July 2010 - Posts
Edit (Sept 6, 2010): As per their usual practice, the ICAO has taken the results offline. You should have received your results in the mail by now - the UFE is coming up soon and you should be well into your study schedule by now! I will keep this page up as a historical record of the minor drama associated with the 2010 results release, and as an example of what the temporary splash page looks like when results are released. Original post continues:
That was more dramatic than it needed to be.
The ICAO must've had some kind of technical glitch which prevented the results from the 2010 School of Accountancy exam from loading on time - it took roughly half an hour for the website to get updated.
The results are, however, now up - this page will let you see which of the writers passed - out of the population of writers who gave permission to have their names on the website. Official results will be mailed to individual writers in a few days.
Congratulations to those who passed!
Smartly, the ICAO recoded their main webpage to reduce the massive crushing load of traffic that's sure to hit them today. When you land on their page you'll just see this:
The Institute of
Chartered Accountants of Ontario
Homepage
SOA
Results | CA
Firms
That's a smart move though - let people get to the results faster, and keep your web server from melting down.
A shame about the delay, but what's another 20 minutes, especially if
your own company gets results on time and tells you on time anyway?
I suspect everyone will quickly forget about the delay.
My fingers are crossed for my friends waiting to hear their marks. Hang tight - the School of Accountancy results should be coming out soon.
If you're not feeling stressed enough, why not dive into the SOA 2010 discussion board?
For them, the waiting is done.
Judging from the commentary, it was a sufficiently ridiculous exam this year. Thinking way back to my attempt, I recall missing this or that seemingly obvious and very important issue - and still making it through in one piece. Perhaps the mistakes I made weren't that significant - more likely, everyone makes mistakes to some extent. Part of the success lies in making less mistakes than everyone else!
Short answer: yes. In fact, I'm working from home right now.
Above: not home. Would be nice though.
To be specific, I stopped working when I checked mail from my readers, and decided to write a little article. I can easily resume when I'm done.
In fact, I was going to resume, right now, as I had a nice long article written.
Then random computer things broke down - we forgot to add diesel to the engine running our server - which caused me to lose my entire post. That's ok, though: you get to enjoy the more succinct "take two" re-write I'll share with you, which loses most of the superfluous wit or "fluff" in the interest of trenchant analysis reducing the aggravation from my computer, once more, choosing to spite me when I least suspected it would.
It's also ok, because at least I have the luxury of working from home. This saves me the hassle of going downtown to the office. If you live nearby, that's probably an hour of round-trip travel. If you commute from the suburbs, that's two or more hours of your life recovered.
I do enjoy meeting up with my colleagues and friends in the office, particularly if we haven't met in ages, either because they themselves are working from home, or are visiting client sites, but there are times when it's great to realize "there's no point to coming downtown today - I have no meetings, most of my friends are on vacation, at their own clients sites or also planning on working from home - and all my work is sitting on my laptop in electronic form."
That's when you get to stay home. And no matter what, if you're a financial accountant with a CA or CPA, or an IT auditor with either those designations or the more IT-specific CISA, CISM or CISSP, modern work allows you to work from home - and that's pretty fantastic.
To achieve this, there's three factors that have to line up in your favour:
- A well designed home work environment with minimal distractions,
- Managers who are supportive and show it by trusting you to get your work done with minimal supervision and who work from home as well, and
- Clients to audit that don't need you to be on site all the time.
You can control your home environment, and if you hate your office culture, no one's stopping you from leaving and finding another place to work. You can also push to work on clients that offer you work that's easier to handle at home - so in a way, you can control everything.
There are all sorts of home offices with varying degrees of effectiveness as a place of work
The original long article led to a vague analysis of the breakdown of time spent working at home versus in a formal office environment - that of your company or the client. In case you're wondering, you can in theory work all week long at home, but you'll eventually need to "surface for air," so to speak, and either meet up with someone in person in your office, or trundle off to see your clients. The precise mix varies, and depends on how you arrange your schedule. If your clients need you present every day, forget about working from home. If you only have meetings 2 to 4 days a week, logically the remaining days can be spent working from home.
This a wonderful and mostly altruistic action: any CA from Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia or Bermuda can click on this link here, to go a page where you can tell your local provincial Institute of Chartered Accountants to donate $25 to a charity of your choice - from a list of five, including Kids Help Phone and Easter Seals.
I say "mostly" because this is all nestled in a webpage hosted by Manulife who sell insurance to CAs and would no doubt love to translate this little bit of charity into some sort of boost to their business too, but given the fact that they're simply giving cash away, I won't hold the fact that there's still marketing involved in this against them.
According to the ICAO's little e-newsletter, about 850 people have already clicked, which suggests that this campaign is only halfway through. If you haven't forced them to give away money to charity, feel free to push $25 of someone else's money towards a worthy cause.
If this train were the charity campaign, it would only be half full. It was one of the cooler attractions during Doors Open Toronto, 2010 edition.