CPA Trendlines Podcasts

The “Uncle Billy” Problem with the ERCWith Bradley Burnett, JD LLMWith 18 months of water under the bridge, we’re three-fourths of the way through the Employee Retention Program, the IRS changed their mind on an extremely important issue that changes many, many tax situations. Catch Bradley’s next webinar on the ERC here See the video The question is: Who’s eligible? And who’s not?The IRS did a complete about-face, now saying if you’re a 50-percent-plus owner and you have a living relative, or half relative, or an ancestor, or a descendant, or a multi-level marketing sponsor, or even an Uncle Billy you haven’t heard from in years… They say you’re not eligible.It’s crazy! It’s just plain wonky.So what do we do now?Many practitioners in good faith have claimed the ERC. Now, do we have to amend? Or, can you let this ride? Congress is already asking IRS to change its position. Will the IRS reverse itself? Hard to say.You’ll need to break out Form 827 for uncertain positions with your next filing.There’s a lot to out sort out here.RELATED: The “Ludicrously Lucrative” Employee Retention Credit | “Brand Spanking New!” IRS Notice on Employee Retention Credit. | Answered! Your Top 11 Questions about the Employee Retention Credit. |

Bradley Burnett, JD LLM, delivers a first-read on the new IRS notice, which adds 34 pages of additional guidance on the Employee Retention Credit. What does it clarify? And will it help accountants help small business clients claim up to $330,000 in COVID relief?

Kill the billable hour, embrace remote work, stay flexible, get social, says Pasha Malik of Thyor.Twitter and Linkedin are the go-to resources for finding new talent at the McLean, Va.-based Thyor group of companies, founder and CEO Pasha Malik tells Richard Rothstein for CPA Trendlines.But he has much more to say about fixing the accounting business to make it more competitive for attracting the best people. In fact, his group of companies may be a model of the next-generation CPA firm, offering through various entities outsourced CFO services, tax planning, technology consulting, and venture capital advisory services.The business was launched as virtual with a far-flung remote workforce, and remains so today, giving it a headstart on other firms still making the transition. Meanwhile, Malik plays the role of CEO, CFO-for-hire, tax advisor, strategist, data scientist, startup advisor, wealth adviser adventure capitalist.Educated in Cambridge and London, Malik has traveled the world in public accounting, from BDO in Singapore to PB Mares in Washington, D.C., before launching Thyor.For the video and the transcript, go to: https://cpatrendlines.com/2021/08/01/three-strategies-to-crack-the-staffing-shortage/

In this interview for CPA Trendlines, Richard Rothstein speaks with Manny Cosme, President of CFO Services Group, about recruiting new talent in the age of COVID.Manny makes some great points about working for a small nimble firm like CFO Services Group and the challenges of retaining great talent in the face of competition from bigger firms for high-quality talent.CFO Services Group also moved virtually several years ago, so they have some great insights on ways to maintain culture even while working remotely. Even more interesting is their attitude on when they hire non-accounting professionals like sales and marketing staff.

With Richard RothsteinIn this interview for CPA Trendlines, Ed Gattis, founder of Parabellum Systems, talks to Richard Rothstein, founder of Rothstein Consulting, about the global recruiting trends and how that is affecting hiring in the accounting world.Here Gattis talks about his experience in recruiting and recruiting for the accounting community and what has changed. The biggest thing he says is that it has become much harder to source very high-level people due to the lack of in-person opportunities, like pre-work coffees, lunches, etc to convince prospective employees that openings are a good fit.He also tells us how important personalization is to finding the right talent for your positions.More here: https://cpatrendlines.com/?p=86455

With Steven SacksThe NEW FundamentalsThe main problem with the annual budget process as a fiscal exercise done by the accountants is that it is disconnected from the executive team strategy.Corporate finance expert Gary Cokins says that allows too much room for bad habits, such as the use-it-or-lose-it mindset of allocated resources, as well as incorporating last year's inefficiencies in processes into the current year.Five Key Take-Aways: There is interest now in corporate performance management because executives are frustrated with strategy failure. They are good at formulating strategy, but meeting expected goals is a real problem. The way to get rid of spreadsheet budgeting is to view the amount of spending of any organization as the result of the confluence of two streams. The first is going to be repeatable work. It tends to be operational. The second is non-repeatable because it involves capital, risk management, and strategy projects. Accounting must carefully identify and construct key performance indicators. But not every type of measurement is key. Activity-based costing is just full absorption costing done correctly, without the “butter spreading” on spreadsheets of labor hours or units produced or sales dollars or full-time equivalent headcount or square feet. None of those reflect the unique consumption that the products or service lines actually consume. Many people have heard about the balanced scorecard, but it's just a feedback mechanism. The real intelligence is in the strategy map.

