CPAnet - CPA Toolbox

Bad clients: Should they stay or should they go?

"It's conventional wisdom among management consultants: Fire your deadbeat clients and concentrate on the real money-makers. Sounds easy enough, but this seemingly no-nonsense approach requires a lot of strategy and soul-searching. CPA Trendlines' Rick Telberg says there are a number of signs that it might be time to drop the ax. "The ideal scenario is, of course, to avoid such situations in the first place," Telberg writes. "That’s why you need a crystal-clear profile of your target client. Then be ruthless about accepting no less."...
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Source: CPA Success

What I Hate About Timesheets - Part I (of many parts)

"The keystone of practice management for the accounting profession and most law firms has long been the billable hour. We rely on hours accumulated on time sheets in six minute increments to drive most every aspect of our practices from setting the value of the services we provide, to evaluating the individual competency of our professional staff, to measuring productivity, to establishing compensation levels, to measuring the cost of the services provided. What an amazing tool! It does virtually everything and provides all the information we need to manage our firms! The universal tool! The Swiss Army Knife of professional service firms! Unfortunately it doesn’t do any of these things very well..."
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Source: Innovative Practice Management

Related:
Pricing on Purpose: Creating and Capturing Value by Ronald J. Baker

How to Get Whitelisted

Seth Godin has put together a great resource on the ins & outs of whitelisting your e-mail addresses.  You can read an introduction to this often tricky subject here.

Interviewing Questions called into Question

Golden Practices made an interesting post about an HR World article "30 Interview Questions You Can't Ask and 30 Sneaky, Legal Alternatives to Get the Same Info" that's basically a list of questions you cannot ask in an interview and ways to get around it...sounds a little sneaky, huh?  Make sure you read the comments...the questions are definitely coming into question. 

Research Resources

News Sources - Mainstream
New York Times
Financial Times
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post

BBC News
Newsnow
MSNBC

Topix
bizjournals
News Record
LA Times
GPO Access
Google Finance
USA.gov

Articles
FindArticles
Newsiness

Search Engines & Mashup Engines
Google
Yahoo
Exalead
Sputtr | Intelways
whonu
Factbites
Search the Tail

Blog Search Engines
Google
Technorati
Blogpulse
Blogdigger
Ice Rocket
Rocketnews
Ask / Bloglines
Sphere
Feedster

Blogs
Bates Information Services
BeSpacific

Specialized Search Engines
CSEs Google | Eurekster | Yahoo Pipes
50matches | social search
BoardTracker | Boardreader
PodcastAlley | Podcast.net | Yahoo (dead)
Chunking Podscope | Everyzing
OmniMedicalSearch | databases
TimeSearch | based on HistoryWorld.net
Open Directory Project
Google Topic Search
Ujiko | from KartOO

Aggregated Wiki Resources
WikiIndex
Wikiseek | indexes outgoing links from Wikipedia
Wikia | more expansive than the two above | check out "librarian"

For Fun
StumbleUpon
Business Zen
PopURLs.com
FARK.com
Ms. Dewey

Tax Dingbats

Looking for some visuals to use during tax time?  Check out these "Taxing Moments" Dingbats created by Jeff Levine.  You will need to scroll down the page a bit to get to the zip file.  Just click on the image when you see it.