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It's good to be proud of your work. If you've done a good job, you can take pleasure in the fact that it's error free. And yet, people may say things like, "are you sure you didn't double-count those items?" You may be 100% correct in saying, "of course I didn't," with a self-righteous huff. That doesn't mean you should , though. Let's assume that you are in fact correct. Rather than scorn those who are helping you by examining your work to avoid embarassing mistakes, thank them for their concern and interest. Then let's assume that the people asking you are very knowledgeable, and they aren't just asking the question to give you a hard time. Now stop and ask yourself, "why are they asking me this?" Is it, perhaps, because your work may in fact be entirely correct, but you didn't present your thought process in a very clear and logical manner? Are you hiding some important facts or assumptions which cause people to second...
I received an e-mail inviting me to give free marketing to someone who put a lot of effort into a cute cartoon explaining the job prospects for accounting students. I'm responding publically because I can: I won't do link to your graphic, because you ignored who I am and what I do. Your cartoon is about the US market, and about the American CPA designation. This is a Canadian blog, and I when I do get around to writing, it's typically about living life with the CA designation. That's Chartered Accountant, not "certified accountant." I may sometimes also venture towards the CMA and CGA, and the ongoing idea of creating a Canadian CPA designation, all worthy topics among the many that I should write more about. But I typically leave the American CPA to people who specialize in that sort of thing . Sorry to be so harsh about it, but you work for an accounting exam website, so you asked for it: if writing an e-mail to me could be tortuously contorted into a kind UFE...
Jaycee is preparing for the UFE, and ran into a wall on the comp . It's natural to get tired of a five hour exam case, especially when those little devils in your head start nagging with those evil thoughts, like " Two of your seniors who had passed claimed to have never done any cases at all. They just practiced outlining and read the evaluation guides. " I of course immediately called shenanigans on that. Being a smart young CA student, she herself quickly dispelled those notions, but I felt like adding more on top of that comment: here are the original thoughts plus at least one more idea while I'm at it. Don't fail at studying If you play musical instruments or any sports, you will be familiar with what it's like to "practice" and really practice. You will only perform, play or write as well as you practice. If you want to get to SOX City, you'll need to do a few things first. If you go through the motions of trying to play a piece of music without...
This post is an example of where the mindset of the Hardcore CA will take you. In AuditLand and other corporate environments, when something goes Horribly Wrong, rather than point blame and string people up, you have a "Lessons Learned" moment, which can either be a casual debrief, or an exhaustive exercise in identifying what mistakes were made, and how they can be avoided in the future. There will no doubt be some very professional investigations conducted into what happened this weekend at the Toronto G20 riots. One of the most shocking images online and on TV came from the fires that consumed Toronto police cars , which initially engendered some extremely sceptical treatment. After all, they just bought a water cannon - couldn't they handle a fire quickly and safely? This presumed that the security teams knew they may need to use it as a firefighting vehicle; given the delays it's probably safe to assume wasn't planned for. This makes sense, considering its stated...
I missed out on the madness downtown today. I followed it on my phone, but missed all the live TV footage which no doubt justifiably enraged my friends. I did catch stills like this one which from a local Toronto photographer show why the city was on edge all week long. It's perhaps best I wasn't around - I could've had my camera smacked down to the ground by an imported officer from Peel region. Of course he might've been on edge - not sure if this was before or after one of those police cars was set on fire. The you'll "be on Youtube" response, while accurate, was rather snarky to the point of inviting an assault. Not justifying, of course - this is clearly a criminal offence by a police officer. Also freakish: random arrest videos by plainclothes officers. I should point out that some well-meaning people naively claim that when store windows got smashed in, the "peaceful" protesters should've taken action to stop the anarchists and ne'er...
New hires at accounting firms land in what may be a completely new culture. After a hard week or month of audits, some people look forward to spending time with their families, but given the number of young bucks and does in a large Big Four office, heading down to the local bar(s) will also be a popular option. One CA student is worried about this phenomenon, particularly at formal firm-sponsored functions, asking "you think it will be a problem if I don't drink at the cocktail party due to religious reasons? I'm just worried they'll think I won't "fit in"?" This is an easy answer - no, not at all. In any mature firm people will understand if you have personal reasons - be they philosophical, spiritual, practical ("$15 for a mixed drink, what?") or simply rational ("no, I'm driving"). Having said that, there's always a wrinkle: as you can imagine, I'm sure there are cliques of people who never escaped their frat boy days...
Sometimes you read things online and wonder, "gee, what if someone in charge of this enforcing The Rules found out what's going on?" Would some audit firm get in a mess of trouble if things weren't being done properly? Consider this quote from a lively AuditLand discussion board : " Having worked for Big 4 firms for almost four years, I feel that Big 4 firms often lack ethics. We learn about ethics in different courses in University. I feel that none of the ethics I learned is being applied in the workplace. Generally speaking, managers do not perform all the Audit procedures in gathering evidence. For example, we take data given to us without validating them. The managers don’t offer its workers any directions or help. When I was in my third month at the firm, I went to audit the inventory of a computer hardware warehouse with another auditor. We had no idea what we were doing. We simply made up numbers that we thought made sense and we left. We compiled those numbers...
