Use IRS Online Tools to Get Year-Round Tax Help

Getting year-round tax help from the IRS is easier than ever before. The IRS website has many online tools that you can use to get the service you need. For example, with IRS.gov you can e-file your tax return for free, easily check the status of your refund, or get many of your tax questions answered. Here are some of the online tools that the IRS offers to make filing your taxes less taxing:

• IRS Free File.  You can use IRS Free File to prepare and e-file your federal tax return for free. Free File will do much of the work for you with brand-name tax software or Fillable Forms. If you still need to file your 2013 tax return, Free File is available through Oct. 15. The only way to use IRS Free File is through the IRS website.
• Where’s My Refund?  Checking the status of your tax refund is easy when you use Where's My Refund? You can also use this tool with the IRS2Go mobile app.
• Direct Pay.  Use our Direct Pay service to pay your tax bill or pay your estimated tax directly from your checking or savings account. Direct Pay is safe, easy and free. The tool walks you through five simple steps to pay your tax in one online session.
• Online Payment Agreement.  If you can’t pay your taxes in full, apply for an Online Payment Agreement. The Direct Debit payment plan option is a lower-cost hassle-free way to make monthly payments.
• Withholding Calculator.  If you got a larger refund or owed more tax than you expected when you filed your tax return, you may need to change the amount of tax taken out of your paycheck. The Withholding Calculator tool can help you complete a new Form W-4, Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate to give to your employer.
• Get Transcript.  If you apply for a loan or student financial aid, you may need to get a tax transcript. With Get Transcript, you can download and print your transcript or ask the IRS to mail it to your address of record. 
• Interactive Tax Assistant.  Use the Interactive Tax Assistant tool to get answers to common tax questions. The tool will guide you step-by-step to the answer to your question based on your situation.
• Tax Map.  The IRS Tax Map gives you a single point to get tax law information by subject. It integrates your topic with related tax forms, instructions and publications into one research tool.
• IRS Select Check.  If you want to deduct your gift to charity, the organization you give to must be qualified. Use the IRS Select Check tool to see if a group is qualified.

Share sag puts shadow over Xero’s global foray

Sally Rose for the Australian Financial Review writes: A significant amount of heat has come out of Xero’s share price since March with analysts divided over whether the company can pull off its ambitious push into the US and Britain.

Of the five analysts who officially cover Xero only one, James Schofield from First NZ Capital, has the equivalent of a “buy” rating on it.

Auckland-based Goldman Sachs analyst Robbie Aitken upgraded Xero to “neutral” on April 9, due to price change.

The stock had fallen sharply after a new product-pricing structure was poorly received by the market.

Macquarie initiated coverage of Xero this month with an “underperform” rating, describing it with the tagline “beautiful company, expensive stock”.

“We expect Xero to gain significant market share of the small business accounting software market. They have a compelling product and have gained a good market share in the countries they entered first. However, the current share price is factoring in too much upside,” Macquarie analyst Daniel Frost said.

Xero dominates the small business accounting software category in its home, New Zealand, with a market share upwards of 90 per cent. It has also been successful in attracting customers in Australia, where it encroaches on the leading home-grown rival MYOB.

YET TO SHOW PROFIT

The Kiwi company has never turned a profit and management is yet to provide any guidance on when it is expected to do so. Xero showed revenue of $NZ70.1 million ($64 million) in the financial year ended June 30, while reporting a net loss of $NZ35.5 million ($32.4 million).

Macquarie forecasts revenue will increase to $NZ236 million ($215.3 million) in the 2016 financial year, while net losses blow out to $NZ66 million ($60.2 million).

It is widely acknowledged among analysts that Xero has a good product and has been leaders in the shift to move accounting packages into the cloud with a software as a service (SaaS) model.

But it faces strong competition from established brands in Intuit, owner of QuickBooks in the US, and Sage in Britain.

Xero is chasing partnerships with accounting firms in the US and Britain to grab a foothold before SaaS solutions from Intuit and Sage are widely implemented.

Ties with H&R Block in the US and KPMG in Britain were announced earlier this year. It is too early to judge the efficacy of these as a tool for customer conversion.

Founder and managing director Rod Drury is on a mission to replicate Xero’s local success at a global level.

“We expect Xero’s cash-burn to increase as the company continues to push into the Australian and British arkets and builds its presence in the US,” Forsyth Barr’s Blair Galpin noted earlier this month. And he points out the competition is not standing still.

“Just as Xero has increased its investment competitors such as MYOB and Intuit are also increasing their focus on cloud services.”

