Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Intuit to Debut Online Accountant Offering

Bob Scott for the Progressive Accountant writes: Intuit is going to replace QuickBooks Online Accountants with a product called QuickBooks Accountant. The new product is designed to increase collaboration between accountants and their clients. But it's also aimed at turning around the reception the current product has received. "The Net Promoter score for accountants is actually negative," according to comments by SVP Dan Wernikoff during this week's Investor's Day.

In far-ranging comments, Wernikoff also noted QBO is now integrating with PayPal and is shifting demand generation at retail to QuickBooks Online. Intuit will also add advanced inventory capabilities to tempt desktop users to migrate and target self-employed users "for the first-time ever." It is also accelerating its international move with France the next country on its calendar.  

Wernikoff described QuickBooks Accountant as being harmonized, the term that Intuit has applied to the most recent release of QuickBooks Online. The harmonized version was aimed at making QBO work in the same way as the desktop version of QuickBooks. [snip].  The article continues at The Progressive Accountant, click here to continue reading....
Posted on 2:53 PM | Categories:

Pentaho Data Integration with XERO makes it really easy to extend the reach of your current world of data. In this case, we can now build dashboards and analytics, perhaps run some predictives over Xero

Stuart Guthrie for  BizCubed writes: One of the things I love about Pentaho is its great data management tool PDI, or 'Kettle' as it's known. Pentaho can load in and write out over 100 different data sources. It's the ultimate tool for data munging – I've never seen anything in its league for diversity and capability.
Recently at BizCubed, we've had a lot of requests for integration to xero.com, that's an effective software-as-a-service (SAAS) accounting system from New Zealand.  Screen Shot 2014-02-22 at 10.40.26 am
Xero has a nice webservice / REST based API set that exposes securely lots of data for reading and writing. This makes it a perfect target for PDI (did I mention it's a great data munging tool?).
The obstacle to all of this is the need to play nicely with Oauth- an open standard for securing webservices. Oauth is used at some of the major Web assets like Google and Facebook.
Since there was no example we could call on currently in PDI, we went to the Java-defined class level as examples were provided on the xero developer site.
Atul, our newest engineer at BizCubed, developed the java class and tested the capability in fast order. We can now load Bank Transactions out of Xero for a given user / certification and get it into the PDI for further fun.
This is our simple example:
 NewImage
What we are doing here is loading Bank Transactions from a specific Xero account out to a database. The practical application of this is to set a loop around this transformation and access all accounts for a specific bookkeeper, helping them to keep their various clients bank accounts reconciled on a daily basis.
We would do this by loading this data back to a dashboard or report viewable by the book keeper(s). Currently, to achieve this, the bookkeepers need to log into each and every Xero account and check the bank reconciliation page manually.
Since this is a User Defined Java class, our next port-of-call is to turn it into a true PDI plugin which makes the first two steps a lot simpler and provides translations to all of the various Xero web services, allowing Pentaho Data mungers to load and extract data from this neat accounting tool any time they want.

A DEEPER DIVE

The two steps that matter in this transform are Step 3 and Step 5.
NewImage
Step 3 uses Java from the examples at Xero to access the web service with the Oauth certificates and extract the relevant XML for the relevant account. We've got the code if you want it, just fill out the form on this page and we can send it to you.
Step 5 is neat, you can use the PDI XML Path reader to extract the pieces of the Xml data returned from Xero.
NewImage
I arrived at this screen by copy/pasting the Xero XML into the 'content' tab as an 'example of content'. PDI then asked me at what 'level' of the Xpath to loop around. In this case, it was '/Response/BankTransactions' Choosing that, returned the fields as above.
Putting this step together took about 1 minute in Pentaho. It would have been 2 hours at least for a skilled experienced Java Software Engineer believe me – I was one!
Pentaho Data Integration makes it really easy to extend the reach of your current world of data. In this case, we can now build dashboards and analytics, perhaps run some predictives over Xero. A great extension to a great product.
Now.. to talk to those bookkeepers…
About BizCubed: BizCubed introduced the Open Source BI platform Pentaho to the Australian marketplace at CeBit in May 2006.  Our clients have since ranged from local to federal government, manufacturing to financial services, and from small two-person companies to large billion dollar organisations. With a quality ecosystem of partners, contributors and customers, BizCubed is changing how data is consumed and delivered in Australia and New Zealand.
 All of our services are geared towards making businesses smarter. We enable the rapid implementation of robust business analytics capabilities through knowledge sharing and systems integration. We guide decision-makers on the critical path to developing a technology enabled organisation. We help customers showcase the potency of good business information through compelling data visualisations. Visit BizCubed Here.
Posted on 10:40 AM | Categories:

