Recent research commissioned by CCH has revealed that the majority of SME owners would consider changing their accountant if they failed to keep pace with cloud technology.

The research involved over 1,000 small businesses and 200 accountants from across Australia.

However, according to the study, the perceived barriers to adopting new technology among small business suppliers' such as the time to learn new systems and the fear of changing existing processes are slowing progress and putting businesses at risk.

One of the key industries where this slow uptake of new technology was most prevalent and therefore potentially hazardous, was accounting services. Read more…

Embedding a video into a website used to be a real challenge in the early days of the web. You had different file formats to choose from, some viewers might not have had the proper software installed to see the video and bandwidth was still limited as many people were still on dialup connections.

Nowadays things are a lot different. Internet connection speeds are a lot faster and just about anyone can watch a video over the internet on their desktops, laptops, tablets or smartphones.

There are still plenty of different video file formats to choose from but one of the most popular ways to view video is via YouTube.  YouTube makes it incredibly easy to upload and share videos as you simply upload a video in any recognisable file format and it will automatically produce it in a single format which is compatible with most of today's web capable devices.
YouTube is also an incredibly useful marketing tool. With so many businesses starting to ride the wave of social media marketing, YouTube and other similar video sharing sites can sometimes be forgotten.

Read more…

The first CCH Roadshow of the year starts next week and we want you to join us as we present CCH iFirm - the most comprehensive software suite your firm needs to ensure sustained, strong and manageable growth.
At the events you will discover how iFirm will

• Save you time and money.
• Allow you to offer more services to your clients.
• Reduce administration requirements and create efficiencies.

We're hitting 14 cities in New Zealand and at the events we are presenting iFirm in detail and the benefits it is delivering to accounting firms across the country. Read more…

If you are looking for ways to drive more traffic to your website by enhancing your search engine rankings, there are a number of simple methods that can be followed to improve your results.

Globally, Google accounts for 83% of all searches with the rest spread across others such as Bing, Yahoo and a number of other smaller search engines.  So when it comes to looking for ways to improve your site, it is best to ask the king.

There is some fairly detailed information in their guidelines on the best practices for your site.  CCH take care of the technical side of things - the areas you can manage yourself relate to improving the content, titles, descriptions and url names within your site, as well as organising third party sites to link to your own. Read more…

What is Google Places?

'Google Places' is basically Google's localised business directory - Google's own statistics show 97% of consumers search for local businesses online, which makes having your business listed on Google Places an important part of your online strategy. It is also free so there is no good reason not to submit your listing.

How Google Places works 

When a search is made on a phrase that either contains a location name, e.g. 'Accountants Christchurch', Read more…

The development team has been working away since we've been back and the first update for iFirm in 2013 was made overnight on Wednesday 9 January. Updates were made to four areas - Contacts, Practice Manager, Client Accounting and Intranet.

The release went smoothly and we haven't encountered any technical issues.

Read more…

2012 has travelled amazingly fast for me, and I'm sure for the team at CCH Collaborative Solutions too. We started out in January, under the Acclipse brand, with big plans for growth in both product development and in new iFirm users. If anybody had told me back then about the challenges and opportunities that would present themselves, I wouldn't have believed them!

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With Christmas just around the corner, the team @CCH Collaborative Solutions thanks all our clients for their support throughout 2012 and wishes them all the best for the new year.
We've enjoyed working hard through the year and the team is now gearing up for a well-deserved break this summer.

Read more…

In April we first launched our mobile website product to iFirm Web Manager clients, and based on user feedback, we have recently made several enhancements to the product.

We will be releasing these changes on Tuesday, September 18th. Read on for details.

• You can now easily re-order pages within your mobile site.
• Swiping between pages has been replaced with a menu that allows you to navigate from any page, to any other page.
• The location map has been improved by increasing the standard size, and allowing for situations when a visitor does not want to 'allow their location' via GPS.
• Splash page for choosing between mobile/full site now includes your personalised branding.

Click here to find out more about the benefits of a mobile site, or get in touch to arrange one for your firm. Read more…

Something that is easily overlooked and sometimes not understood is adding optimised images to your website. In this post, I'll show you how to create images for your website that look good and download fast.
Read more…