Summer's over. Kids are going back to school and accountants are getting down to work. Here's what you should be thinking about BEFORE busy season.
By Rick Telberg
Special for HP
It's September. While parents are rushing their kids off to school and kids are hitting the books, accounting professionals are gearing up for another busy season.
Whether you are girding for a new tax season or looking toward the final close of the fiscal year's books, if you're an accountant, then summer is definitely over and it's time to go back to work.
But before you settle in for the long haul ahead, pause for a minute or two to see if you're really ready. Here are three of the most important trends or issues that you'll probably be dealing with to one degree or another over the next few months.
So let's get started:
(1) Update and safeguard your passwords -- Password breaches are among the top 10 most critical vulnerabilities in most offices. But today, a password leak is more than a problem; if you're an accountant, it could be a crime. That's because the Gramm-Leach-Blilely Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act require that client information remain impenetrable. To be sure, password-protection isn't the only issue in security, but it is the best place to begin communicating to an organization that you're serious about digital assets and liabilities.
Just how easy is it to crack a password? The typical four-character password many of us use is pretty tough to break -- but only if you're human. A person trying a new combination of four characters every ten seconds could work six months to break the code. A computer, running at a million tries a second, could crack it in two seconds. And consider this: The federal government's intelligence agencies aren't publicizing it, but it took a single journalist exactly one good guess in 2002 to figure out the password for Saddam Hussein's email account. Ah, if only we'd known then, what we know now!
(2) Ride the Upgrade Wave -- Too many accounting firms and departments are still using systems, procedures and technologies from the 1990's. But we are already well into the 21st Century. In the past few years, we've gone from deskbound desktops to mobile computing, from running cable for networks to running from one Wi-Fi hotspot to another, and we've gone from thinking of technology as a cost to understanding that technology is a critical business differentiator. Second only to a spouse, consumers now rely on Internet search engines to make purchasing decisions about major appliances. More people are now getting their news from the Web than from TV. And a newspaper? What's a newspaper?
Fueled by an economic uptick, continued low interest rates, the mounting obsolescence of older equipment, and a nice tax benefit (remember the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief and Reconciliation Act of 2003), small- and medium-sized businesses are going shopping this year like it's Christmas. If your plans for September don't include a close look at upgrading and expanding your hardware, you could be left behind.
(3) Take the Leap into CRM -- Accounting firms and corporate finance departments are being dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the marketing department to help on customer relationship management installations. The green-eyeshade breed of accountant is shying away from CRM. But visionary business-minded accountants understand intuitively the vast potential in winning direct involvement in raising new revenue, better gauging returns on investment through performance management techniques, and adding directly to the bottom line.
Sure, the software is great at keeping track of client birthdays and favorite haunts and hobbies. But a good and flexible CRM system can forecast revenue, find new growth opportunities, make key management decisions and control and optimize marketing costs. Besides, every business already has an accounting system to measure and record internal activities; a CRM system goes outside the business to the world beyond, giving accountants a newly holistic view of the environment and making them essential go-to people for business strategy.
This short list goes from the mundane (in the care and feeding of passwords) to the strategic (in pushing the accountant into the role of corporate visionary). But that's where accountants are headed anyway. And that's the way clients and employers want it. You resist it at your own risk.
