The start of a fresh week is an occasion to consider your plans for the coming five days. Or if you're in AuditLand, likely six days given that busy season is ramping up and the joys of full two day weekends are fast becoming fleeting memories.
It doesn't help if your client has a proclivity for only sticking around for four days beford disappearing to work from home on Friday. Given that you may need those client contacts to be present and available, what can you do to encourage people to stick around?
Donuts.
Yummy treats are a surefire winner with all but the most health-obsessed auditees. But if the treat can be enjoyed by world class athletes convening in Vancouver in 2009, something tells me it'll work for you too.
Make it a recurring tradition and you may induce a quasi-Pavlovian association with your Friday treat that may even get them to like you.
Good news!
Especially if you were on the fence about getting a Playbook when it went on sale last month, hemmed and hawed, and then realized it was too late to order one, only to find out you could still get one from Shopblackberry.com, just to endure a cycle of cancellation, re-ordering, more cancellation, frustration with a coda of "well, you can mail us a cheque and then we'll send you one."
Ridiculous.
Fortunately Future Shop, Best Buy, and presumably other fine retailers have it online for their Boxing Day sales, which started last night already.
$249 for a Playbook, which I can use to easily sahre the photos I took the with 5 megapixel camera on my phone? Works for me. Better than the $20 off sale for the $499 Apple tablet - there's many good things about the iOS and iPad products, including legendary customer service, but affordability isn't one of them. I'd rather pay less and solve problems myself, no matter how insane.
Merry Christmas to all!
Once in a while a staff-produced parody video is inspired. This is one of those.
A few points of clarifications. First off, JIT stands for "Just in Time," which at Ernst & Young as well as other firms is a meeting room used for impromptu meetings and other sessions where more privacy than that provided by a standard cubical is needed.
A "TPE" is a Team Planning Event, used to prepare for audits.
The reference to Turley relates to the firm's global CEO, "GAMx" is the E&Y proprietary audit software program, and WBLs are "Web based learning," which are computer-based training courses often used in distance education, and in this case, used by the firm's staff to school them where a classroom session doesn't make as much sense.
Also note how easy to make it look like someone standing at a photocopier is feeling miserable or annoyed.
Thanks again to Going Concern for the tip.
Congratulations to everyone who made it, passing the UFE which means succeeding in the penultimate step to becoming a Chartered Accountant.
The results came out yesterday - and Ontario's successful writers are listed here. Despite my less frequent posting pace, I've always tried to time a post for the reporting of results. Thankfully Going Concern was there to trumpet the news while I was out of the country. Thanks guys.
The CA Institute posted a PDF with a list of all the writers on the national Honour Roll. Ernst & Young's Juliana Yuen from the Toronto office got the highest mark in the country, winning the gold medal for the country, and a healthy dose of pride for both her office and the Accounting Masters program at Waterloo University.
G20 bar patron man salutes you, and the line of police outside the patio
Things suddenly change. Let's see if I end up with deliciously more time for posting, now that my idle thought "I can probably do this from my phone" led to this short post.
You attended all the recruiting events in the fall. You presented your "BBA" or "Bcomm" candidate business cards, asked your clever question, uploaded your resume and cover letter peppered with extra curriculars and top marks, and now you've done it. You've scored job interviews with the Big Four where you hope to fulfill those dreams of becoming a Chartered Accountant, to make your family proud and pay off the massive student debts you've been racking up over the past three or four years.
And you could blow your big chance in the interview by making the most innocuous of statements.
"But I'm so clever, I know I won't ask about the overtime, but will tell them I enjoy working long hours," you respond. You know all the right things to say, you're ready for this.
But do you know anything about the wrong things to not say?
Keep in mind that your answer may inadvertently turn into a hilarious insult.
If you were asked some metaphorical question about what you'd expect after crossing over to the other side of a bridge, you might come up with something clever.
What if the recruiter were to ask you where you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?
"Oh man, I'd be in my 30s. I'd be so old. I don't what life would be like when I'm that old!"
Remember that thing about the inadvertent hilarious insult?
How exactly do you think you'd do, compared to the other straight-A student with a great resume of club presidencies and other volunteer activities if the only thing separating you from each other was that the other candidate didn't make the recruiter feel like you were completely tone deaf to other people's feelings, by making a statement like the one above?
Based on the recruiting events I've seen, the odds are that the recruiter conducting your interview is a lady in or approaching her 30s. Keep that in mind before you stick your foot in your mouth.
