Apps for Accounting & Tax Practices

On October 3, 2017, I gave a presentation in Columbia, MD  for the Maryland Society of Accounting & Tax Professionals entitled “Apps for Accounting & Tax Practices”.

My goal was to share what I see as the evolving definition of what an app is, plus  demo a selection of apps I use in the categories of accounting, tax, communication, general business, and travel. I closed out by providing an approach to discover and deploy new apps.

Below are the slides I used for your reference too!

Soul of Enterprise: On Value

Two of my great mentors are Ron Baker and Ed Kless, from whom I’ve learned so much about how to think about business (not to mention they’re fun people to be around). It was a pleasure to be on their internet radio show Soul of Enterprise (and whose name I suspect is connected to a talk they once suggested I read called The Soul of Silicon by George Gilder, and which blew me away).

In this episode, we chatted about a book I had started reading, entitled An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought by Murray N. Rothbard. (2 volumes) I’m actually still in the midst of reading the book since it’s so densely packed with history and insights, but we chatted about the origins of economics, the different theories of where value comes from over the years, how ideas and thought influence action, how value and accounting mix, and more.

You can listen to the audio right from page for Episode 145, as well as subscribe to their podcast in iTunes.

And don’t forget to check out The Soul of Enterprise’s website, their VoiceAmerica internet radio page, and the VeraSage website for more great resources.

Thrivecast: Deeper Weekend 2016

At the annual Thriveal Deeper Weekend conference, hosts Jason Blumer and Greg Kyte record a live version of the great accounting podcast: the Thrivecast. In this episode they talk to the various attendees of the conference and get their take-aways from this year’s speaker Blair Enns who taught us advanced value pricing techniques.

You can catch all types of good snippets, and look for myself and Ian Vacin being interviewed starting at 36:45 right from the audio on the page for Episode 65.

I definitely recommend you check out the Deeper Weekend conference – it’s like none other I’ve been too, and of course the great Thriveal CPA Network.

Referring Link: Lab Experiment 2 Launched – Value Accounting Model

After the successful completion of the first Thriveal Lab experiment, we were ready to launch #2 — one based on the hypothesis that “there is a more intuitive way to present financial results that requires less accounting knowledge by business owners, and more transparently reflects the financial performance of the entity.” This post on the Thriveal blog describes the background for the experiment, and solicits accounting firm owners for the Experimental Team.

Alas, with changes to my schedule and to the Thriveal’s long-term strategy, we mutually decided to push pause on the experiment and mothball the Thriveal Lab for another day, proud of what we had created and its impact, perhaps to revisit at some time in the future. This experiment and The Experimental Framework are as relevant today, as they were in 2015, as accountants continue to search for ways to create new and better value for their customers.

Art of Value: Making the Transition to Value Pricing

It was great to spend some time with fellow VeraSage Fellow (say that ten times fast) Kirk Bowman on the podcast for his organization Art of Value. Our theme was “Making the Transition to Value Pricing” and we talked about things like what’s the first step when making the switch, what was easy/hard, what are some techniques to apply, resources to learn from, and more.

Check out the audio embedded on the page for Episode 70, and/or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or other podcatchers (additional links available on the episode page).

And definitely recommend you check out Art of Value‘s blog, podcast, Facebook page, events, and other resources to help equip and encourage on your journey to value pricing.

The Price of Profit

I wonder if you’ll allow me a few moments for some experimental thinking — to explore with you an idea: what is the price of profit? (it may not be in the way you’re thinking.)

In a previous post, I ruminated on a different way to view what CPA firms do: we sell access to emotional, intellectual, and creative capacity. What this means to me is that we have care, smarts, and the ability to imagine, and that’s truly what our customers want from us. This is how we help them. These are not unlimited resources, however. We have only so much emotional capacity. You know what I mean if you’ve ever had that morning customer situation that completely zaps your energy for the rest of the day. We have only so much intellectual capacity. Has anyone out there been able to keep up with changes in all the dimensions of accounting, much less the other things we have to know to run a business? And we have only so much creativity capacity. The juice it takes to rollout new products, or help customers imagine solutions to their situations, can only run so long before it needs to be replenished.

From a business model standpoint, our goal is to optimize the long-term yield on this emotional, intellectual, and creative capacity.

