air newsletter - august 2012
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AIR Newsletter - August 2012TRANSCRIPT
August 2012
FACE I.T.____________________________________________________________
Spotlight on Your Bank Account... Yes, YOUR Bank Account
I.T. LEADERSHIP____________________________________________________________
ERP Software Implementations - Consider among the “7 Habits” to Ensure Success
Letter from PartnerFINANCIAL SYSTEMS - ACHILLES HEEL, OR STRATEGIC ASSET? COME FIND OUT!
YOUR ACCOUNTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESOURCE NEWSLETTER
Contents
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PARTNER LETTER2 F INANCIAL SYSTEMS – ACHILLES HEEL , OR STR ATEGIC
ASSE T? COME F IND OUT!You probably know – either from successes achieved, or from pains experienced – that your business’ financial and information systems can be either a strategic asset, or your Achilles heel. Simply put: decisions, analyses and strategic planning rely on having the right information in the hands of the right people, at the right time.
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FACE I.T.3 SPOTLIGHT ON YOUR BANK ACCOUNT. . . YES, YOUR
BANK ACCOUNTThere’s a race occurring daily and it’s as competitive as any competition imaginable. What’s at stake you ask? Your bank account. Cybercriminals are hard at work, chipping away at any form of protection you or your bank can throw at them.
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I.T. LEADERSHIP5 ERP SOF T WARE IMPLEMENTAT IONS - CONSIDER AMONG THE
“7 HABITS” TO ENSURE SUCCESSA continuation from last month: CFO’s, you are well aware of the emotional response that the letters “ERP” can bring to executives and board members.
August 2012
1 | SingerLewak August 2012
August 2012 SingerLewak | 2
PA R T N E R L E T T E R
FINANCIAL SYSTEMS – ACHILLES HEEL, OR STRATEGIC ASSET? COME FIND OUT!BY BOB GREEN, CPA.CITP | PARTNER AND PRACTICE [email protected]
Hello, friends and colleagues.
You probably know – either from successes achieved, or from pains experienced – that your busi-ness’ financial and information systems can be either a strategic asset, or your Achilles heel. Sim-ply put: decisions, analyses and strategic planning rely on hav-ing the right information in the hands of the right people, at the right time. It can, and does, hap-pen. It just takes commitment, time, and mindful execution. This is the focus of our upcom-ing CFO Essentials Roundtable
in-person sessions, in September 2012 in the Los Angeles and San Jose areas.
If you’re a CFO, CEO or Corpo-rate controller, I invite you to join us for an educational event where you’ll be with your peers, and where you’ll learn from (and col-laborate with) our ERP advisory team and a panel full of strong nationally-recognized thought leaders and CFO’s. I’ll be moder-ating this event, and promise that the topics and interaction among panel and audience will be very interesting. Additionally, we’ll have a nice cocktail and network-ing session to accompany this seminar.
To register, e-mail [email protected] or call 877.754.4557 ext. 5137.
The rest of our newsletter in-cludes:
•NEW section, called “FACE I.T.” – where we’ll bring you up to date on current technologies, front and center. We’ll start having local workshops in our offices on these topics, too, so stay tuned for announcements.
•Cloud software educational sessions; and
•The continuation of our series ERP Software Implementa-tions – Consider among the “7 Habits” to Ensure Success
Have a good rest of the month!Decisions, analyses and strategic planning rely
on having the right information in the hands of the right people, at the
right timeBOB GREEN CAN BE REACHED AT
[email protected] OR 818.999.3924
3 | SingerLewak August 2012
There’s a race occurring daily and it’s as competitive as any compe-tition imaginable. What’s at stake you ask? Your bank account. Cybercriminals are hard at work, chipping away at any form of protection you or your bank can throw at them.
It’s all in the numbers...the bad guys get as many attempts as they want and the bank only has to fail once before millions can be lost and just as many accounts are compromised. The attack-ers have the advantage, and they know it.
Think you’re too small of a fish to be a target? New data suggests that cyber attacks aimed at small businesses have doubled over the past six months. According to Symantec, 36% of all targeted attacks during the last six months were directed at businesses with 250 or fewer employees.
How are they doing it? With your help! Whether it’s a website you visit or an email attachment you’ve opened, the Internet is littered with botnet-creating, information-stealing Trojans. A
Trojan is a small program that first infects your computer and then sends information from infected computers to remote servers.
When thousands of copies of a Trojan have been installed on computers all over the Internet, you get a network of machines under the remote control of a cybercriminal — known as a botnet. The reason this method has proven to be so successful for the bad guys is that the owners of the infected machines usually aren’t even aware that anything wrong is happening.
One recent story on how quickly things can go awry occurred on July 10th when crooks who’d broken into the computers of a fuel supplier in southern Geor-gia attempted to transfer $1.67
million out of the company’s accounts. When that failed, they put through a fraudulent payroll batch totaling $317,000, which the victim’s bank allowed. Shortly after the dust settled, the victimized company hired an outside forensics firm to investi-gate, and found that the trouble started on July 9, when the firm’s controller clicked a link embed-ded in an image in an email designed to look as though it was sent by the U.S. Postal Service.
Criminals are using these botnets to perform a whole slew of mali-cious internet activities. Whether it’s mounting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or sending out spam emails, like anyone else, they’re after the money. Banking Trojan botnets
F A C E I . T .
