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Website
of the Month: Practitioners Publishing Company
By
Susan B. Anders
NOVEMBER 2005 - Practitioners
Publishing Company (PPC), part of the Thomson family of
companies, provides a variety of accounting practitioner
materials. While its website, ppc.thomson.com, is geared
toward marketing the company’s products and communicating
with customers, many excellent free resources are of interest
to professionals and students.
PPC’s
website is organized around its product lines and quick
links to related companies. The homepage is designed with
a left-side index for the main product groupings: accounting
and auditing, tax compliance and planning, consulting, practice
management, and CPE/training. The center presents a text
box for each product group, with links to two or three highlighted
items. The right side includes customer help functions and
the results of a recent poll question. A horizontal menu
bar at the top of the homepage provides links to related
companies, such as Quickfinder and MicroMash, personalized
webpages for PPC customers, and the site index. The main
pages for each product line mimic the homepage in appearance.
More-specific resources are delegated to the main pages
for the product groupings. For example, the accounting and
auditing homepage contains a drop-down menu that includes
accounting, audit and attest, compilation and review, and
nonprofit organizations. It also offers “more options,”
which include the latest AICPA and FASB developments and
downloads and updates. The center of the main product pages
includes featured products, news and views, and five-minute
updates.
Navigation
on PPC’s website is easy. Some links open in separate
windows. Some resources can be accessed by multiple routes
and others cannot, but the organization of the website is
fairly logical. One useful feature is the option on HTML
documents to save, e-mail, or make a clean printout of the
document.
Free
Resources
While
some resources are accessible only by customers, many current
materials are free. The PPC homepage features free resources,
providing text boxes highlighting online demos and quick
tours, e-practice aids, and tax advice rules. The product
line main pages also include links to free articles on timely
issues and other topic-specific materials. PPC also offers
free CPE for beta-testing its courses via the CPE/training
homepage. Its online demos and quick tours offer short videos
and PowerPoint presentations that demonstrate PPC’s
accounting and tax software products as well as the e-tools
and e-practice aids and sample engagement letters, among
others.
Accounting
and Tax Resources
Free
newsletters and articles on the accounting and auditing
homepage address current matters. At the time of this review,
the topics included Hurricane Katrina, the latest SSARS
pronouncements, EITF issues, and disclosure checklist updates.
Additionally, payroll withholding tables and a list of recent
FASB, AICPA, GASB, and PCAOB documents and effective dates
are available in PDF format.
As
year-end tax planning and a new compliance season approach,
tax preparers can find excellent up-to-date free resources
on PPC’s website. A textbox on the homepage links
users to two PPC Tax Action Memos concerning recent AICPA
and IRS Circular 230 rules for written tax advice and covered
opinions. The tax compliance and planning homepage offers
free articles on Hurricane Katrina effects and the increase
in the IRS standard mileage rate, among others. A handy
updated quick-access federal tax data sheet presents 2003
through 2005 standard deductions, personal and dependent
exemptions, tax brackets, and many other amounts. The PPC
product catalog offers a complete sample of the PPC Tax
Action Bulletin which, at the time of this review, included
a sample of year-end client letters and a tax action memo
on Schedule M-3.
Susan
B. Anders, PhD, CPA, is an associate professor of
accounting at St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure,
N.Y. |