The Passionate Accountant
On Sunday I attended the annual meeting of a church in a well to do part of Toronto where I am not a member. The person in charge of fundraising got up and said that the central church had not …
On Sunday I attended the annual meeting of a church in a well to do part of Toronto where I am not a member. The person in charge of fundraising got up and said that the central church had not …
Sometimes my job can be so gratifying. One of the accounting staff came into my temporary office today saying those immortal words, “Where have you been all my life? I have just entered a stack of wire transfers. In our …
AccountingWeb just published the results of a survey by their British counterpart that should be read by Canadian accountants interested in technology. While in spirit accountants might like to get involved with e-business, the reality of their current knowledge and …
I’m now officially a member of the blogging crew at AccountingWeb. You can find my first post at http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/bill_kennedy_blog.html on sales analysis using Excel Pivot Charts. AccountingWeb is targeted at the American accounting market, so I will continue with this …
Did you hear the one about the rogue trader who cost a French bank two years worth of profits? These days, it’s nothing new. We seem to hear about people routinely circumventing companies’ control systems and causing an uproar, whether …
On page B5 of today’s Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper is an announcement by UBS Investment Bank. It caught my eye because of how glum the three executives pictured appear. The announcement is for the promotions of Jim Estey, Rick …
Re-energizing the accounting staff is a major part of re-energizing your system. Here’s a question to ask them: “What would you do if your work took a half hour less each day?” After you weed through the joke answers, you’ll …
Have you seen this situation? Two accounts don’t reconcile (e.g. intercompany accounts between two subsidiaries or the subledger and the GL control account) A spreadsheet is created Several adjustments are attempted The reconciler spends days on the problem but does …
This is an occasional series about the accounting side of business turnarounds, where a company makes a serious effort to get back on its feet. Two things that all turnarounds have in common: high stress and low money. Even if …
From my earlier post, you know that Manually Entered SpreadSheets (“M.E.S.S.”) are my nemesis. Not only are they time consuming to create and maintain, but they are also difficult to audit. As anyone who has been through a Sarbanes-Oxley (Bill …