The Self Employment Tax Trap

Tax Defense Network writes: Unlike wage earners that work for employers and have their taxes withheld from their wages and deposited with the IRS, the self-employed have to calculate and pay their taxes themselves. Tax rules for the self-employed are different from those for businesses, individual taxpayers and those working for employers. Generally, self employed individuals are required to file a tax return if they earn $400 or more from self-employment.
Many times, misunderstanding IRS requirements or a lack of information causes the self-employed to underreport income and incur a tax debt. The tax rules that the self-employed must consider when calculating and paying their taxes are discussed below.
Self-Employment Tax
Self employed individuals are required to pay the self-employment tax in addition to federal income tax. Self Employment tax includes the self-employed individual’s Social Security and Medicare taxes. From 2013, an additional Medicare Tax of 0.9 percent was required to be paid by the self-employed. This additional Medicare Tax applies to wages, compensation, and self-employment income that is above a certain threshold.
Estimated Taxes
Self employed individuals may also be required to pay Estimated Quarterly Taxes. Estimated taxes include self-employment, income and any other tax a self employed individual may be required to pay and are paid at specific intervals throughout the year. Generally, if you expect to owe more than $1,000 in taxes by the end of the year, you should be filing estimated taxes.
Many times, self-employed individuals do not pay estimated taxes quarterly and wait for the traditional filing deadline of April 15th. This leads to tax debt, as correctly paying estimated taxes every quarter is essential to remain compliant with the tax laws. The IRS even charges a penalty for underpayment of estimated tax.
Tax Credit and Deductions
There are many deductions that the self-employed can claim. Certain qualifying business expenses can be deducted from income to reduce taxes. The Home Office Deduction is often used by self-employed individuals who work from home.
Self-employed individuals can claim the Earned Income Tax Credit if they file Form 1040 Schedule C. This tax credit reduces the tax liability of those employed by an employer or work independently.
In order to avoid mistakes in calculating taxes and running the risk of a debt, it’s recommended to either seek the help of a tax professional or keep yourself up-to-date about the tax laws that impact you.
Posted on 9:46 AM | Categories:

The impact on XERO of the NZ currency fall, a 10% increase in revenue

Lance Wiggs for The National Business Review writes: The currency fall has a wonderful effect for exporters, especially those who have most of their costs back here in New Zealand.
As I write this, the NZD versus the USD has fallen about 10% since earlier this year. As an exampled of what this means I’ve made a simple spreadsheet estimating the impact on Xero [NZX: XRO].



My take is that the fall from the end of May to today would increase their estimated monthly revenue by about 4.3%.




Obviously this is only for revenue received after the exchange rate changes, so don’t expect any surprises when Xero announces their September revenue, although their Annualised Run Rate might have a boost.
But we’ve also heard talk of a desired optimum level of a rate of $.65 US dollars per NZD. If that happened tomorrow (and I am never a fan of fast movements), and if the AUDNZD cross rate stayed the same, then the Xero table would look like this:



That’s would show almost 10% increase in revenue, a lovely bonus for Xero and Xero’s shareholders. Xero does have a lot of staff offshore, but the bulk of their costs would be in NZD, so overall they should see a net increase in profitability, which in their case means little, as they are very well funded and constrained by things other than monthly profitability.
Every other exporter will be facing a similar scenario, but SaaS providers are luckiest because their costs are often largely in NZD, and so they will maximise the benefit.
Posted on 7:12 AM | Categories: