Write-Up Is Dead, Long Live Write-Up

Accounting Technology,  August, 2007  by Wayne Schulz

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For years, the death of write-up services has been predicted by many who felt the labor-intensive service to be too low end to be worthwhile to most CPA firms. These services were thought to be lower-end services easily replaced by accounting software.

Some CPA firms have fled the service, long considered unprofitable and tedious, instead leaving the work to be completed by bookkeepers and much smaller practitioners.

Today, write-up work is alive. And a large part of the new popularity is due to the advent of strong suites of CPA firm software packages. Many CPA firms have embraced write-up in different ways than in the past. Rather than bring back shoeboxes of loose checks and deposit slips, they're more often importing a disk containing accounting software data.

The strong feature set of today's lower-cost accounting programs such as QuickBooks and Peachtree have prompted accountants ...