While in a waiting room last week, the cover of Forbes magazine caught my eye. It was entitled “The Death of Cash.” I’ve noticed even the smallest of retailers now have systems to swipe charge and debit cards. Maybe you’ve noticed it too, like the restaurant at the airport where you order your meal on an iPad and then pay for it in the same manner. Books and music are now dispensed through online means with a card number and a PIN number or other security code.
With the advent of the mobile touch-screen and cloud technology, the exchange of money has been reduced to a series of computer transactions. And why not? Your firm and your business clients could use all the help it can get in collecting money.
The Mobile Generation
Consumers have adopted cloud technology at such a rapid pace that accountants have to struggle to keep up. Most individuals have a banking app, whether they just want to take a look at their checkbook register or to use Chase Bank’s QuickDeposit, which offers the ability to deposit a check by snapping a picture with a cell phone. TurboTax implemented the same concept with their Snap Tax mobile app, where W2s and 1099s can be photographed and entered automatically into an individual tax form.
Some firms have responded by offering to take tax documents via email, either scanned or snapped with a cell phone camera. Better yet, the documents could be submitted through an online portal system and then the completed tax return copy could be delivered into that portal. The tax return itself may have a Self-Select PIN from the IRS to act as an electronic signature and be e-filed.
Receipts, Expenses and the Shoebox
A modern form of stuffing a shoebox with receipts is the expense tracking app. These apps are very popular with those who have to travel for a living, including myself.
Some of the best in class are Concur, iXpenselt, Receipts Pro, Smart Receipts and Expensable. You can capture receipts using your cell phone camera before they get lost (along with your luggage in some cases) and enable you to produce an expense report that can be printed, emailed, or submitted to another organization via the cloud. Receipts Pro, for one, is also compatible with Dropbox and Evernote.
Rock Star CPA in Chicago offers a mobile app in which their clients in the entertainment and creative industries track their income and expenses while at home or traveling, and are able to submit them to their CPA firm as well.
Have you ever thought about developing your own app? There is a comprehensive article in the February issue of Journal of Accountancy on how to plan and build one!
Mobile Payments
Collecting money has never been easier. You could choose to have a payment “button” on your website that takes MasterCard, Visa, a debit card, or even PayPal. Quickbooks is finding new ways to appeal to small business owners by offering an easy way to do this. They also offer “paylinks” for social media sites that look like shortened URLs and e-invoices.
Then, there are merchant card-readers that can be attached to the business’s smartphone or tablet. There are too many to list here, but some of the better-known brands include the Square card reader, ROAMpay, GoPayment by Intuit, Verifone Sail and PayPal Here.
Near field communications, or NFC, is a method of exchanging cash with a touch of your mobile device and anything with an NFC chip or tag. Using electromagnetic radio fields, we could one day use our cell phones to pay for groceries, ride the subway, or pay bills at a kiosk. Google Wallet is one of the new applications, but is only available on an Android device. The Blackberry operating systems of 7.0 and up are able to support NFC. More information about NFC can be found here.
Feel free to post your own favorites in the Comments section.
You can read the entire Forbes article here.
You can see David’s Top Tech Gadgets 2012 on Pinterest here.