the conference was a preview of Amicus Attorney in the cloud. This product was officially announced a few days later at American Bar Association Techshow in Chicago. Imagine the power of Amicus Attorney on your IPad or other device with a connection to the internet. As a cloud based solution you never have to worry about upgrades or server maintenance. Of course, since Gavel & Gown understands the legal market, the application and the environment will meet all the requirements for confidentiality of data, uptime and backup that are critical to attorneys. Amicus Attorney Cloud Edition is expected to be available this summer. You can read the press release at http://www.amicusattorney.com/company/press-releases/20120329-amicus-cloud or watch www.amicusattorney.com/cloud for more information.
Amicus Attorney Cloud Edition differs from Credenza and is designed for those who want the power of Amicus Attorney through the internet, with no concern of a server or networking.
Gavel & Gown will still offer and fully support Credenza, and they continue to enhance it regularly. Credenza is the solution if you like to work in Outlook but want the ability to organize all of your information according to client files or projects. This includes email, contacts, tasks and notes. For a single user, there is a free edition of Credenza so you can easily try it and see if it works for you. If you are part of a team or want more features, you can upgrade to Credenza Pro for firm-wide practice management including collaboration tools, cloud document management and billing.
Amicus Premium Billing offers a tightly integrated billing solution for those using Amicus Attorney Premium edition. The elimination of links greatly simplifies the billing process and lets you see the data you need with just a mouse click. For accounting the link to QuickBooks is well designed, having learned some lessons from other products. Is it perfect, No. You still need to enter client expenses in both Amicus and QuickBooks, but Amicus Premium Billing is well on its way.
Making Amicus Premium Billing even more powerful is the use of SQL Reporting Services. For those who have worked with Amicus Attorney reports in the past, you know that the reports were based in Crystal. If you know crystal, you know if can be difficult to work with. SQL Reporting Services offer more power and flexibility. We saw samples of reports developed by other consultants that included dashboards to view billing information. If you choose Amicus Premium Billing we can help you set it up and design the reports you need to run your practice.
Amicus Attorney 2012 introduced the new Document center. With powerful search functions and the ability to see documents on all your files or your contacts, the Document center will make your work easier. You can now search for a document without knowing what file it was part of, make a copy of it and use it for another matter in just a few steps.
Last but not least, users of the Premium Edition have long had the ability to setup custom fields and custom pages. However, getting the data out in a format you could use was significantly limited. With Amicus Attorney Premium Edition 2012 you now have the reports for custom pages and custom records on your files. These reports are created in SQL Reporting Services and offer a starting point for us to help develop your reports.
Amicus Attorney is moving forward in many exciting directions. If you would like to get more out of your current version or would like to learn about upgrading, please contact us at 203-254-7736.
While Time Matters and PCLaw have long had powerful built in help, customers often want a guide based on the role they play in the firm. Some users really like to read manuals and have asked for a printed manual they could buy. PCLaw has had a manual that could be printed but it was very broad and not conducive to helping you do your job.
Based on customer feedback, LexisNexis has now redesigned their product manuals to focus on the information you need to accomplish your basic tasks within the product. With pictures and clear “how to” instructions these new manuals will help you better use the product and learn new skills.
From the Time Matters Support Center at http://support.lexisnexis.com/timematters/ you can now download the manuals that you need. There are three manuals available in PDF format.
- Time Matters and Billing Matters 11.1 Installation and Upgrade Guide
- Time Matters and Billing Matters 11.1 Administration Guide
- Time Matters and Billing Matters 11.1 User Guide
For users of PCLaw, there are also three manuals, available in the PCLaw support center at http://support.lexisnexis.com/pclaw/.
- PCLaw 11 Installation and Upgrade Guide
- PCLaw 11 Administration Guide
- PCLaw 11 User Guide
Once in the support center look in the left column. Click on version 11 under Product Versions. Then under Using The Program, click on Product Documentation and the guides will be available for you to download, use and print as needed.
For those who don’t like to read manuals, or who would like more personal training, please remember we are always here to help you. We can provide training customized to your needs onsite or remotely.
An Appetite for Double-Dipping (and I Don’t Mean Ice Cream)
We never think it will happen to us. Becoming a victim of fraud is a horrible experience. It can wreak financial damage, sometimes significant enough to put us out of business. It’s a time-consuming business disruption which often involves accountants, lawyers, credit bureaus, bank executives, and IRS and state tax agents (our favorite people, right?). Worst of all, it’s a betrayal by one or more fellow human beings, sometimes relatives; an intimate violation that can leave us emotionally scarred for years.
The purpose of today’s article is to get you thinking about this business threat, relay some common ways your accounting system can be used to hurt you, and to urge you to make a plan to protect yourself against fraud so you don’t become a victim.
