Master Payroll Service
We are going to launch a new service called Master Payroll Service.
This is a 24/7 platform for CPA firms to serve their clients on payroll and other HR matters.
We will send out notices about the detail of the service as well as the seminar information.
If you are interested in expanding your business into the payroll and HR areas, please do come to the seminar for more information.
Thank you!
Client Input File
We are working on using the Excel file to import and export client file information.
This is going to be a standard feature rather than the present custom data conversion task.
On the imTalk progress, we have already tested the speed in sending and receiving instant text messages using the imTalk. We hope our users as well as the public can use the secured imTalk for their private “conversation” rather than using the unsecured US dominated communication platforms.
June 2 Seminar Recap
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 involved 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 towards 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
OT on CTO
OT Compensating Time-off-
Thanks to Joyce of Union Alpha. She had gracefully corrected our error on OT calculation for CTO (compensating time-off).
This is what she just say, “Overtime is compensated either by leave or overtime payment and the compensation method is to be determined by the Directors.
When overtime is compensated by payment, it is paid monthly in arrears on submission of approved Overtime Claim Form. The overtime rate (“OT factor”) is calculated at 150% of the hourly pay of the staff for each hour of the overtime worked. The formula for calculating overtime payment is shown as below:
Monthly Base Salary x no. of overtime hours worked x OT factor
Total monthly working hours (i.e. 180 hours per month)
When overtime is compensated by leave, the overtime rate (“OT factor”) is calculated at 125% of the staff for each hour of the overtime worked.
The formula for calculating overtime compensation by leave is shown as below:
No. of overtime hours worked x OT factor
Total working hours per day (i.e. 7.5 hours per day)
On behalf of our CPAnywhere users, a big Thank You to Joyce of Union Alpha for your contribution.
Miscellaneous charge costing entry
In order to keep track of the cost of each miscellaneous charge item-
We have created a separate function called Miscellaneous charge costing.
User can match the miscellaneous charge item to the cost in order to find out the profit.
We have also created a corresponding journal entry template for automatic accounting entry.
Journal Entry Transaction Date added
In order to increase the flexibility-
We have added an extra Date definition to Invoice Maintenance, we called it JE Transaction Date.
Normally, when generating invoices, the system would take the invoice date as the JE date. However, some users would like to have an option to define the JE date.
Therefore, we have added an extra date field JE Transaction for selection.
The individual invoice would still show the invoice date on invoice but for bookkeeping purpose, the corresponding journal entries would use the JE transaction date as the journal entry date.
If your company wants this option rather than the automatic one, you need to set it in Company Maintenance setting to activate this feature.
Management Report
Thank you for coming to the last seminar on Dossier Control Sheet.
At the seminar, we asked the following question:
“Please name the most important report you always want in your practice?”.
Ms. Suzanne Liu of S. Liu & Co., CPA had named the Weekly Job Status Report. Miss Dylus Wong of Fernhill said that she would definitely want a “Billable items report” that can list all items that need to be billed but not yet billed. CPAnywhere already has the pro form invoicing function to list the items that need to be billed and the Executive widget to display the amount but we do not have that billable report. That prompted us to develop this special report soon after coming back from the seminar. We are happy to report to you that the Billable Items Report is now completed and we will present it in the upcoming seminar.
Enclosed please find the following sample reports in Excel format generated by CPAnywhere:
l Work in progress report
l Profitability report
l Dossier control sheet
l Assignment Activity Record
*We have selected these reports because they are the most popular ones for practice management purpose.
We would like to invite you and your partners to come to the seminar on January 27, 2015 (Tuesday) to study the various management reports for lawyers, CPA and company secretaries to use.
At the seminar, we will discuss each report in detail with live data input in CPAnywhere to see the intended and unintended results.
Since you have those reports on hand, you can open those report and compare them with the ones that you are currently using. You are welcome to give us comment at the seminar on how to improve those reports.
It is our intention to present the practical use of CPAnywhere on operational level. We hope the people who come to our seminar will be benefited from our specific problem solving approach rather than just another marketing pitch.
If you are in charge of your professional practice you surely would like to know what is going on.
