Honoring Innovation

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• August 2007 Issue
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From the August 2007 Issue

Streamlined tax preparation, electronic banking, enhanced practice management and a free small business accounting system highlighted this year’s Tax and Accounting Technology Innovation Awards, which were presented in June to the vendor community at the California Accounting and Business Show & Conference in Los Angeles and to the professional community at the AICPA TECH+ conference in Las Vegas.

The five vendors receiving awards are BankServ, Intuit Lacerte, Microsoft, SurePrep and Thomson Tax & Accounting. The Tax and Accounting Technology Innovation Awards are sponsored by The CPA Technology Advisor, with the magazine’s editorial advisory board, contributing writers, editorial staff and other thought leaders in the profession voting on technologies based on their potential to positively influence the tax and accounting professions. this positive influence can be through enhanced productivity when a technology is used directly by the professional in their practice, through enhanced client collaboration, or via client-side technologies that improve data accuracy, integrity and consistency, which in turn can aid the professionals who provide financial services to those clients. The magazine’s advisory board is comprised of accounting and tax professionals from across the country who are engaged in public practice in firms ranging from sole practitioners to major, multi-office regional practices.

Among this year’s award winners were two products that streamline the tax preparation process by automatically routing client data into forms. “The integration of scanning, OCR and forms recognition will have significant and immediate positive effects for virtually every tax professional,” said Gregory L. LaFollette, CPA.CITP, Executive Editor of The CPA Technology Advisor.

Software, hardware, hosted applications, and other technologies and services may be nominated for an award, but the technology must be commercially available at the time of judging, and must be either less than two years old or have undergone a significant redevelopment or addition within that timeframe. This year marked the fourth year the awards have honored technologies that aid the tax and accounting professions. Over 50 different products were nominated this year by vendors serving the accounting community. A total of five Innovation Awards are presented each year. This year, recognition was also given to five other high-scoring products in the form of Honorable Mentions. This year’s Honorable Mentions included Acct1st Technology Group; BizActions; CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business; Research In Motion (BlackBerry); and Thomson Tax & Accounting-PPC.

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2007 Innovation Award Winners

BankServ received an award for DepositNow A/R, a service that lets businesses make online bank deposits using a desktop computer and a check scanner while, more importantly, also automatically updating their accounting records in QuickBooks or Peachtree. When the business receives a check for payment, the bookkeeper or manager who would ordinarily take deposits to the bank instead simply feeds the check through a scanner. DepositNow A/R uses optical character recognition (OCR) and MICR technology to read the handwritten dollar amount, as well as the magnetic ink at the bottom of the check. It then automatically records the payment in QuickBooks, filling in the dollar amount and using the account number to match the check to the correct customer and/or invoice. Then the user clicks “send” to electronically transmit the check to the bank, which processes the check using electronic funds transfer technology.

“We designed DepositNow A/R specifically to make accounting simpler for small businesses, so of course we’re delighted to see it recognized by the people who know the accounting world best,” said BankServ CEO Dave Kvederis. “When you introduce a technology that’s the first of its kind, it’s great to gain acceptance from the experts in the field. That’s always a positive sign that your invention is accomplishing what you intended.” Especially useful for businesses that process many checks, DepositNow A/R not only saves a trip to the bank, but also saves time on bookkeeping tasks and reduces errors that can occur during manual data entry on deposit slips and again in the business’ accounting system. More than 3,000 businesses are already using the DepositNow A/R system. BankServ also offers products and services for phone and web-based payments, Fedwires and foreign exchange and file translation.