Top 12 Reasons Why Mike Block CPA is the Best QuickBooks CPA

by David Citron, Tech Writer

Guest Blogger

I have known Mike Block for more than 30 years, since he was working on the Proposition I "no new taxes without voter approval" constitutional amendment and personal computers were a few years in the future. I knew him when he got in "on the ground floor" with QuickBooks and Intuit in the days of 10-key calculators and columnar pads. So I know this stuff and remember when much of it was happening. (I even picked out Mike's domain, BlockTax.com, back in about 1997.)

Here are the top 12 reasons why Mike Block CPA is the Best QuickBooks CPA:

1. Mike Block CPA was a very "early adopter" of Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax/ProSeries -- as soon as Intuit released them. Mike then spent 11 years as a real Intuit (QuickBooks) insider, earning praise from people like Intuit CEO Brad Smith, who said "You’re fantastic Mike. Absolutely fantastic!" Mike has always stood up for users and was not afraid to speak out, prompting former Intuit CEO Steve Bennett to say "Keep raising hell when Intuit does something wrong!"

2. Mike has been an Intuit Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor since the program's inception. (Non-certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors are not tested. They simply pay Intuit for the title. CPA exams do not even cover QuickBooks.) Mike encouraged Intuit to upgrade Certified ProAdvisor tests to CPA standards.

3. Mike Block wrote the first non-Intuit employee QuickBooks blog on the Intuit website. Mike was featured three times on the Intuit website as the Intuit QuickBooks Ask the Expert, mainly regarding Speeding up QuickBooks. Mike Block is THE QuickBooks Errors Expert. On 7/28/11 Google had 272,000 links to web pages with QuickBooks errors and Mike Block or BlockTax.

4. Mike has been a leading alpha and beta tester throughout Intuit's history:

• Mike won the #1 Top Tester prizes for pre-release testing of QuickBooks 6 and 99. (For 99, he had 412 points, compared to 215 for the #2 tester. Intuit no longer tracks test points, at Mike's suggestion, because he felt his results discouraged other testers.)

• Mike's repeated TurboTax ProSeries beta tests included the year when he was the first and only tester, due to his direct contact with Intuit's CEO.

• Mike was the first alpha tester of the ProSeries scan and fill program.

5. Mike Block is a charter member of Intuit QuickBooks and Tax Advisory Councils. He requested the creation of two new Intuit websites. See How Should Intuit Change? Two web pages from Blocktax.com are now included in the Intuit QuickBooks Community web library.

6. Mike Block popularized the idea of QuickBooks add-ons (a term he coined) and got Intuit to go from being actively hostile to QuickBooks add-ons to making them their #1 company goal. There are now nine million web links to QuickBooks add-ons. Some are sure to save you time and money, while increasing accuracy, so you may not outgrow QuickBooks. Mike even got the Intuit CEO to push a bug fix that broke a friend's QuickBooks add-on. This took less than 5 days (counting the weekend and the friend's tests), during the week before Christmas.

7. Mike has provided more than 10,000 mainly QuickBooks newsgroup and forum answers, in the biz.comp.accounting Internet newsgroup, his blog, on the Intuit web site, and elsewhere. Mike got Intuit to participate in tech-support backed user-to-user forums, for faster and better QuickBooks answers, with 14% fewer total employees.

8. Mike is the founder and co-chairman of South Florida QuickBooks Meetup, the oldest and second largest QuickBooks user group.

9. In 2004, Mike provided to Intuit a number of time-saving ideas regarding banks and credit cards, which have not yet been implemented:

• Automatically download all bank, credit card and other financial institution account transactions with one click, instead of making users wait on each monthly download from each account. (Quicken does this now.)

• Let users automatically schedule downloads monthly, weekly, daily or nightly, as desired.

• Use the QuickBooks - Dun & Bradstreet relationship (a credit application for QuickBooks) so users do not have to enter most account information when setting up QuickBooks or adding new account downloads. D&B has lots of information that users could see, select, and import instead.

• Instead requiring a wait for each result, Quickbooks would test bank, credit card, and financial institution login information that users provide overnight.

10. Mike has been featured in news stories about accounting and accounting software:

• CNET Intuit products "phone home" more often than you may like   regarding user outrage re the 2000 version of QuickBooks, which forced users to pay an additional fee for payroll tax updates for each individual company file.

• Accounting Technology Magazine cover, Secrets of Outsourcing (Accounting Today website).

• PC Magazine cover story cover story, Online and On the Money.

• Business Week story, How Software Services Stack Up.

11. Mike Block has very extensive experience preparing federal, state and local tax returns in many states, for small and large companies, as well as fighting related tax exams and extra tax proposed.

12. Mike Block 's civic involvement has helped improve Florida government, clean up fraud, and cut taxes:

• Mike was honored by the Florida State Board of Accountancy, which said "The people of Florida owe you a debt of gratitude" for his work on uncovering IGBE, a major ponzi scheme.

• Mike was elected Port Everglades commissioner in 1982, and served until 1984. He gave back his salary.

• As Tax Cap petition leader, Mike changed the Florida Constitution, election laws and national petition practices. He successfully argued a tax limitation petition that he wrote, before the Florida Supreme Court.

• Mike gave key election law and petition testimony to a Federal District Court. Colorado's Attorney General called Buckley v. American Constitutional Law Foundation, "one of the most important First Amendment cases decided in this decade" before losing in the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Mike led the effort to get Florida Senator Lawton Chiles to vote for the Balanced Budget Amendment. Chiles then said, “Now get Block off my back,” when his vote change almost passed this badly needed Amendment.

• Mike served three years on the Florda Bar Association Grievance Committee.

 This is only a partial list of Mike's credentials, so it is an understatement to say that these are the credentials of the best QuickBooks CPA and the best Xero CPA.

 Please contact Mike Block CPA, the best QuickBooks-Xero CPA now, for a free initial review and QuickBooks help.