2016 CES Favorite Find for Accountants
Each January, CES, the largest consumer electronics show in the world is held in Las Vegas, and presents an opportunity for over 3,800 vendors to promote their latest gadgets and showcase their future product announcements. My mission was to cover as much of the more than two million square feet of show space as possible in three days, with the intent of searching out trends and products suited for the accounting profession. While many of the products were futuristic (manned drones, personal robots, and augmented reality visors), the latest laptops, tablets, scanners and Bluetooth devices gave us cause to be excited. While there were quite a few “Cool Tools” that will make it into our gadget session, we wanted to pick out ONE practical and available device (not vaporware!) that could make a difference in your productivity. This year that CES Favorite Find is the Plantronics Voyager Focus UC Bluetooth headset.
The very first thing we liked about this headset was that it could be used with a PC, tablet, and smartphone and easily switch between these devices, replacing multiple individual headsets that we currently have that are optimized for different purposes. If you were listening to a webinar or background music and a call came in to your smartphone, you could quickly cut over to that call. Also, since the system uses Bluetooth v4.1 (with a 150’ working range via the included PC Bluetooth dongle) it also eliminates the cord on my current “wired” headsets that I settled on after a previous poor wireless headset experience.
When you pick up a call it automatically pauses the audio playing in the background (for you music listeners) and resumes it when the call is over. If you take the headset off it will do the same, and start replay when you put it back on; this feature is important in the office when someone absolutely has to interrupt you. If you are not wearing the headset and your phone rings, you can just put on the headset and the Smart Sensors software will automatically transfer the call from your phone. Also, if you just want to mute the headset there is a button to do so, which will also provide audio prompts (mute on, mute off).
My next favorite feature was that the headset is noise cancelling, so it drowns out external office (or airplane) noise while providing reasonably good sound quality (I’m definitely not a music snob). While the “white noise” was not as effective as my dedicated Bose (over the ear) headsets, the Voyager is much lighter than my previous office headset and has a much better microphone. The microphone actually consists of three microphones on the boom, which can be placed on either the left or right side and is small enough that you can take a sip of coffee with it on.
This device comes in a couple of different models with or without the stand, and a travel bag that the earmuffs can fold flat into, which is important for road warriors like me. While the price is listed at $299, there are versions available on Amazon at a lower cost. Overall, we picked this device as our favorite CES find as it combines some great technology to solve a couple of my nagging office problems and is actually available today!
Roman H. Kepczyk, CPA.CITP is the Director of Consulting for Xcentric, LLC and works exclusively with accounting firms to implement today’s leading best practices and technologies incorporating Lean Six Sigma methodologies to optimize firm production workflows. Roman is also the author of “Quantum of Paperless: A Partner’s Guide to Accounting Firm Optimization” which includes the results of the 2015 CPAFMA Paperless Benchmark Survey.