Department of Sour grapes

Paul Warner’s article “An Assessment of Accounting Portals” (CPAJ, December 2001) [an overview of portals in general and an apples-to-apples comparison of eight accounting portals at that point in time] provided valuable insights into this valuable professional resource, but the discussion of My Accounting Portal (www.myaccountingportal.com) overlooked many of its unique features.

My Accounting Portal, which was awarded Best of the Web by Forbes magazine in February 2001, adds the best features of consumer portals of such giants as Yahoo and Excite: extensive customization, vast consumer and investment resources, and a powerful array of portal tools and modules—along with 1,000 pages of proprietary content, including almost 100 business and personal financial planning guides, as well as the reference tools and resources of the traditional accounting portal.

The unique features include “windows” similar to the Windows operating system that, depending on what you want on your portal desktop, you can select, deselect, modify, minimize, and position wherever you want. You can even drag and drop a window from your My Accounting Portal desktop to your computer desktop.

You can customize your portal desktop to show only what you want, with news feeds, research material, and other resources at your fingertips. And you can change the layout and design at any time.

The portal has an accounting website window that offers general and business news, links to more than two million websites in every conceivable area, a reference library, a stock portfolio window, and a choice of dozens of other windows.

The Personal Information Manager (PIM) contains notes, calendar, task list, and address book sections. You can access the PIM wherever you can access the Internet and it can serve as a mini-intranet.

The office tools range from basic telephone directories to collaboration tools for sharing information electronically, data storage and online backup, procurement management to control spending and track purchases, fax notification and retrieval from the nearest fax machine, and free long-distance phone calls (including international). Users can send e-mail through the portal’s free e-mail service. The portal also offers more than 50 financial calculators for both business and personal use. Users can set up their bookmarks at the portal for instantaneous access to their favorite websites, and they can set My Accounting Portal as their start page.

The CPA Journal is broadly recognized as an outstanding, technical-refereed publication aimed at public practitioners, management, educators, and other accounting professionals. It is edited by CPAs for CPAs. Our goal is to provide CPAs and other accounting professionals with the information and news to enable them to be successful accountants, managers, and executives in today's practice environments.