The board of directors Reckon, Intuit's former Australian distributor, has loosened the conditions for vesting of long-term incentives. The board based its decisions on the fact that Reckon cut its ties with Intuit in 2012 and began marketing products in its own name. It also factored in the decline in license sales as Reckon made its move to the cloud with applications such as Reckon One. Incentives for 2011 to 2013 were allowed to vest even though the target levels of total shareholder return were not reached.

Newly formed Sovos Compliance has acquired Boulder-based ShipCompliant, a compliance and tax software publisher for the alcohol beverage market. Sovos was formed in February when its owner, Vista Equity Partners, welded together TaxWare, Convey Compliance Systems and VAT Resource. We've been talking about the impact of private equity and this shows one battlefield in indirect tax; acquisition of specialized vendors. Sovos and ShipCompliant will integrate their compliance products.

The words "RealWorld Cloud Coming" on the website of the Passport Software home page were a bit jarring. But there they are on the home page at www.pass-port.com. For those who have not been in this field forever, the Passport Business Solutions application is the old RealWorld Classic kept alive and nurtured. Great Plains purchased RealWorld before the death of the dinosaurs, actually in March 2000 after the world did not end with Y2K (although the RealWorld package quickly was killed).