This month's CA magazine features a mention of Stefano Picone, CA , founder of mycasite , but before you can read that you may read the following unrelated trainwreck of a paragraph - read it and guess what went wrong here : " Firms only interested in training CA students who wish to practise public accounting but lack the audit hours to do so should also consider hiring experienced CA students who have already completed the required chargeable audit hours at another firm. CA students can complete their practical experience requirements for qualification at your firm and may be eligible to practise public accounting. The current economic situation has resulted in the availability of a number of experienced CA students ready and able to take on new opportunities. " Did you see it? Avert your eyes children! Did they just casually say "current economic situation"? I'm sorry, I think the editors must have accidentally hit "find and replace" on the more...
If you started, say, an engineering program at one given university, could you switch partway through to a Chartered Accountant prep program instead in the same university's business school, and quickly get all the credits you need to graduate in a mere year and a half? One of the regular CA 'commentators' on the blogs and forums, sardaukar - who does an excellent public service in opening people's eyes to the "hell years" that await them as CA students, incidentally - did just that, and people wondered how this is even possible. Since I'm not really into Sudoku, and this is just the sort of "puzzle" I enjoy solving, I'll answer the question for the writer of comment #427. The funny thing about this exercise is that when you review the list of courses needed - I include links at the end of this article - many courses will count for "3 hours" even though they're full year, or half year. That means you can't divide 51 by 3 and...
PriceWaterhouseCoopers Advisory has made some significant cuts to their US workforce, as mentioned off-hand by Francine and discussed in detail here Skip down to comment 4 in the post for an interesting dissection of firm revenue math and the possible impact it'll have on partner income. It's a topic everyone seems to be curious about knowing more about, gets very little information about, and is often to afraid ask questions about - so go check out "TT"'s breakdown and the follow up if you want to know more. Or skim all the way down to comment 114 , which points out that while the cut of roughly 300 people is small compared to the size of the entire US firm, the internal PwC webcast apparently stated that this represents a cut of 6% of the affected group - one value provided by a commenter is 260 of about 4300 people. I spent way too much type going through all the other comments, and things did in fact get kind of dark. Consider this post - it's anonymous, but...
A few people have written to me looking for help either getting a job with the Big Four, or with SOA/UFE exam preparation tips. I'm unable to offer any one-on-one services to help people with these exams as I'm fully booked helping colleagues at work and writing here. I will address specific requests that I'm able to write about here, but if you're a repeat writer I can't offer a complete set of diagnostics and advice via e-mail or phone calls. Among many reasons, there's the fact that if I'm going to respond with advice, I'd like to share the tips here, because that's the whole point of writing here in the first place is to help as many people as possible. I am, however, not one to turn away someone looking for help, so here are a few tips to keep in mind so if you didn't pass the SOA this year or are unlucky on the UFE on any year you can do better next time: Figure out what went wrong . This is the single most important piece of advice, complemented...
I have, not surprisingly given my little writing-break, an extensive backlog of topics to write about. I'm going to do two things right now: shine the spotlight on an aspiring CA , and answer someone's question. Judging a book by its cover, " Second Rate CA " has an excellent dark sense of humour, and the wicked good funny writing there supports that view . The writer is going through the difficult process of getting that all-important start on the road to having a CA. I wish lots of luck towards anyone in that challenging position, and especially those who are writing and sharing their thoughts. It's a valuable service. I myself did some extensive travelling and worked at a place best described as "anything but an approved CA training office", until I accomplished all I could there, and at the same time successfully landed my current job. Travel is always an option; it can be surprisingly affordable too. The question to answer, on the other hand, is from...
Another one of my intelligent comments to the PwC blog got blocked . This is getting a bit annoying . This time, I had some free job application advice to share. The pumpkins sum up my feelings about this shabby treatment rather succinctly. Here's the advice, for those of you looking for tips on how to prepare your resume and cover letter for that CA student position you're trying to land: "For most candidates the one page cover letter is a good call, but I've said before and had success personally with the mythical two page cover letter. It only works if you have very strong writing skills and know you're actually going to deliver a solid message - that means, no buzzwords or filler, but strong selling points that show why you're a good candidate. Maybe one out of a hundred candidates can pull it off, so make sure you know what you're doing if go down this route. Checking with your university career centre is a very good idea no matter what - but sharing your...
I found another CA blog out there - the first French Canadian one I've come across . If you have trouble reading Julien's French, run it through Google Translate. The translation's not perfect, but it'll do. The newest posting caught my eye ; in the spirit of hyper-critical UFE prep, here's some analysis. His writing's pretty good - the post about travel is a good read , and it's amusing to note that he looks forward to the chance to perfect his English in his travels, whereas I could say the same about improving my French when I'm sent on the road to the francophone parts of the world. Going back to his newest post about the UFE process, however, Julien talks about two factors that he claims make his program unique compared to those experienced at other firms - any message like that delivered on an official blog deserves closer scrutiny since new recruits are going to put some weight into what they're being told. Special Educators The first claim is...
I try to help people, they turn me down. That's about par for the course, I should say - auditors are used to not getting much respect. With the exception that other auditors usually listen to what we have to say. If I offer help to someone, they're usually happy to get it. My UFE mentees are a prime example. They listen carefully to my suggestions, and pass their exams. It's a strong symbiotic relationship - I'm happy to share knowledge. With that in mind, imagine my surprise when, while stationed a day's drive north of the city, I checked my mail in the morning to find an unusual e-mail from another writer. What I received was a polite e-mail from PriceWaterhouseCoopers explaining why my commentary isn't welcome at Nisha's PwC blog , part of the new "PwC Connect" recruiting site that's gradually rolling out. That they don't want to permit my voice to be heard at their site doesn't concern me too greatly as I have - oh, my own little soapbox...
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