Cook and Company Technology Department

Mortgage Tax Savings Calculator | Loan Calculator | Investment Questionnaire | 72(t) Calculator | RMD Calculator | 1040 Tax Calculator | Home Budget Calculator | Net Worth Calculator | Business Valuation Calculator | Estate Tax Calculator

Gregory J. Cook, EA, CPA+ Accredited Tax Advisor Past President Alabama Society of Enrolled Agents Past President Alabama Association of Accountants

Technology In Action   

For years now, we've been utilizing dual monitors at our workstations. Hardly a week goes by that someone doesn't ask about our setup. Some ask, "why not just use one larger monitor?" It's not the same at all. Our productivity in the tax department increased by a full 30% when we implemented this system.

The 30% increased efficiency in the tax department was just the tip of the iceberg though. Because the agents were viewing the client's current year information on one screen and the prior year data on the other screen, our error rate decreased by 12%, which resulted in another big productivity gain in the review department.

A client in the manufacturing industry and I were having a conversation about three years ago. We were discussing my computer network. He asked "how much have you invested in your computer network and software?" When I responded with "in excess of $300,000 and ongoing annual costs of more than $30,000", he didn't seem surprised. But his next question was, "how do I, as a client, benefit from that?"

I quickly pointed out that our clients benefit by; 1) spending less time in our office, 2) having an immediate and very accurate estimate of the results on their tax returns before they walk out of our office, 3) their financial information is secure, 4) the client has a backup of their documents retained by us as long as they remain a current client, and ... he stopped me there and said okay.

A few years back when I was replacing printers, we bought four Konica-Minolta BizHubs. These machines will also scan documents at a rate of 80 pages per minute. It turned out to be one of the best upgrades we ever made. With the progression of time, it seems that we are using the scanning capabilities far more than the printing features.

Technology Projects

My latest technology project of course was the redesign and rework of our main website. A major project like that always involves smaller projects that seem to spawn out of the bigger overall project. It's like a domino effect that occurs when you make a change in one area, it necessitates another change. For example, I wanted to make our site more engaging to visitors, which involved reducing the number of hyperlinks on pages and increasing the number of images. Increasing the number of images places a heavier workload on the server and slows down the load time of pages for the end users. So I engaged a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve up the new images from servers strategically placed all around the world. In order to utilize the CDN, I had to change all of our hyperlinks and links to image files to point to the fully qualified domain names.

A website in it's most basic form could be one single page with the contact information for a company, much like a business card. From the beginning I've wanted our website to be so much more. I realized early on that there is a lot of generic information that can be dispatched to our clients, accessible by them anytime at their convenience. After placing a good amount of general information out here on the web, we began getting many visitors searching for one particular piece of information. As a result, a visitor would come to our site, find the bit of information they were seeking and leave our site without visiting any other pages. 

It turns out that Google tracks site traffic and assigns a statistic known as "bounce rate". If a lot of visitors come to your website and view only one page and leave, Google's algorithm interprets that and applies logic that labels your site in a bad light. Of course if the visitor does not continue searching for the search term that brought them to your site to begin with, I suppose it logically assumes they found what they were looking for. At any rate, that's just one of many good reasons I have for attempting to make our site more engaging and useful to the internet community.

Another small project that developed from the site rework was the addition of the financial calculators (see links above). We wanted to enable our clients with some self-help tools that would prove beneficial to them and spur interest in further pursuing certain avenues with us involving their tax and financial interests. The calculators are secure java applets that run from the client's computer, no input information is stored or even seen by our server. There was a substantial cost involved with providing the calculators, so I hope that you will explore and give them a try.

 

If you haven't been following us lately on this site, we implemented secure email and file transfer for our clients in 2010. We had made a previous attempt at secure file transfers with a Linux server a couple of years ago and abandoned that project after a period of time. This new system seems to be working flawlessly. After a file is uploaded to one of our servers, the recipient receives an internal notification automatically. The sender then gets a confirmation that we have the file or files.