After a long day it's nice to unwind and check out news coverage of the protests that is arguably scant - the following links are courtesy of that last article, though at least you can always rely on Google News to provide you with information from various sources. The idea that Yahoo somehow blocked or censored mail related to the protest is weird and troubling though.Oh, and innocent spam filter issue. Right, the only thing their spam filters can stop is political agit-prop. At the same time, my rarely used Yahoo account receives an unending stream of spam, phishing scams and other idiocy that Google rarely if ever lets through.
That aside, it's nice to see the police barricade guarding the 'sacred cow' of Wall Street, though I'm sure there could've been a more impressive picture. Oh, the Daily Mail obliges, while dressing down the event as 'merely' over a thousand people. The Guardian, on the other hand, goes with the estimate of 5000 on the weekend. A hardcore crowd of 200 or so is camping, trying to mimic the drama that transpired in Egypt at the start of the year.
Three cars wrecked. That I know of.
Two people fled away from Canada. For China.
One staff hospitalized. For completely unrelated reasons.
All of 'my people' are now healthy and accounted for, though.
So all-in-all, the first year of life as a manager in my firm went by pretty smoothly.
I was not in any of the wrecked cars when those incidents happened, and I'll ascribe the blame to an unfamiliarity with winter driving and the lack of snow tires on rental cars for all those situations, except one. In that case, it wasn't a rental, and the driver wasn't contending with winter driving conditions either.
None of my staff wrecked their cars during the 2010 Olympic victory parades. That was well before my promotion.
As well, the staff with the medical scare was fine in the end, but it was a good precaution at the time. And you couldn't really blame it on his work; if anything, I'm proud of the fact that my standing rule of, "you don't feel well, you go home or to a competent medical authority, immediately," which happens to directly mirror company policy, worked out well for everyone for all the right reasons.
Oh, and I learned much about development and all sorts of other fancy manager stuff, but it sounds significantly less dramatic at the moment.
The newest gem to land in Toronto's lap is a
report on where services can be cut back to save money - you can
read the report yourself here - the city has kindly posted the PDF for all to see.
According to NOW Magazine, the report cost $300,000, which suggests a 1000 hour job if the consultants charged about $300 an hour to do the work. That's just a wild guesstimate, but scale the hours and hourly rate accordingly based on how much work you think it took to put this report together.
It's not surprising, if NOW's math is to be correct, that only $15 million of savings has been identified, however, considering the majority of the findings in the report are in the "low" savings category, which means it'll save us 5% or less.
Did the consultants correctly identify the risk associated with publishing a report where they were going to draw the ire of everyone from cyclists to dentists?
Who angers dentists, seriously? Candy companies.
And global consultancies, apparently.
Go to page 9 of the 44 page report. Oh. They went there. Didn't anyone say, "hey, perhaps people will openly mock and ridicule us - for years - if we come out on the side of the tinfoil-hat wearing anti-fluoride lobby?" If no one did, they should have. If you read the comments on Torontoist, you'll find that there are some people who cheer that point. Perhaps these are their brothers-in-arms. Let's say you agree with the suggestion.
Fine.
My main problem with the fluoride point is that it's such a marginal cost saving area. Most of them are - the majority of cost, KPMG astutely points out, comes from repairing our aging watermain infrastructure.
So where did all this effort go? As the Torontoist suggests, the report was crippled from the start by its design, which involved comparing programs and identifying programs that could be cut.
Why oh why is no one given the unenviable but suitably EPIC task of going into the nitty gritty of government departments and identifying areas where actual efficiency in program design would lead to real savings? After all, that's exactly what the city's citizens mistakenly thought they would get when they handed the keys to the city to Rob Ford. Instead, we get a smokescreen that suggests increasing the amount of smoke in the air by starting a war on bike lanes will save money.
Yet look at this post on one of the most infamous new bike lanes in the city - clearly the traffic patterns of the city are not being destroyed by bikes getting a dedicated space. I try to bike as often as I can, but sometimes client work at far-flung locations means I'm in the car. When I see a series of a dozen or more cyclists, I don't whinge. I'm glad to see them. If they were all in cars, you'd have another dozen cars in front of you, setting back your trip by 5 or 15 minutes depending on how poorly timed the traffic lights are!
Let's go back to the other idea. The stereotype of the 'lousy bean counter.' It rears its head when the report writers encourage the city to charge organizers of street festivals higher fees to "recoup costs." This is a frighteningly simplistic suggestion to make. Frightening because some city councillors may think it's a good idea. And simplistic because it only looks at revenue generate from permitting a street closure for a massive festival.
