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Practice

Free to pee

Yep – that was the teaser title for this Superbowl ad for a free tax return program that aired for a cool $3.5 million last night. Somehow I don’t see something remotely similar gracing the airwaves of an FA Cup Final anytime soon.  Unless of course, you know better.

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Industry

Keynoting UNIT4 and CODA customer gigs

This coming week – weather permitting – I’m the opening act for UNIT4′s upcoming Agresso/CODA customer conferences in Birmingham.  I say opening act as I will be delivering a very short address followed by some fun stuff. When UNIT4 contacted me about this late last year I was sceptical. Howlett addressing a customer conference? How [...]

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Cloud Computing/SaaS

LiquidAccounts illiquid?

Rumours have been circulating that Liquid Accounts is going through tough times. Filings at Companies House reveal that Matt Holmes and his partner Lisa Kendrick parted with the company back in October 2011. The filling was not made until 15th December 2011. The company also filed notice of new debentures in the names of other [...]

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Need Wikipedia? Not today. Not quite.

January 18, 2012 General

The English language version of Wikipedia is blacked out today. Go to the site and this is what you’ll see. This action is in protest against the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) currently doing the rounds among US legislators on Capitol Hill. For those unaware of SOPA, critics say that it is ill conceived [...]

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Messik expands via the cloud

January 17, 2012 Cloud Computing/SaaS

Last week I saw this Tweet from Richard Messik: Just taken on another overseas client – using E-conomic in Denmark and want to use it for their UK venture. For all the downsides to globalisation (and there are plenty,) the internet has opened up markets that were unavailable to the average practitioner. The only way [...]

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Move over naysayers

January 11, 2012 Cloud Computing/SaaS

A frequent concern I hear is that there are risks attached to running cloud services because many are physically located outside the EU and that in any event, data protection legislation renders the use of them inadvisable at best. It is actually something of a grey area because providers could always offer ‘safe harbor’ statements. [...]

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The photo of your junk will be publicized

January 11, 2012 General

Privacy – or rather the dwindling rights to privacy exacerbated by public social networks – are a long run topic of discussion. The reality is that it is hard to fight against the direction of travel, especially when so many are demanding transparency of the businesses with which we deal. For all those considering how [...]

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Twelve steps to writing the quintessential blog post

January 9, 2012 Cloud Computing/SaaS

Following on from my ‘why blogging isn’t dead‘ post it struck me that’s all very well but then I can’t count the number of professionals both those who are connected to marketing and what I would call functional experts who have come to me saying they find it really hard to write posts. It’s not [...]

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Addressing SaaS concerns: NetSuite

January 7, 2012 Cloud Computing/SaaS

The lack of a coherent set of answers to common SaaS questions has been a topic of continued complaint in AccMan stories. That might just be changing. Over the holiday period I read Tom Foydel’s NetSuite OneWorld Implementation 2011 R2 paper. It runs to 368 pages and while I wont pretend to have consumed it [...]

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Re-evaluating Twitter

January 7, 2012 Marketing

As we kick off another year, Twitter has told me I’ve been using the service for five years. That was a surprise. How time flies? Looking back I clearly remember thinking at first that it was an incredible time sink and likely waste. Many in business still see it that way. In the interim, others [...]

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Awesome customer service courtesy of BS

January 5, 2012 General

I spend so much time complaining about poor customer service that when it goes well then it feels like all my birthdays have come at once. Given I am pushing 59 that’s a lot of joy to get in one moment. Today is one of those days. Just prior to the holiday period my bank [...]

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9 things accountants should have done in 2011

January 2, 2012 General

Mark Lee has written one of those chestnut lists we all love to read at the turn of the year: New Year resolutions for ambitious accountants. He lists 10 things, nine of which I see differently. Let’s go through his list: 1. Reducing the January rush This is wholly avoidable. Progressive firms achieve this in [...]

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