There are several important issues raised at the June 2 seminar on the improvement of CPAnywhere:
Payroll service – Vickie Fan CPA and Denise Wong of Fan, Chan CPA & Co. have raised the issue about using CPAnywhere for client payroll service. At the moment, the payroll and MPF functions are done for employees only. I have appointed our manager Oscar Lo as the person in-charge for this development. If we are using the existing system to do the client payroll service, there is a risk involve in term of data security. The best way to do it is to create independent database for each client. That means client can use the time clock input function, leave application, roster but leave the payroll and MPF to the CPA. This is more like an interface modification so we hope we can get it done quickly. The only problem remains with the IRD. Even though all of our IR56 series forms have been properly approved and in use, they need the approval from EACH company that are submitting the form. That means if you have 1 million companies using the electronic service to produce the forms, they will need to go through 1 million time of approval process. Talking about gearing up Hong Kong as the business friendly place! Well, I hope some leaders in the government can change this kind of attitude toward the business community.
Job Status – Josephine Chan of FTW CPA has raised the issue regarding the active notification of the change of the job status. The job assignment function does incorporated the job status progress report. However, this is still in a passive phase. It would certainly be nice to have the system automatically report to manager and partner regarding the certain job status. However, Aki Ho of P & L has the doubt. For example, one of our client has over 10,000 jobs at any time. How many notification through post-it or email can generate? So, the question is how can we restrict the automatic reporting to a particular person in charge of that job. The system is there. All we need to do is to combine that Job Status function to the automatic reporting function. Any ideas?
MYOB data transfer – Candice Tsai of Madison Pacific Trust Limited has asked the question regarding the transfer of the existing accounting record to CPAnywhere so that they can completely replace the MYOB system. This is easy. We can do it and do it really fast. MYOB is a competent system to handle the general ledger. The first time I encountered this software was in a San Francisco book store. They were selling it for US$19.99. Basically, all accounting systems centered around the general ledger. CPAnywhere took a different approach. We believe most accounting transactions should be done automatically when the event happens rather than an after-the-fact system. Because it is a truly real time system, it makes all the financial reports more interesting to users.
Scheduling –Lloyd Hui of Baker Tilly CPA has asked the question regarding how to check the job schedules of the team members when assigning jobs. This is an excellent point. For now, we have the Job Schedule reports. In order to use it, you need to general the report for a particular person or team and then lay it on the table while doing the job assigning function. Why not if we can put a pop up screen button to check the schedule of an employee. We will not let this good idea to pass.
All attendants who came to the seminar can still access to the demo site of CPAnywhere as a regular log in user. I hope we can get more response from them when they explore more about other features of the system.
Summer is hot in Hong Kong. Thank you for bracing the sun to come to the seminar. We are planning to hold more seminars on HR function, particularly on payroll, leave and roster. Please do come and share your thought!
Sincerely,
Harry Tsui CPA