MYOB has ironed out some kinks from its cloud-based service, while Intuit is taking on Xero on its home turf with aggressive pricing for QuickBooks in the Australian market.

NOT SEEN AS A THREAT

Along with Macquarie and Forsyth Barr, EVA Dimensions analyst Andrew Zamfotis also has the equivalent of a “sell” recommendation on Xero. The New York-based Mr Zamfotis also covers Xero’s biggest global rivals Intuit and Sage.

The Australian Financial Review contacted other offshore analysts covering Intuit and Sage. While a couple of them had heard of Xero, none of them saw it as a threat to the incumbents.

It is almost two years since the company, which has been listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange since June 2007, made its spectacular debut on the local boards.

After making its dual-listing on the Australian Securities Exchange in November 2012 Xero’s stock soared as much as 807.5 per cent before peaking at $42.20 in March this year. Since then the share price has lost 49.4 per cent to $21.34 at Friday’s close. The stock is still up 51.4 per cent over the past 12 months, compared to a 7.8 per cent gain in the broad All Ordinaries Index. Xero is ahead 359 per cent since listing.

At Xero’s financial results presentation a few weeks ago the company confirmed it is targeting a US listing in 2015. Mr Drury has been telling analysts and investors that going public in the US will be primarily an exercise in brand building rather than raising capital.

Among large institutional managers controlling shares in Xero, according to the latest Bloomberg data, were Fidelity Management, Credit Suisse, Vanguard Group, Baille Gifford & Co, BlackRock, and the Bank of New Zealand.

Harnessing the Power of CRM Analytics

Bill Faley for Information-Management.com writes: In a competitive business market, the importance of the system that maintains and fosters growth for one’s customer base cannot be understated. In 2013, expenditures on customer relationship management software increased by 13 percent to over $20 billion, according to Gartner. The technology is not going away anytime soon: Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner, notes, "CRM will be at the heart of digital initiatives in coming years. This is one technology area that will get funding because digital business is critical for companies to remain competitive.” With the amount of resources invested in CRM, a company must examine these systems to ensure it is getting the most out of its investment. There are a number of ways to optimize a CRM implementation, but data analytics in particular offers exciting opportunities to drive innovation in the sales cycle. CRM data analytics can enable a business to make the sales process smarter as well as empower field reps with easy access to business intelligence. This is done not only by studying CRM data itself but also by enriching that data with additional information from both inside and outside the organization.

Start at Account Planning

The basic premise for selling goods and services has always been constant: convert opportunities with new and existing customers into closed deals. But with the evolution of a salesforce and the potential for a national customer base, the complexity of the sales process has exploded. Key sales activities now include territory alignment, customer segmentation and multistage account management. So where do analytics come into play? This begins at the account planning process. Account planning allocates the resources of the sales team to customers and prospects in an efficient manner. CRM analytics can aid this process by bringing together past sales activity data with historical sales results and other external data influencers. Ask any sales team to name its top 10 customers and the answer should come easily. But can they tell you who the top 10 customers will be next quarter? Possibly, though with the right business intelligence models, answering that question becomes easier by providing what-if analyses and projection trends. With this type of information, organizations can then segment customers into prioritized groups.

Build a Better Sales Call

CRM analytics can also be used to ensure that a sales interaction is the best it can be. Building a better sales call depends on the right CRM information architecture. CRM software should not only track accounts and contacts but also the actual sales materials presented to those customers. The advantages this setup brings are many. For instance, sales and marketing materials can be stored centrally and consumed by the field agents as necessary. Cloud-based CRM applications make searching email folders for the latest version of a presentation obsolete. Under this model, the usage and adoption rates of such materials can be tracked in the same way that clicks on a website are analyzed. Additionally, certain regulated industries can automate compliance procedures via digital consent agreements when a customer views certain content.

In the spirit of continuous improvement, feedback for sales presentation materials can be gathered from the customer — either formally or informally — as part of the sales call. That feedback can be stored in the CRM repository to improve future iterations of content. Smarter sales calls are also built by presenting the customer with relevant cross-selling opportunities. Data analytics plays a key role in determining cross-sell chances. For a company with enough order history and customer dimension data, models can be built that will provide an Amazon-type suggestion list of additional products purchased by similar customers. But the most important factor from an analytics perspective is to associate both the sales activities and sales materials with the individual customer. In that way, sales results can be correlated with these factors; insight into what works and what does not becomes readily available.

