Category: Banking
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Product review: Trim
I’ve written often about the fast-paced evolution of consumer finance software. In summary, our best programmers and artificial intelligence resources are focusing on this field for a number of reasons and consumers stand to gain. he field is highly competitive and exected to continue to evolve so that the value of product reviews like this…
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Turned Sour on Bitcoin
I opened a CoinBase account in 2014 with the expectation that BitCoin would eventually be an important currency. this blog post titled “A practical approach to bitcoin for regular people” marked the occasion. I got “locked out” of the account recently and was impressed by the level of security it took to gain access to…
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Law firm trust accounting overview
This post is meant for non-lawyers and people who want a general understanding of the topic. Lawyers should rely on more specific sources including their state bar associations. Rules vary by state and jurisdiction. These are just general principles. Client funds that are not earned legal fees must be kept in separate accounts and not commingled…
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QuickBooks “Pay Bills Online” (New feature)
I just set up and tested the internal “Pay Bills Online” feature of QuickBooks. Actually this is an integration between QuickBooks and Bill.com. The benefit is that bills can be paid without leaving the accounting software. (Prior to this I had to pay bills on my bank web site and then enter the payments manually…
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Small business problems with ‘bill pay’ services
One of the oddities of modern small business accounting is that banks have promoted services that send paper checks through the postal mail instead of transferring funds electronically. These are called ‘bill pay’ services. Some portion of these paper checks are ‘lost in the mail’ and some skeptical people wonder if this is the reason that…
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Wells Fargo in the news again
Most of the nonprofit businesses that I work for in the Philadelphia area use Wells Fargo as their primary bank. I’m not quite sure how that happened; it was not a deliberate choice on my part of saying to these boards “hey guys: let’s all use the same bank so that it will make my job…
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Keep the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Independent
In 2008 the United States suffered a previously unimaginable financial blow stemming from negligence, scandal and fraud at multiple levels of banking, Wall Street investment firms and government. We suffered but survived it by coming together, accepting the major financial setback to our lives, and taking steps to ensure that it did not happen again. One…
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Online Banking with Chase/Intuit
Chase Bank, the last large bank to resist automated online integration with customer accounting software, announced a deal with Intuit, the nation’s largest consumer and small business software firm. Now customers can automatically reconcile accounts, analyze performance reports, prepare tax filings and make bank transactions from a single secure software with little effort and without the…
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Trends in home ownership
The rate of individual home ownership is stuck at the lowest point in our lifetime. The trend will be further aggravated in 2017 as interest rates rise, real estate tax incentives diminish, and disposable income falls for the lower half of American households. Yet it remains unclear whether the homeownership issue indicates a serious underlying economic problem or a…
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How I “wowed” a small business accounting client today
I don’t think that small business accountants have many opportunities to “wow” a client. Marketers would probably say I am short-selling myself on this opportunity and that I could find more ways to impress if I really looked for these opportunities. I get it. But the reality is that daily life of a small business…