Before the Ciphersend project we were working on our news feed, which we publish in RSS2 and Atom. The technologies that we are utilizing with our news feed might surprise you. We were able to integrate several separate technologies to simultaneously publish a news item to our website, the feeds, email, Twitter and Facebook. In addition to having the capability to publish to multiple destinations, I can publish from multiple sources, i.e., my website from anywhere, Windows Live Writer or my cell phone.   

Prior to that, we had a project going with publishing video to the internet. Unfortunately I had focused on using Adobe Flash as the primary tool. Along came the ever so popular iPad which does not have the capability to play Flash. I monitored visitors versions of the Flash plug-in for a long period of time and was satisfied that it was the proper vehicle to use for video delivery. With the new HTML5 coming along, we could eventually simply include video with a <video> command. I'm never satisfied that I've done all I can to make our website the best it can be. I think the main reason for that ongoing need to improve is attributable, at least partially to the fact that there are always compromises to be made. The one I have the biggest issue with is screen resolution discrepancy or variance among internet users.

I have spent hours working on layout design to make it flexible and adaptable to the various screen sizes. It is frustrating to create what appears to be the perfect presentation, only to view it in a different screen resolution and find that it is totally broke. Many webmasters take the approach of using a fixed-width design that has unused areas that increase in size as the screen resolution increases. To me, that's a cop-out and a waste of technology to cater to the smallest screen resolution. Ever visit a website that looks like you should be viewing it on a 1980's monitor? Conversely, I've always used a fluid-width design that will shrink or stretch with the screen resolution, but that presents it's own set of challenges.

If everyone had the same size monitor (no touch screens or all touch screens), with the same screen resolution, used the same browser, with the same plug-ins and all had the same operating system and software on their computer, it would be much easier to create the ultimate website. In today's world though, you have to do the best you can to create the best user experience for the largest audience.

Internet Explorer 9 release candidate 2
I've been using IE9 for about a week now and I love it! I will use two words to describe it, sleek and fast. Ironically, the only website that I have visited that absolutely does not display correctly is Google Webmaster Tools. Competition between the different browsers has increased over the last two years. We monitor browser use at our website and IE users have dropped from 90% a couple of years ago to about 78% today. With the introduction of IE9 we may see those numbers come back up.
 
Facebook - A Couple of Things You Should Know
With 500 million users worldwide and 150 million users in the U.S. alone, Facebook has quickly become the number one social media network on the internet. When initially launched in early 2004, Facebook was for students only. By late 2006 it was opened up to anyone with a valid email address. If you haven't joined Facebook due to security concerns, rest assured that the company has made so many improvements that the only security concerns you should have, will be related to your own actions.

A "must" setting for security is this; click Account, Account Settings, Account Security and then check the box that reads "Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible."

Just be mindful that anything you put on Facebook may be seen by others. You can control the security settings for your account and have the ability to limit who can see what, i.e.; everyone, friends only, friends of friends or you only. I have a Facebook add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2010 that allows me to see Facebook information on anyone that sends me an email from the email account that they used to join Facebook, (that is information that they have chosen to share with everyone in their security settings).

Facebook encourages users to import their email contacts in order to make connections with friends. This is a great feature, but be aware, that if you send invitations to email contacts that are not already Facebook users or to people that have already registered with Facebook using a different email address, Facebook will automatically send reminder emails to those people every 30 days! In order to prevent this, from your Facebook home page on the right hand side under "Get Connected", you should click on "Who's not on Facebook - Invite Them Now", then click on "View All Invites". You can then delete those people so that they won't continually get email reminders that you have invited them to join Facebook!

We hope that you found these two tips useful and we hope to see you on Facebook soon. Visit our Facebook page at facebook.com/cookco.

Windows 7 and 64 bit Operating System on Workstations
In our business we utilize tax software programs that change annually. We can't expect our vendor to retroactively update older software programs to work with newer technology, yet we need to utilize the older software far beyond it's one year life span. As a result, we are forced to keep legacy systems in place which can be more costly than one would expect.