What about the spinoff benefits? A city with more festivals is a more attractive place to visit. Taste of Little Italy, Taste of the Danforth, BuskerFest, and the like. These events increase tourism, increases revenues for businesses poised to capitalize on the festivities, and generally makes the city a more enjoyable place to live in. Perhaps the larger events I mentioned could survive a higher fee. But smaller festivals like the Ukranian and Polish street festivals are just getting off the ground. Stiff them with higher fees, and inhibit their growth. Or watch only well-heeled corporations be able to afford the fees to participate and underwrite the events. And forget about grassroots organizations getting new events started. A high start-up fee will spell death for the innovation that ultimately spawns fun new events.
I really get upset when a bunch of accountants take a short-sighted look at "costs" without matching them to the associated "benefits." It's simply unfortunate, to put it mildly.
Speaking of mildness, be sure to check out page 21 in the report. Although there's the sound of crickets chirping in the accompanying news coverage, some more attention should be paid, as KPMG does a good job of pointing out a service that is "below standard." It's a shame that the conclusion is so weak. If you say something is not being done properly and should be fixed, say it.
Don't say "Technical Services generally does not meet its performance standards and may benefit from process improvement to achieve service level standards."
"May benefit?" Come on now. How about, "it's broken, so fix it"?
Reports have to be delivered in the language of "professionals," but that sentence screams of that very not-yummy condiment, "weaksauce."
Speaking of weaksauce, I'd like to meet the designer of a style guide who doesn't insist on defining technical acronyms. I'm sure a few experts will know what you mean when you're talking about "Utility ABC", but to the average reader, using the term "ABC" without a definition is just sloppy writing. They use the acronym twice in the report without defining it.
I'm sure there's a more detailed report in addition to this "Summary" that was issued for the benefit of the related Standing Committee to gloss over. It's a shame it wasn't shared with us, because the summary was mulched to the point of sour disappointment.
Do you feel like the city just got taken for a ride?
I'm very happy to see Bixi arrive in Toronto.
Sometimes it doesn't make sense to walk a block or two to the subway, to ride two stops, and then walk another two blocks. And if traffic is heavy, a taxi may take just as long.
With Bixi, there's a new option, and it's great. I'm in that happy spot where the teams I work on are full of young people happy and willing to try out 'craaaazy' ideas like renting a bike to go to a client's office, so we did just that last week. We saved the client money by not taking a cab - I know the fares, and the savings were close to 50% - and given how long it took, we didn't waste any of our time either. Judging by downtown Toronto traffic these days, our mode of transportation was faster than driving.
Win.
The only thing Bixi lacks is 4-person bikes - for you and three kids. Though it'd probably be best for those to belong to people who know what they're doing, like the owner if this fine bicycle in Amsterdam.
Oh, and an expansion of the network to cover more of the city will be fantastic too once enough money can be found to support it.
In some companies people don't have to enter time they spent on time sheets. These are usually companies other than accounting firms, where you work in the same job every day. Accounting and consulting firms work for a mix of clients, so their staff are expected to identify where they spent their time every day, so the company knows where time is being spent by their staff.
In most accounting firms, you're asked to book your time accurately. Companies bill clients for doing work, and rather logically, don't bill clients for time their staff spend learning how to do their jobs.
Having said that, accounting firms operate on an apprenticeship model, so there's always on-the-job training going on.
And this is where a supposedly straightforward issue gets a little confusing.
Precise rules differ from firm to firm - be sure to see what your written policy is - but for the most part, if you're working on a client's file, it's considered client work, not "training time." If someone suggests you shouldn't charge all the time because you spent some of it learning how to do the work, be ready to challenge that idea, especially if you work for a mainstream company where this certainly isn't training time.
The exceptions to this rule would be cases where you're studying a client's file to learn from it, but aren't actually creating any new work. For example, someone gives you an audit file, tells you to look it over for an hour, to see how it's setup. If this is being done as part of a training exercise - and you'll know because you're in an all-day training class! - then it's training time. Usually samples used in training are anonymous and don't even identify your client, but that's not always the case, especially if you're doing some more advanced sort of case studies.
If you took longer than average to start working on a file, though, yes perhaps you're slower because it's a new file, but that shouldn't be a reason to charge your time to training. It won't take much experience to identify situations where a manager is pushing you to bend the rules versus telling you to follow policy. Figure out what your company expects of you and run with that.
If you find you're working for someone who isn't respecting your firm's ethical guidelines, recall that most large firms has an ethics/whistle-blower hotline you can contact to report accusations in good faith.
In smaller firms, you'll lack that luxury, in which case I hope you picked a place with a strong leadership team that will support you. Many good firms exist, so if you didn't find one, keep your lines open to new positions. Turnover is extremely high in the accounting industry so it shouldn't be too difficult to find yourself a new home if you find yourself in a bad place.