We hope the management reports that we are presenting here can help:
| Title | : | Study of the various management reports for CPA, Lawyer and Company Secretaries |
| Date | : | 27 January 2015 (Tuesday) |
| Time | : | 11:00 a.m. to 13:00 pm. (2 hours) |
| Venue | : | Room 408-409, Fortress Tower, 250 Kings Road, North Point, Hong Kong (Next to Fortress Hill Station, B Exit) |
| Seats | : | 20 |
| Reservation | : | Reserve a seat(s) |
| For | : | Partner and Manager of CPA firm, Professional Service firm and Law firm |
| Cost | : | Free |
| Speakers | : | Aki Ho, System Consultant; Harry Tsui, CPA |
We are planning for future seminars on the powerful HR features of CPAnywhere.
Some suggested we should talk more about the payroll functions. Other would like to see the leave management functions.
If you have any suggestion, please let us know.
Sincerely,
Harry Tsui CPA
Dossier Control Sheet
In our last seminar on “Keeping Track of all Letters from/to the IRD/CR”-
Ms. Jess Cheng and Mr. Vince Chiu of Cheng & Cheng CPA have gracefully shared their experiences with the attendees. Here, we would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation for their wonderful participation in this unique user experience sharing session.
We would like to invite you to our coming seminar “Job Assignment Control Sheet”.
This feature was introduced by Mr. Eric Mayer, Solicitor of Thomas, Mayer & Associates, a French law firm with offices in Hong Kong and Paris. This report is their main tool to monitor all the money matters about a job assignment. User can just have a quick but comprehensive look of a job’s status in a second to know what is going on. This report is great for partners and managers who devote most of their time on client development but would like to know what is going on about all the on-going jobs.
The beauty of this report is to capture almost everything about a job so that partners and managers can just look at one report and know it all. The information presented here are all automatically captured from the system and updated instantly whenever the data changes. It is good for time billing as for lawyers as well as for fixed billing as for CPA and Company Secretary.
The information captured here include:
- Fee
- Advance and deposit
- Disbursement
- Misc. charges
- Issued invoices
- Billable amount
- Pending and unbillable amounts
- Trust deposit and withdrawal
- Time charged and spent
Enclosed please find the two sample reports, one for fixed fee and the other for time charge, for your information. Even if you are not using CPAnywhere, you will get a lot of insight into the “new” way of doing things. In the French version of CPAnywhere we called this report “Dossier Control Sheet”. That really sound French to our ears! Thank you Eric for your wonderful contribution.
As usual, we will prepare the CPE record for those who needs it. Please be sure to give us the full name and company when doing the registration. The space is limited because we want to keep a cozy and comfortable environment for participants for question and answer. In our last seminar, the seats were full within a few hours.
So please do call Mr. Aki Ho at 2521-3110 as soon as possible if you are interested in this great tool from Paris.
Sincerely,
Harry Tsui CPA
“Letter to/from IRD/CR”
As promised, we are going to conduct a seminar on the use of the correspondence management system for IRD, CR and other government letters.
The main functions are:
1. To keep track of all the extensions, deadline and payments to cut down the penalties.
2. Tie all correspondences to related job.
3. To be able to charge time to letters handling.
4. To view all outstanding letters in the CRM subsystem on mobile phone.
5. To keep a copy of the letter in the folder for review and record keeping purpose.
Today, we are fortunate to have Ms. Jesse Cheng, manager of Cheng and Cheng CPA, to present to you their experience in how to handle over ten thousands active letters at any given time of the day by their over 250 staffs.
They are also the initiator of this letters management system five years ago. We are grateful of their willingness to share their extensive experience to the professional community.
Mr. Cheng CPA, the initiator, has ample of working experience with the IRD. This is an one time opportunity to know the secret of how the IRD works and we surely don’t want you to miss it.
Again as a reminder, we will not repeat this seminar in the near future, unlike other seminars on billing, accounting and HRMS topics.
“Automation”
Since over half of the CPAnywhere users are CPA firms, we need to consider how to further improve the system in order to cut down their manpower by implementing the following automation process:
1. Audit procedure documentation
2. Bank confirmation.
In order to do that, we will add a pull-down list of audit procedures to speed up the works preformed and status.
In bank confirmation, auditor can print out the bank confirmation based on client’s bank account management section and discrepancy if any.
The most up-to-date bank information can be transferred from CSA.
We hope all these “little” things can help auditors to perform better and faster in their work.