SPOTLIGHT ON YOUR BANK ACCOUNT... YES, YOUR BANK ACCOUNTBY RICK MARK | SERVICE AREA [email protected]
Think you’re too small of a fish to be a target? New data suggests that cyber attacks aimed at small businesses have doubled over the past six months.
August 2012 SingerLewak | 4
are used specifically to snag login credentials to online bank ac-counts and payment processors such as PayPal.
While banks are constantly refin-ing online account security by coming up with new methods for authenticating users, there are still steps you can take as well. Getting to know what’s coming into your network is one thing, but what’s being sent out of it is another. Many of these botnets report from very specific and known areas of the world and internet addresses. Having a fire-wall block incoming traffic can’t help when a Trojan is injected into a system. Most networks do not filter proactively or on a regu-
lar basis, for outgoing traffic and connections to the botnet servers.
In business, it’s often about the bottom line. There are crimi-nals out there trying to attack yours….what are you doing to protect it? If you have concerns about security threats in gen-
eral, and want more information about how to check your network for these threats, and then how to effectively ‘curb the trojan appetite’, email us at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help.
While banks are constantly refining online account security by coming up with new methods for authenticating users, there are still steps you can take
as well.
RICK MARK CAN BE REACHED AT [email protected]
OR 818.999.3924
5 | SingerLewak August 2012
A continuation from last month: CFO’s, you are well aware of the emotional response that the let-ters “ERP” can bring to execu-tives and board members. The response is often not pleasant. That does not have to be the case. If there is one thing we can con-firm from our years of experience with ERP selection and imple-mentation project management, it is that more often than not successes are assured from ERP upgrades/projects from deploying a number of strategies.
1. “Begin with the end in mind” strategy (thank you Steven Covey). This sounds simple, but it takes strategic leadership and mindful management of an ERP upgrade project team’s activities to achieve. Simply, when you take on an ERP upgrade, we strongly recommend that the leader-ship or steering committee first develop key objectives as to what is to be achieved, and how success of these objectives will be measured. Then, more specifics need to be developed re: what the “end” will look like, from a reporting and
process improvement perspec-tive. And, consider the specific information needs and data fields that will be critical for capture in the ERP solution, as well as how they will be used in assessment of the busi-ness’ performance.
2. “CRITICAL Requirements” strategy. In order to provide the software solution vendors a clear and appropriate pic-ture of your business, and the priorities that you face techno-logically, your business process “owners” must prioritize their software functional require-ments. This is not easy – but it is critical to getting an ERP implementation focused on what matters most. For ex-ample, your operations man-ager oversees the scheduling of personnel onto work-related projects. Their process involves
many activities – but be sure to convey to the software vendor those processes that are both critical to the success of the operation AND those that require automation aid – such as “assessing staff schedule availability and skillset for the required project” as opposed to less critical process activi-ties, such as “confirm that the PTO/vacation schedule is ac-curate”. Get the point? Soft-ware vendors want to know the critical matters that, with automation aid, can make your business more effective. They don’t want to know everything that your busi-ness does, today, down to the minutia. The traditional term used regarding what you want automated, “Requirements”, in our view, should really be called “Critically Important Software Functionality”.
These are but a few of many things that we recommend people consider when taking on a critical ERP upgrade project.
I . T . L E A D E R S H I P
ERP SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATIONS – CONSIDER AMONG THE “7 HABITS” TO ENSURE SUCCESSBY BOB GREEN, CPA.CITP | PARTNER AND PRACTICE [email protected]
BOB GREEN CAN BE REACHED AT [email protected]
OR 818.999.3924
SEPTEMBER 20SILICON VALLEY
SEPTEMBER 27LOS ANGELES
As part of our CFO Essentials Roundtable series, please join us for a spirited panel discussion focused on what it takes to get solid information systems in
place - why it’s important and how to build systems that deliver ROI and provide a competitive advantage.
PRESENTERS:Seth Fineberg, Technology Editor, Accounting Today
Bill Sutman, CFO, formerly with Relativity MediaMark Linden, CFO, Intacct Software
Jim Hart, Manager - Software Selection Expert, SingerLewakBob Green, CPA.CITP, Partner and Practice Leader, SingerLewak ERMS - Moderator
For more information, please visit www.SingerLewak.com/news.
W W W.SINGERLE WAKSYSTEMS.COM
BOB GREEN [email protected]
818.999.3924 ext.4659
J IM HART [email protected]
818.999.3924 ext.4656
RICK MARK [email protected]
818.999.3924 ext.4623
SingerLewak is a leading regional accounting services firm in California with offices in Los Angeles, Orange County, Woodland Hills, Monterey Park, San Diego, Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Serving California since 1959, SingerLewak has established a reputation for excellence as professionals with unparalleled expertise in the Accounting and Management Consulting industry. Providing the services of a large firm with a blended environment of practices, industry specializations and particular attention to hands-on service, SingerLewak continues to demonstrate leadership and industry growth year-over-year. Our client relationship approach and industry excellence is renowned.
We are nationally recognized as active community and professional services partners, working among many sectors of the business world. Our core services deliver results whether it’s auditing, accounting, entrepreneurial business services, tax preparation, business manage-ment, SEC filings, transactions, enterprise risk manage-ment, forensic accounting, business valuation, litigation support, or consulting.
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