Are you fully up to date on your professional reading? Our members do not have time to read dozens of accounting, tax and business publications for few items that affect them. So we do it for them. We go through the business and professional media, find the items bookkeepers need to know and give them to members in our monthly newsletter, The General Ledger. Here’s a professional reading we gave members from The CPA Journal, the prestigious publication of the New York State Society of CPAs .

Password protection for sensitive personal and other data is only as good as the password itself. Easily accessed “cracker,” “breaker,” or “recovery” software runs millions of passwords per second through a log-on box. A password of even 6 characters combining numbers, symbols and upper- and lower-case letters can be broken in 5 hours; only numbers, symbols or letters, in minutes.

Your password should: · contain a minimum of 8 characters; · not use any word found in a dictionary (dictionaries in any language can be downloaded to be used in cracking software); · combine numbers, symbols and upper- and lower-case letters; · not include personal information—it’s too easy to obtain a user’s name, address, birthday, and names of relatives. · lock users out of the system after a few tries at the correct password fail (prevents hacking software from trying 1,000s of passwords per second). Lastly, compartmentalize electronic files and allow access only to those authorized to use each file.