February 2011 - Journal of Accountancy

There comes a time when every sole practitioner or small firm owner needs to consider the consequences of a disruption in leadership of his or her CPA practice. Illness, disability, family obligation or death can be devastating for the CPA’s clients, family and employees. Proper planning, however, can mitigate the

FASB’s parent organization, the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF), this month is expected to discuss a report recommending a new standard-setting board to establish exceptions and modifications to U.S. GAAP for private companies. This discussion follows the culmination of a year’s worth of work by a blue-ribbon panel, formed in December

Ponzi schemes continue to come to light regularly. After 2008, when Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme was exposed, the SEC made comprehensive reforms to better detect fraud within the 11,000 regulated investment advisers and 8,000 mutual funds that it oversees, according to the SEC’s description of those reforms (tinyurl.com/2fu6eog).

CPAs who use dual monitors are finding that the addition of a third or fourth monitor also pays dividends. As the number of applications CPAs depend on expands, so does the need for more screen real estate. While a CPA’s two primary monitors are typically used to manage core applications

Dashboard reports created in Microsoft Excel are powerful, flexible and easy to design. In much the same way that an automobile dashboard graphically displays numerous measures of performance from the gas level to oil pressure, a computer dashboard presents critical data in a variety of visual formats. From this organized

Editor’s note: Also read “Who Would Run Your Firm?” Feb. 2011, page 40.   In August 1988, 48-year-old CPA Jim Feigel was in an accident that left him in a coma for 23 days. “If anything ever happens to me, the first thing you should do is sell the practice,”