Story Time
Here’s a list of just a few common ways that someone with access to your accounting system can make off with your dough:
- Paying bills you don’t owe. If you and your bookkeeper both owe Pacific Gas and Electric, make sure the check is going to cover your account balance and not theirs. It’s a common fraud act to pay personal bills from the company account. According to a Florida CPA, “one bookkeeper promised to repay a company owner $50,000, with a second mortgage on the bookkeeper’s house, when caught using QuickBooks this way.”Also watch out for repeat requests for reimbursements of the same receipts as well as overstated expenses due to improper use of entering bills versus writing checks in QuickBooks.
- PayPal, ATM withdrawals, and petty cash violations. Make sure you have the same controls on your bank accounts as you do your cash equivalent accounts. It’s easy for employees to abuse PayPal accounts, ATM withdrawals, and other cash equivalents if controls are not in place.
- Lackadaisical oversight. When the cat’s away…A Connecticut consultant’s clients were living overseas while a cousin was supposed to be handling their bills. The clients were unable to access their accounts online, so they began asking for bank statements. When they didn’t get them, they suspected something was up. They finally had to request the bank statements from the bank and found that their cousin was paying both the clients’ bills and their own bills from their account. It took four to five years to straighten out, plus a huge bookkeeping bill, and they never recovered all of the lost money.You would hope people don’t take advantage of you when you are in a weak spot, but it didn’t happen in the next story. A Florida CPA tells of a bookkeeper and manager who stole $250,000+ while an owner was out trying to recover from a liver transplant. They kept money that should have gone to pay payroll taxes. By the time you get the IRS letter telling you of the problem, the bookkeeper and manager can be long gone.Don’t let the mice play.
- Sales irregularities. A Florida CPA alerted me to this story. When a customer attempted to return an item to the Complete Wireless store in Edinboro, PA, the receipt could not be found. Robert Kerner, a former employee, allegedly pocketed over $19,000 worth of cash sales by deleting not only his sales receipts but the sales receipts of other workers. Journalist Tim Hahn of the Erie Times-News wrote, “Kerner admitted to taking the money in order to pay his college tuition.”
- Angry employees. An attorney who was a client of a Connecticut Timeslips consultant terminated their bookkeeper but let her work a few extra weeks. All of the billing was done in Timeslips. The angry employee deleted billings worth thousands of dollars right before she left. The Timeslips consultant was hired to attempt reconstruction of the damage. It’s dramatic in movies when the bad guy actors escort fired employees directly out of the building (most recently, Margin Call), but it’s a good thing to do in real life as well.
- Collusion. When the bookkeeper is a close friend of a bank teller, it can spell trouble. When they go in together to draft fraudulent checks and pull money out of a business owner’s account, it can spell fraud. This happened to an attorney in Connecticut; to his credit, he noticed some irregular transactions on the bank statement and blew the whistle. You may wonder like I do how people think they can get away with this, especially when it’s an attorney.
Fraud hardly ever ends well, so the best thing to do is to put measures in place to prevent it as much as possible. It’s never a sure thing to prevent fraud 100%, but it makes sense to do as much as is cost-effective to avoid catastrophic losses that can bring an entire business down.
As always, if we can help you in any way with this, please don’t hesitate to contact our office.
Article contributed by Sandi Smith Leyva. Sandi is the founder of the popular Accountant’$ Accelerator program, one of the hottest practice growth programs in the accounting industry, which helps CPAs, EAs (IRS Enrolled Agents), bookkeepers, QuickBooks ProAdvisors, and Intuit Solution Providers grow their practices, work less, and serve their clients better. You can learn more about Sandi at her website http://accountantsaccelerator.com/about/
How do you keep in touch with your clients, prospects and contacts? Do you use e-mail? While regular e-mail is a good tool there are several areas for concern.
First there’s the issue of e-mail limitations. Most e-mail services have limits on the number of e-mails you can send at one time or in a period of time. Exceed these limits and your account, and perhaps your domain can be labeled as a spammer. While it is possible to get this designation changed, it is a lot of work. In the meantime, important business e-mails may not get through to customers as their providers will regard your account as a spammer and block your communication. While you could get a separate account specifically for the bulk e-mails you will still have numeric limitations and the inconvenience of changing accounts when it becomes necessary.
Another limitation of e-mail is formatting. While you can do some formatting or you can format in word or another program and then attach the document to the e-mail, basic e-mail is not designed for newsletters and attachments may be difficult for some contacts to work with depending on the format and where they are viewing the e-mail. Remember more and more people are viewing information on smartphones and tablets where they might not have compatible viewers. Additionally, if it is more work, they might not look at the attachments, completely missing the value of the communication.
