For nonprofit software vendors, along with their customers and pretty much everyone else, the focus in 2014 is on relationships. These vendors have had to expand their view beyond applications that are traditionally accounting focused into solutions that are more about people, connections, and service.

Software vendors rarely agree with each other. But these days, nonprofit solution providers can't help but share a common goal of moving their nonprofit clients to the cloud*. For many nonprofits as well as for many other organizations in our post-recession world, the cloud is seen as a way of simplifying IT support requirements, reducing costs, and enabling smaller (often remote) staffs to get more accomplished.

You can't fully appreciate the complexity of a concept until you attempt to explain it to someone else. Over the course of the past year, I had just such an opportunity while trying to explain U.S. rules for depreciating fixed assets to a very bright individual from France. When we compared notes regarding every other element of accounting, we were happy to discover more similarities than differences between the two countries.