But we generally don’t have this type of “yield” mindset. And we usually don’t have a way to judge yield or keep it in the forefront of our minds.
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Facing Fear

“The pathway to your greatest potential is through your greatest fear.” -Craig Gristle

This is where it gets real. The blog posts are one thing. The conferences. An inspiring TED talk or coffee exchange with a peer. But eventually it all comes down to you, and the action. And the fear that’s present in that moment.

I’m convinced that facing fear is perhaps the biggest skill we can develop as business owners. Heck, as human persons. To me, here’s an example of human business, and how developing this skill in business, can actually feed back into our life outside of business. And vice versa. I know it has for me.

Herewith, five steps for facing fear, from facing my own fears:
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Business as a Moral Enterprise

Commerce. Hubbub. The noisy marketplace. The tens, hundreds, and thousands of small exchanges. In the store, online, over the phone, from an airplane. It’s like an ecology, the ecology of the economy. The creation and shifting of resources from one area of the ecology to another. All voluntarily. All based on what we value, on what we think is worth the expending and spending of resources. The values, where do they come from?

As entrepreneurs, we design “the value exchanges:” those interactions that bring together buyers, workers, suppliers, owners, and indirectly, their surrounding environments. If we’ve done our job well, each party leaves the exchange with greater value than they brought to it. In a very real sense, they are affirmed in that value through their interactions with the others. The whole process is a way of cooperating to make the imaginary real, the potential actual, the unseen seen. It also transcends the laws of matter: while the physical matter doesn’t increase, paradoxically the whole enchilada just grew, because it grew in a non-material dimension: in the minds and souls of the participating parties.

ValueExchange

“The value exchanges” are preceded by a decision, and the savvy entrepreneur is really a decision architect. She’s created the exchange, but the decision is what gets the movement of the exchange activated. Architecting that decision is really a matter of leadership, of presenting the decider with their freedom. The frame of the decision proposes a truth about reality, what makes reality better, and how the exchange brings about that reality.

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Boiling Down An Accounting Firm

The world is a wild and wooly place. Grappling order out of chaos, or introducing chaos into order, is a messy business. Which is why neatness is not the aim of business, even though we may sometimes consider it the aim of accounting.

In our efforts to come to terms with our reality, mental models can be very helpful. The concept of business as a ship, navigating uncharted waters, in search of undiscovered lands. Or that of climbing a mountain, catching glimpses of the peak, pressing on, but enjoying the journey. Or as we like talk about in Thriveal, cliff-jumping, blowing stuff up, and lab experiments on our way to making a new firm. These can help give us the clarity and impetus to act because we have a way to understand our movements in the broader story.

Conversely, mental models can also be very harmful. The idea of time as money. That monetary profits are the sole purpose of business. That perfection of the system is the goal (thus people become cogs in the machine). That leaders are all-knowing and inerrant. These are among the models that can increase our friction as they under-equip us to deal with the realities we face.

Our ability to evolve and change is usually the result of adopting a new mental model and/or letting go of an old mental model. They’re the brain pathways that sit just underneath the surface, often out of view to us. They’re the pattern molds we’re subconsciously using to make sense of and interpret the experiences we have each day. You can see how powerful they are to our life. It’s why I take issue with the phrase “perception is reality” and prefer to replace it with “perception shapes our experience of reality.”
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Accounting Enters the Creative Economy

This post is adapted from a presentation I gave at Xerocon Denver 2015. In it, I talked about the progression our economy has made from agrarian, to industrial, to service, to knowledge, to what I believe is here in some industries, and now surfacing in the accounting industry — the creative economy. See this link if you’d like to read the full text.

If you look at our nation’s history, you’ll notice the progression from survival (agrarian economy), to possessions (industrial economy), to freed up time (services economy), to intellectual pursuits (knowledge economy). Some of you may recognize the parallel to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I suggest we as a society, and as an economy, are moving our way up that hierarchy.

So what comes next? I believe there’s a new age brewing — it’s been around for a little in the broader market actually. But I believe our field, accounting, is now entering the creative economy. In this landscape, it’s not acres, it’s not physical capital, it’s not hours, and it’s not even intellectual property that governs the economic paradigm: it’s our ability to tap into the human capacity to imagine and create. That’s what the market will reward the greatest. And that’s why the largest taxi company doesn’t own a single vehicle (Uber), one of the largest lodging companies doesn’t own a single building (Airbnb), and the largest content company doesn’t have any journalists (Facebook).

The next ten years or so, I believe, will be a drama between the characters of Knowledge (we’ll call him Kevin), and Creativity (we’ll call her Cora) — something I call, “The Tale of Two Economies.”

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