How to overcome the mind-blocks holding you back from total success.With Steven Sacks, author of "The NEW Fundamentals: Thriving in Disruption"Professionals need to use a blend of psychology and strategy to guide them with both mental fitness and tactics to produce career breakthroughs, executive coach Nancy Fox tells Steven Sacks.In business, the mind is 95% of the game, according to Fox, so it’s essential to recognize the causes of mindset blocks that are encountered, such as competition and business development, and what their impact can be.KEY TAKEAWAYS:Leaders may not understand the nuances or fundamentals of mentoring and cultivating talent. As such, they find the biggest impediments to be themselves.The conscious mind is where our thoughts are directed in such areas as logic, strategy, memory, learning, data analysis. However, 95% of our thoughts are directed by the subconscious mind, and only 5% by our conscious minds.The subconscious mind is where the inner game of work, career, and life is really won — or lost.There are some strategies you can use to train your mind to prepare yourself to experience an outcome and imagine ways to achieve that outcome.In addition to training your mind to block negative thoughts and experience only positive thoughts, there are physical techniques that can be used.Nancy Fox is the founder and President of The Business Fox, a business consulting and training company specializing in guiding law, accounting, and service business firms grow through smarter networking and business development and niche marketing strategies.

Profitability Analysis & ReportingManagement finance expert Gary Cokins says there's nothing wrong with activity-based costing, in this conversation with Steven Sacks for CPA Trendlines. Except that you're probably doing it all wrong.Takeaways:– The deficiencies with product and service line costing have to do with overhead allocations. The problem is, it's convenient for the accountants to allocate the overhead based on allocation factors, like labor hours, number of units produced in a manufacturer, headcount, number of employees, and square feet, even though none of them reflect the unique consumption relationship between how the outputs products and services consumed.– Rapid prototyping is really meant as really to get buy-in and displace misconceptions. The accountants can build a model that replaces percentage estimates with data that can be extracted from ERP or production systems.– The analyses must go below the gross profit margin line, including distribution channel expenses, marketing expenses, selling expenses, customer service expenses, to basically get a P&L almost by the customer to determine whether the largest customer is also the most profitable.– EPM and CPM tools will enable young professionals to move away from vouchering and more toward problem-solving. Their jobs will become more meaningful and fulfilling.– Accountants and financial executives really need to create a culture of discovery and investigation. And this is where analytics come into place. Because analytics creates questions. It creates better questions and even more questions. And they also need to have tolerance for making mistakes, as long as they learn from the mistakes.

With cyber-crime growing by leaps and bounds, accountants are caught in the cross-hairs, cyber-security professional Jill Cagliostro tells Steven Sacks for CPA Trendlines.Cagliostro, senior product manager with Splunk, a data management and security company, says “cybercriminals are getting more advanced. They’re finding new avenues and new ways to get in every single day.”“And beyond that,” she says, “they’re also communicating with each other. So they’re able to share these new tactics and techniques amongst each other to become more proficient together.”Key Takeaways-- Bad actors are communicating in places like the dark web and in forums to share their ideas and to plan to breach private and government entities.-- Third-party vendors must go through security questionnaires before they are onboarded as a partner with a private entity.-- The questionnaires are employed to ensure that the third-party vendor has the necessary security mechanisms in place, such as two-factor authentication, encryption, and comprehensive policies that must be followed.-- There are key metrics to use to assess the risk of cyberattacks. KPIs that indicate how secure something is or how good the security team is doing at protecting the organization can be difficult.-- Clients are looking for different KPIs that they can show the level of success that they’ve had with identifying threats in their environment.-- Companies that experience security breaches will find it more difficult to attract future security talent because security professionals will not want to have on their resume companies that were victimized by a security breach as it will imply that they allowed a breach to occur.-- The most common way that companies get hacked is through phishing emails, which doesn’t always go to the executives. Security should really not just inform technology decisions, but business decisions as well.-- One of the best ways the IT team and security teams monitor for behaviors is by tracking activity on employees’ work computers. By connecting to a corporate VPN allows the IT and security teams to see what is going on internally.-- In addition to external threats, there are internal threats that could be very costly. Company employees can have access to trade secrets, confidential information, and insider trading information.-- There are a couple of different ways to monitor this behavior using data-loss prevention tools that can monitor files going in and out of a company’s network.Full transcript and video here: https://cpatrendlines.com/2021/04/11/fighting-cyber-crime-starts-close-to-home/

With Steven Sacks for CPA Trendlines. The accounting profession is "stuck in a rut," says James N. Lopiccolo, founder and managing member of Capocore Professional Advisors, in Lake Orion, Mich. He says CPAs can't see "the challenges that are coming by from other non-CPA firms." Lopiccolo's answer is offering service agreements, instead of billing by the hour. Risky? Sometimes. But clients love it. In more than 31 years of public accounting, Lopiccolo has worked in business advisory, tax, and accounting for a multitude of industries including contracting, manufacturing, medical, professional service companies, and real estate. He serves on the Michigan CPA Association executive committee and the finance committee, and he is a two-time chair of the AICPA Small Firm Practitioners Task Force. Key Takeaways:-- CPAs should employ a minimum level of service agreement with clients because it will help to manage expectations as well as professional fees.-- A proactive approach by CPAs is what clients desire.-- Clients want their CPA to be a partner in their success.-- CPAs are much too fixated on getting as much money as possible from clients rather than providing real value in each client interaction.-- Make sure the client onboarding process is consistent from one client to the next.-- Advisory services are practically the same with slight modifications for each client.-- There is a trust factor in identifying and hiring the right staff in order to provide a level of comfort for providing each client with advice.-- It is necessary to have confidence in your staff and let them know they have the opportunity to sink or swim.-- There will be more competition for client accounting services, so advisory services should be the leading service CPAs provide.-- CPAs need to leverage the CPA “brand.”In the next five years, new businesses will arise, but at the same time, there will be greater competition from non-CPAs.