Month: September 2016
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Cleaning up my old blog posts
I just finished manually de-duplicating my personal web page blog posts and found 267 duplicates of the 1200+ gross count. A few were reproduced up to five times. I do not know how that happened. It is possible that they were imported from different publishing sources years ago. There seems to be some harmful impact…
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Sobering message to nonprofit board members
I expect to deliver this message of my engagement findings to the CPA board member and treasurer of a nonprofit client over the weekend: 1) you are in a fiduciary environment with responsibility for other people’s money. 2) We all recognize there are weaknesses in the bookkeeping. 3) There is no evidence that the accounting…
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Revisiting CRM for sole practitioner
It is time for me to revisit the topic of Client Relationship Management systems. I put together notes here in 2014 and in 2012 for the NJCPA. I am looking for a CRM that is well-suited for a sole practitioner CPA practice. I’ve been using Pipedrive and there are many things I like about it. Price…
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Blind trust basics
I can’t figure out if the Trump campaign people don’t understand how a blind trust works or they just hope that the rest of America doesn’t. Blind trusts are usually a great tool for politicians. The basic concept is that the politician is not aware of what company stocks or investments their independent investment managers…
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QuickBooks professional education today
After a technology-plagued day of QuickBooks webinar presentations yesterday, I am hoping for a better experience today. Intuit is using 6connex.com technology that is apparently suffering from bandwidth issues at the source of the presenter’s location. The end result is that the presentation freezes and the viewer must log out and then log in again.…
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Clinton Foundation vs. Trump Foundation
Recent news reports about the Clinton Foundation and Trump Foundation allow us to draw sharp distinctions between the two organizations. Starting with the basics, the Clinton Foundation is a properly registered charity that is actually active in attempts to do good in the world. The Clinton Foundation completes required filings and audits. Some transactions reported in this election…
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More on the education divide in the U.S.
I’ve written in an earlier bog post about the unprecedented ‘education divide’ where the level of formal education is now the most highly correlated indicator of a person’s political beliefs. Yesterday The Wall Street Journal ran a story about that same phenomenon with a series of findings by the Bowling Green State University National Center for Family…
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Use an honest marketing system
Stop using “sales tricks”. The words you use matter. I recently blasted a recruiter of a financial services firm for using an email template that started with a statement that simply was not true. I pointed out how received the same false email generated from exactly the same sales template from several other firms that week…