"I think the challenge is going to be moving the market faster," says Jennifer Warawa, VP for Sage Accountant Solutions. But beyond vendors trying to educate accountants to use these products, the more pervasive use of the web marks a big change from 10 years ago. The Internet changes the relationship between accountants and clients, she says. And the clients themselves are more often asking for services beyond the traditional tax and accounting offerings.

Sage View draws data from accounting packages into Sage financial applications. But the big difference appears to be that the earlier generation of products focused on letting users manipulate scenarios—they could introduce changes into financial reports and see the impact of those changes. View produces a dashboard that enables accountants to assess a client's key performance indicators. And those are tailored to the client's business, Warawa says.

"I picture someone at a firm getting to work in the morning and, they go into one dashboard," she says and continues the accountant notices, "This client has 10 alerts. They are going to run out of cash before payday. I need to look into that and give them a call."

Much of Warawa's message is one that practitioners have heard many times—traditional services have become commoditized. But she notes that technology now, instead of simply speeding up work, is now changing it, and clients are demanding more advisory services.

Results from a survey soon to be released by Sage show 25 percent of business respondents want help in work on business strategy and 21 percent assistance on putting together a dashboard.