The biggest issue with using e-mail is compliance with the “Can Spam Act”. At its most basic this law requires that you have some form of permission for communicating with the person and you provide an opt-out mechanism. While you can offer contacts the option to opt-out with basic e-mail the burden of tracking this is on you. If someone opts out and you forget to remove them you are breaking the law.
So what should you do? Newsletters and other communications can be a value to your clients and a good marketing tool. The answer is to use a service like Constant Contact. While there are other tools that do the same things, I will focus on Constant Contact as it is the service with which I am most familiar.
Constant Contact allows you to keep lists of those with whom you have permission to keep in touch. The lists can have fields for selecting and you can have multiple lists. When you send communication out via Constant Contact there is an opt-out link included. When someone opts-out, it is tracked and they are automatically marked in all lists. Even if you add the person back in by accident they will not get communications, you have to pro-actively go in an indicate that they have chosen to opt-in again.
Constant Contact has tools to help you format your newsletter or other communications. Once you format a newsletter with headers and various sections, you can re-use it as the basis for each succeeding communication. Constant Contact will also track how many people opened the communication as well as bounced e-mail addresses, opt-outs and other useful statistics. All this can be reported to you automatically or by running reports. With Constant Contact and similar programs you also don’t have to worry about sending out too many e-mails at one time or be labeled a spammer. Your contacts know the communication came from you but your domain and e-mail are protected.
In addition to legal compliant e-mail communications Constant Contact offers tools for creating events, sending out invitations and tracking responses as well as creating surveys and, most recently, social marketing campaigns. The people who work for Constant Contact also provide help in formatting your newsletters, invitations, etc. at no additional charge and the website offers lots of useful information.
By using a tool like Constant Contact you can communicate effectively with your contacts, track results and not risk breaking the law.
If you are interested in learning more about Constant Contact please contact Caren at 203-254-7736 or click here to setup a trial account.
It’s that time of year again, and Gavel & Gown has just released the Amicus Attorney 2012 products, including Amicus Attorney Premium Edition 2012, Amicus Premium Billing 2012, Amicus Attorney Small Firm Edition 2012 and Amicus Small Firm Accounting 2012.
If you use Amicus Attorney Accounting it is important to note that the product has been renamed to Amicus Small Firm Accounting. If you are using Amicus Attorney Premium Edition you should be switching to Amicus Premium Billing. Amicus Premium Billing is tightly integrated into Amicus Attorney, making it an easy to use billing solution. However, Amicus Premium Billing does not have general ledger and accounting capabilities. To meet your accounting needs, Amicus Premium Billing links to QuickBooks. You can still meet your billing needs by linking either the Premium edition or the Small Firm Edition to other solutions, like Timeslips.
A big area of change for Amicus Attorney 2012 is in the area of document management. Both the Premium and Small Firm Edition offer a new Documents Module to make it easier for you to find your documents and work with them. In a single click, you can open, edit and print documents, add new documents and create time entries without having to open the file details. New filter capabilities allow you to filter by file type and to limit your view to active files. Gavel & Gown has also added the ability to search documents or files using full-text search or by document profile search.
If you do a lot of work with PDFs, you can save time using the new Amicus Tasks toolbar in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. Similar to the Microsoft Office toolbar, this allows you to associate a PDF with files, view related file details or send a PDF as an email attachment to your Amicus contacts.
In a firm with lots of files, you can now save time in finding just those you are working on by designating files as favorites and filtering the file index to show only your favorites.
For those that are frequently out of the office but need to be notified of new phone messages, Amicus now has the ability to send phone messages by email. You can also create customizable email messages to your contacts and automatically merge in information from Amicus.
While there are many other new features for all users of Amicus Attorney here are a few more highlights:
- Faster Access to Events details via File name hyperlinks
- Keep up with client referrals with a new field in Client contacts
- New preferences allow better tracking of return phone calls
One thing to note: If you are still using a Palm OS device, that connectivity for these devices has been discontinued.
If you are using Amicus Attorney Premium Edition, there are additional new features:
- Amicus will forward your daily agenda via email
- Enhancements to billing include faster performance, better functionality “at a glance” file values and an improved QuickBooks link
- Simplified licensing procedures
You can visit the Amicus Attorney website (www.amicusattorney.com) to learn more about What’s New in Amicus 2012 as compared to your version or call us at 203-254-7736 to discuss the options for upgrading.
As a business you have to issue 1099-MISC forms to your vendors. Whenever you begin working with a new vendor, it is important to get the correct tax id and address so that you have the information when needed. It is always easier to get the information before you pay the vendor than after the fact.
For 2011 the reporting requirements have changed and it is important that you understand these changes. Traditionally you issue a 1099-MISC to anyone that is not a corporation that is paid over $600 for services. However, in 2011 how you paid the vendor is important in determining the 1099 requirement and amount.
