Winners Include Microsoft Office Accounting Express, Intuit Lacerte for its newSmartMap function, SurePrep for 1040Scan, Thomson Tax & Accounting for Practice CS, & BankServ for DepositNow A/R.
LOS ANGELES -- June 4, 2007 -- New technologies focused on streamlining tax preparation were among this year’s winners of The CPA Technology Advisor’s Tax & Accounting Technology Innovation Awards, the most prized recognition for developers of software, hardware, services and other technologies geared toward professional accountants and tax preparers. The Awards were announced on Monday, June 4, at the California Accounting and Business Show & Conference in Los Angeles. The winners of the awards will also be introduced to the accounting profession during a general session meeting at the AICPA TECH+ conference in Las Vegas on June 12.
The Tax and Accounting Technology Innovation Awards are sponsored by The CPA Technology Advisor, the leading technology magazine and online portal for practicing public accountants and tax professionals. The Awards recognize recent advances in technologies that benefit accounting and tax professionals.
Two products in particular reflected the increased movement toward paperless processes that increase the efficiency of tax preparation. SurePrep received an award for its 1040Scan system, and Intuit Lacerte was awarded one for its SmartMap application. 1040Scan was first to market with a system that allows professionals to utilize scanning, form recognition and optical character recognition technology ( OCR) to scan client documents like W2s, 1099s and brokerage statements and have the data automatically flow directly into the client’s tax return in the professional’s tax preparation system. Intuit’s SmartMap utility simplifies and automates the movement of data between QuickBooks and the Lacerte professional tax application.
“The integration of scanning, OCR and forms recognition is a trifecta that will have significant and immediate positive effects for virtually every tax professional,” said Gregory L. LaFollette, Executive Editor of The CPA TechnologyAdvisor. Mr. LaFollette is also a practicing CPA who holds the accounting profession’s Certified Information Technology Professional (CITP) credential.
“Tax professionals will be able to save considerable time by using these systems, which then allows them to either service additional clients or to focus on other more profitable services,” he said. “Because of the increased efficiency that professionals will gain, the demand for this technology will be so great that by next tax season we will see almost all other professional tax preparation systems offering their own versions of these tools. And within a few years, it will be nearly universal.”
Innovation Awards were also presented to Microsoft for Microsoft Office Accounting Express, a free small business accounting system included with the Office productivity suite; Thomson Tax & Accounting for Practice CS, an advanced practice management system for accounting firms that includes integrated time and billing, project management, client management and data sharing functions; and BankServ for DepositNow A/R, a system that integrates with small business accounting software and allows businesses to scan customer check payments and then matches checks to invoices, verifies check value, and then can make bank deposits electronically.
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