Just watch out for stairways to nowhere.
"I have no idea what to do on this account! What should I do? The senior's gone for the day. I'll never finish this file!"
The chaos inherent in a young auditor or accountant's mind would be fun to watch, if you enjoy watching the suffering of others. Judging by the popularity of certain sports and shows, there's many such people.
Unfortunately there's no efficient way to charge admission to witness the whirling vortex of worry in your mind, so you might as well have some strategies to deal with it.
As much as it's a running gag, looking at last year's file is a time-honoured tradition. Part of the entire point of documenting your work well is so the person taking over your job next year will have a good idea as to what they're supposed to be doing, to avoid the mess you're in in the first place.
Of course, perhaps you made the file yourself last year, and didn't do a very good job. And now someone with higher standards is reviewing your work. Well, good luck. Alternatively, you're doing something for a new client where there is no prior file to refer to.
In either case, ask for help: talk to whoever's supposed to be supervising you and get some proper guidance.
Easier said than done, especially if you're "fixing" a weak file from the prior year. Or if your senior or manager has wandered off and you're stuck on your own.
Part of the secret of getting help is knowing how to ask the right questions. While you're waiting for your source of help to return, spend some time preparing your question.
Don't just say, "I'm stuck, what do I do?"
Consider asking Superman for help.
Instead, trace out the thought process you went through. You found issue X. You looked at guidance in the Handbook, and you couldn't find it. You Googled the topic (yes, we do that too), and couldn't find answers. You tried one or two other ideas, and got nowhere.
If you tried two or three solutions - notice how deliberately vague I'm being, since your problem could be just about anything - at least you tried.
If you tried one solution - looking at last year's file, or anything for that matter - and then just gave up, no one will be impressed. Try a little harder.
Either you will show that you tried your best before giving up, or - this may come as a shock - you may end up solving the problem yourself.
Unless you have a fantastic memory, write down the thought process you went through in some sort of intelligent manner so you can recall your notes when challenged with the question, "well did you try anything before asking me?"
Much of the time you will find a solution. I chuckle every time I see a missed call from someone at 10 a.m. After my meetings are wrapped up I call them back. It might be the afternoon by this point. "Your voicemail said you had a problem?" I'll ask.
"Oh, never mind, I solved it." they'll tell me.
Good!
Readers have sent me many questions which I've tried to respond to a little faster than in my posts.
One question involves old accounting textbooks. When you're getting ready to start work, you may wonder if there's any point to keeping them, or if you should sell them.
Unless you work for a company with the world's worst employee support program, you should feel comfortable in disposing of them. If you can sell them to younger students in the program, good for you. Hopefully the editions haven't changed.
Over time, accounting standards change, so the theories you may have been taught three years ago may have some merit, but hopefully you've memorized the key elements. The details may have changed, and any employer worth their salt will provide you with the accounting handbooks and manuals that apply to the field you're working in.
If you're studying for exams like the UFE they should, again, be providing you with exam prep guides which will be much more useful than your old textbooks anyway.
Almost two fulls months between posts? Yes, I've been busy. There giant Oreo cookie cakes don't just eat themselves.
"I hope that's not blood."
To set the scene, this is in an open house for a place being sold "as is." And there were some dark crimson splotches in the main hallway. I didn't snap a picture of that, but got a few other small wins.
David Fleming is an amazing broker. He said the first quote, and if you never get a chance to hear his commentary in person you can read his writings here - well worth checking out.
He also noted the nice touch of the frilly lace - by the handle of the
above saw that was left lying around in one of the bedrooms.
No one bothered to get rid of the spider web on the chandelier in this particular house, I noticed.
I guess they were trying to complete the look.
This is a fascinating little article: an analysis of over 500 job postings, showing which accounting programs are in demand. Thanks to Bill for the link.
The popular 'large programs' are SAP, the various Oracle apps like JD Edwards and Peoplesoft, as well as the Microsoft Dynamics / "Great Plains" system. On the small side, QuickBooks dominates.
Where do IT auditors fit into this?
If you have enough experience and exposure, you will likely be exposed to almost all the applications cited above, with the likely exception of QuickBooks, since the audits of small clients often won't include the services of an IT auditor.
As a result, a CA who works in this field will not only be able to demonstrate knowledge of various business processes, but they'll also be able to demonstrate the nimbleness and adaptability that is so in demand these days.
It typically isn't difficult to get students interested in applying to transferring to this field. This just made it even easier to make the argument.
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