If you pay a 1099 vendor with a credit card or other 3rd party transaction (defined in the regs), the payment is to be EXCLUDED from any 1099-Misc that you give to that vendor. The 3rd party payor (credit card processor, bank, etc.) will file a 1099-K to report those payments.
If you use QuickBooks v2012 this requirement is addressed with Release 5. You can determine what QuicKBooks Release you are on by clicking F2 within the program and looking at the top of the box. For QuickBooks v2010 and 2011, Intuit is working on an application that you will be able to purchase to address the requirement. The application is expected to be inexpensive (Less than $5) and should be available shortly.
If you would like step by step instructions on using QuicKBooks 2012 to prepare 1099s please take a look at the blog post by Laura Madeira at http://www.quick-training.com/2011/12/21/quickbooks-2012-new-1099-tax-form-wizard-2/. While you are at Laura’s website you can sign up for her newsletter and get a free copy of “What’s New and Improved for QuickBooks 2012″
If you use other accounting packages you may need to find another way to address this requirement. If you need help, please contact us so that we can help you issue correct 1099s.
While holiday season is the most common time to do a mass mailing, you may also need to do this at other times. Whatever software you are using, there is generally a way to create address labels so that you don’t need to re-key data. In this series of blog posts we show how to create address labels using the different programs with which we work.
1) From the top menu click on File, then choose Contact Manager and click on the Label button.
2) Choose the label format. If you need to create a new label format that must be done before you start by using the Template Editor (Tools – Template Editor).
3) To choose specific contacts click on the Contact button and then click on the contacts you want to include. They will appear with a check next to the name. You can also choose contacts associated to a specific matter, client or vendor, or contacts belonging to a certain contact type using the various boxes on the Labels – Select Contact screen. The Advanced Search at the bottom of the screen allows filtering based on additional, specific search criteria.
4) Click OK. A screen will come up allowing you to choose the first label position on which you want to start printing. Make your selection and click OK. The selected labels will print.
If you need help in creating labels or setting your search criteria, please call us at 203-254-7736.
Creating Labels Using Amicus Attorney Small Firm Edition
While holiday season is the most common time to do a mass mailing, you may also need to do this at other times. Whatever software you are using, there is generally a way to create address labels so that you don’t need to re-key data. In this series of blog posts we show how to create address labels using the different programs with which we work.
1) From the Contact list select those for whom you will be creating labels. You can do this by marking them or by highlighting them by clicking on the name. To highlight you can select a Range by clicking on the first name in the list, holding down the SHIFT key and clicking on the last name you want included. Additional names can be selected by holding down the CTRL key while clicking on the name. To mark Contacts, open the Contact and click the upper right Yellow corner to change the indicator to a check box. You can also Mark contacts by highlighting as described above and then clicking on CONTACTS from the top menu and choosing Mark Contacts.
2) Once you have selected or marked the appropriate names, Click on CONTACTS on the top menu and then choose Generate A Document or CTRL-D.
3) Choose whether Labels should be created for All Shown, Selected or Marked.
4) Click on the drop down arrow in the Master Document box to expand the choices.
5) Click on Letters and Labels and then choose the Labels document you wish to print.
6) When you click OK, Word will open with your labels setup and ready to print. The Amicus – Save Options window will also open to allow you to Save the Document and Add to Amicus if you choose.
7) You can now use the features of Word to preview and print your labels. You can also edit the font or make other changes that you desire. If the changes are ones that you will want to be in effect for the future you will need to modify the Amicus Document Template. If you need help in doing that please call us.
Previewing of labels, prior to printing is highly recommended to verify that the fields chosen show as you expect. It is also recommended that you print one sheet to paper and hold it over your labels to make sure everything lines up correctly before you start.
If you need help in creating labels or setting your search criteria, please call us at 203-254-7736.
While holiday season is the most common time to do a mass mailing, you may also need to do this at other times. Whatever software you are using, there is generally a way to create address labels so that you don’t need to re-key data. In this series of blog posts we show how to create address labels using the different programs with which we work.
When using Peachtree you can create labels for Customers, Vendors or Employees.
1) From the top menu bar click on Reports & Forms then click on Forms and choose the group for which you want to create labels.
2) For Customers, Peachtree provides several pre-designed forms including 1 x 10, 3 x 10, continuous and Shipping Address labels. The Customer Labels 1 x 10 and 3 x 10 are set to use the Bill to Address. The 3 x 10 format matches the Avery Standard 5160 labels.
3) The primary customization you might want to do is to change the font. You can Preview prior to Printing your labels.
Previewing of labels, prior to printing is highly recommended to verify that the fields chosen show as you expect. It is also recommended that you print one sheet to paper and hold it over your labels to make sure everything lines up correctly before you start.
If you need help in creating labels or setting your search criteria, please call us at 203-254-7736.
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