Incorporate Downstream Data

Data analytics can further enhance CRM by incorporating downstream data back into the application itself. This can take many forms. In an insurance setting, for example, claims data can be incorporated into a customer profile for risk assessment purposes. Or, perhaps there is external data to integrate into a customer profile, which provides indicators that the customer has experienced some significant event and could benefit from a call. For instance, a service vendor may wish to setup alerts for a representative to follow up if news outlets report a customer undergoing a merger, an acquisition or entering a new market. Service or software industries can track usage rates or support requests, making those metrics available within the CRM application. When certain financial KPIs can only be derived downstream from the CRM application, there is no reason why those numbers cannot be fed back into the system to give sales managers a single place to supervise their book of businesses. In that way, the complete picture of an organization’s data can be woven back into this valuable enterprise application.

Looking Ahead

The future of CRM analytics offers a number of interesting possibilities. Sales force coaching could take on new perspectives if sales presentations were recorded (with consent), and these recordings are submitted to speech-to-text translators. With a large enough sample size, one might be able to analyze the resulting “word clouds” to determine if certain message patterns differentiate a successful call from an unsuccessful one. Richer insights into purchase habits are starting to emerge from the use of guided customer experiences. For instance, imagine if a retail shopping excursion came with the use of a tablet or mobile device to guide the customer’s visit to the store. A virtual assistant is always there to answer questions, understand purchase needs, and make a call to a live associate if necessary. Loyalty program information could be gathered from those who choose to enter it. The result, from a CRM perspective, is a much more individualized experience and a heightened awareness of consumer patterns.

In short, there are many ways the sales process can become smarter through intelligent use of data analytics. Although selling has traditionally been regarded as a soft skill, the post-digital age has provided no shortage of ways sales data can be measured. But the successful organizations will ask — and find — answers to increasingly complex questions: Do certain customers in particular demographic groups exhibit different buying patterns depending on the type of sales interaction they experience? At what level of detail should a customer base be segmented to optimize return? How can sales costs be reduced without negatively impacting financial returns? In order to begin to answer them, one must have access to the right information. And that information is at the heart of CRM analytics and is what makes it such a valuable commodity.

Bill Faley is a senior consultant at CBIG Consulting, a professional services firm focused on business intelligence, big data analytics, and data warehousing solutions. Bill is based in Chicago, IL and is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the Liautaud Graduate School of Business at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Solver Announces BI360 Integration with Acumatica / reporting, consolidations, budgeting and dashboard options to Acumatica

Solver, Inc., the global leader in Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, SL, Acumatica and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, today announced an integration with Acumatica.

“We are thrilled to provide world-class BI360 reporting, consolidations, budgeting and dashboard options to Acumatica users and our partners,” said Nils Rasmussen, CEO of Solver. “Our comprehensive Business Intelligence suite is an organic fit for many Acumatica customers and prospects, specifically those companies who are still using manual Excel spreadsheets or other sub-par processes to manage financial planning and analysis, but can appreciate the importance and value of automated financial processes.”

“We are excited to partner with Solver to provide our customers a robust integration with BI360,” said Richard Duffy, VP of Partner Strategy and Enablement for Acumatica. “Business Intelligence is a critical component to drive insight and help customers take control of their businesses, and we believe this integration to Acumatica is a great way to achieve that.”

The wizard-driven integration connects BI360 to cloud-based or on-premises Acumatica ERP installations and is designed to make it completely non-technical for an Acumatica business user or partner to configure and populate the BI360 Data Warehouse with Acumatica data, so they almost immediately can start writing BI360 reports, or configure BI360 budget models and dashboards.

About Solver

Solver provides BI360, the leading Business Intelligence suite for Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, SL, Sage 500 and X3, Intacct, Acumatica and other ERP systems. Solver is a Microsoft Gold ISV Partner and the winner of the Microsoft BI Partner of Year Award and has a presence on the Gartner Group CPM Magic Quadrant. BI360 is sold through a world-wide network of resellers and is ideal for companies looking to find a user friendly, yet highly functional Reporting, Budgeting, Dashboard, Collaboration Portal, and Data Warehouse solution to give them deep insight and actionable information across all facets of their organization.

Acumatica is a leading provider of cloud business management software that empowers small and mid-size businesses to unlock their potential and drive growth. Built on the world’s best cloud and mobile technology and a unique customer-centric licensing model, Acumatica delivers a suite of fully integrated business management applications such as Financials, Distribution, CRM and Project Accounting, powered by a robust and flexible platform. In an interconnected world, Acumatica enables customers to take full control of their business; to play to their strengths, since every business is unique; and to empower their people by going wherever their people go, on any device.