Microsoft has made a good effort to allow for backward compatibility issues, but after almost a full year of testing I have to say that it's too early for us to make the transition. For the time being it appears we will continue using the XP and 32 bit operating system on the majority of our workstations. We currently run Widows 7, 64 bit on four stations and XP on the remaining 14.
Windows 7 isn't worth the upgrade unless you go with the 64 bit version, that's where you will see the gain in speed. Moving to Windows 7, 32 bit is for the most part a cosmetic change unless you are using one of the few new technologies.

Cook Launches New High-Speed Wi-Fi Hot Spot at Bara Business Center!
We are pleased to announce the launch of our new Wi-Fi hot spot. We hope that clients using cell phones, ibooks and laptops will find it useful on their visit to our office. The connections are secure so you'll need a user name and password (just ask).

The service was provided by deploying a commercial grade wireless router coupled with our newly upgraded firewall hardware, which enabled us to segregate the wireless network from our local area network completely.

Our Background ...
Imagine a small public accounting firm in Arab, Alabama (population about 7,500) that started in 1957. Specializing in tax return preparation places some very big limitations on your business. Why? Because the tax filing season is only ten weeks long. Most people don't receive the documentation they require to file their tax returns until February 1, and the filing deadline is April 15.

With such a "seasonal business", we were forced to actively seek ways to increase productivity in order to perform the greatest output in a ten week period each year. By the mid 1960's two main frame computers utilizing punch cards replaced 12 typists that were hired on a temporary basis each year.

In the 1970's, we saw some technological advances that sped up our computerized system of preparing tax returns. We were utilizing pre-printed forms in triplicate with layers of carbon paper to produce three copies of each return (a government copy, client copy and file copy). Machines known as burster/decollators were used to separate the copies from the carbon paper. The "personal computer" (a new idea) came along and we welcomed it with open arms.

By the time the 1980's arrived we were replacing the old main frame computers with a Local Area Network (LAN) consisting of a server and several workstations. Our interviewers were recording taxpayer information on input sheets which were passed to data entry clerks (a huge improvement over punch cards). We used Novell software from 1983 for the next twenty-five years, until we pulled the plug on our Novell servers in 2008. We filed tax returns electronically with the IRS in 1989.

Technological advances kicked into high gear in the '90's. By 1993 off the shelf "canned software" was available to replace our "in-house" designed code. Actually, such software was introduced in the '80's, but the quality and features did not meet our standards. Adapting the Lacerte tax software was a tremendous time and money saving step for us. Every person in the office had a desktop computer, not just a few.

No more pre-printed paper forms! The software would print the form at the same time it printed the input data for it. By now we were filing the government copy securely and electronically. We also embraced the internet with open arms.

The year 2000 arrived (Y2K as it was known) and ushered in many more advances. I don't remember how much money we spent on computers and software in 1999 and 2000, but it was way more than we should have. Computer consultants were billing $125 per hour and hardware costs were more than double what they are today.

Well, the last ten years have been good to us, technologically speaking. Today we print our file copy of tax returns to pdf files and store them in a Document Management System. We did away with 119 four drawer file cabinets that contained our "retired files"! It took two people sixteen months to scan all those retired files. We scan current client documents at a rate of 80 pages per minute and are mostly paperless. These documents are more secure, more readily available, more portable and much more expedient to work with.

We routinely communicate with clients by email. Electronic mail has greatly changed the way we do business. Telephone costs have been reduced dramatically and although paper mail activity has been reduced, postage costs have not gone down proportionately. For us, this may be attributable to the IRS and State Departments of Revenue slow adaptation of technology. This coupled with the fact that we still mail those big packages with the taxpayer paper copies of tax returns.

We have walls of books, in fact one of the most complete tax law libraries anywhere. Today all of those tax laws are accessible from the desktop computer. In the '80's from compact discs (CD's), in the '90's from one of our servers and today across the internet.