Working virtual or virtually working?

• Author: English, Damien B.M.

You've Seen them on planes, at conferences--maybe even at your kid's Softball game: CPAs who seem to be able to conduct business anywhere, anytime, giving them the freedom to break out of the 9-5 mold of an office. What's their secret? Well, it's a secret no more as the rise of the virtual office is upon us, with it being predicted that more than half of us will be working remotely by the year 2020, according to a Deloitte survey taken at London Business School's Global Leadership Summit in 2014.

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Moreover, with the rising cost of office space, and the continuing demand of the incoming workforce wanting more flexible schedules, it's no surprise that firms across the nation are looking into creating virtual offices to evolve with the times.

CalCPA Members' Take on Virtual

Joseph Emanuele (JE) CRA/ABV/CFF, CFA, ASA, is a principal at Hemming Morse who works remotely from home and also from one of his firm's satellite offices. "I can sene my clients equally from anywhere I can get an adequate internet connection," he says. "The time spent and expense of commuting to an office is a waste. Because of our technology, I'm equally effective when working from home, my office, a client's office, at a conference or even on vacation."

Adds John Lam (JL), H emming Morse IT manager, "Cloud/hosting services are viable and affordable virtual office solutions. Especially for the smaller to mid-size firms."

CPA Greg Burke (GB). former CalCPA chair and Education Foundation president, is not 100% virtual, but his infrastructure is all cloud-based. "I can work from anywhere," he says.

Burke has two, part-time employees, so runs a somewhat small operation, but is pleased with what running as much of his office virtually as he can has done for the business. His transition to virtual took about four months and started when he opened his own practice.

"The benefits have been worth the transition," he says. "Cloud-based is the way things are going. Data handling and data input are more automated now, which frees us up to focus on higher-level, client services. Moreover, I think there's a tremendous security risk in having a server in a local area network. I've heard horror stories about firms being hacked with catastrophic outcomes. The cloud-based/virtual office structure minimizes that because the specialized service providers are using bank grade security."

Scott Hoppe (SH), CPA has gone full monty when it comes to going virtual. He's based in San Francisco and is the owner/principal of his firm. Hoppe Tax, and a board member of CalCPA Education Foundation. He telecommutes full time and employs telecommuting-only colleagues that operate out of California, Florida, Ohio and New Jersey. His company is 100 percent virtual, or "100 percent behind technology," as he puts it.

He says the decision to go virtual...