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There's a small decrease in the professional fees you or your firm is paying for the privilege of calling yourself a Chartered Accountant: the full member fee for 2013-2014 came out to be $22.60 lower than the $1107.40 that was charged last year. Savings of 2%. The total fee is still a hefty $1084.80 including taxes, and breaks down to $520 paid to Ontario's ICAO, $440 paid to the overall Canadian CICA, and $124.80 in HST, and it represents the "on time" payment amount - late fees of $100 extra are charged if you pay after June 1, 2013. The ICAO kindly explained that the savings are courtesy of a $20 decrease in the CICA portion of the fee. At least CAs can't complain about rising fees this year. Curmudgeons are welcome, however, to scoff at the following warning message that is plastered on the bottom of the ICAO's website. " The ICAO website is optimized using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and it's use is strongly recommended to ensure that all...
A colleague and I chatted about a fancy restaurant today, remarking on how it seats very few people but charges a relatively high price for meals. Could it survive? We ran the numbers out loud - estimating how much it probably makes each night, and what its likely expenses are. Didn't even break a sweat. A byproduct of years of experience in the restaurant industry, or just some good business sense developed from doing seemingly everything? The latter is usually the case. Having made some rather huge assumptions, the restaurant in question may be grossing 20% after the cost of food and labour. Is that enough to cover the utilities, rent and other costs we haven't included? We'll see if they're still open a year from now I suppose.
It's too late for me to edit this down, so here's your summary for the TLDR crowd: accounting internships are awesome because you actually get paid. Journalism internships are tough to survive because they're typcially unpaid. There's some gender politics mixed in here, so read on if you want a rant on the associated economics of the male/female split on pay.
The Big 4 accounting firms often march in lockstep. If Deloitte or Ernst & Young offer more than KPMG or less than PwC, you can expect people to start jumping ship, or otherwise being grumpy. So it's quite handy that Going Concern has released the Pricewaterhousecoopers 2012 salary increases. This link will enlighten you . Obviously there'll never be a perfect 1:1 match between what you'll be earning and what the kids in the tower across the street will be awarded, but it's usually not too far off the mark. And this amusingly condescending article on expenses going up and revenue going down will prepare you for the inevitable, "this is why you did an amazing job but won't be getting a bonus" conversation that Big 4 veterans in AuditLand know and love. Good luck, your options may be limited, especially if you haven't finished getting your CA certification.
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...
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...
Bridal registries make no sense. I'm going to ignore most of the economics argument, though if you're never thought about it, consider this: at a typical department store, markups can easily be 100 to 300% over the cost of the given item. Forcing everyone to pay a giant markup for something you can get online for much cheaper? Silly. The reason we'll point out today is that the infrastructure to manage these things are insane. The excellent IT Audit Security blog has an article on this topic . Read it. Here a sample. Rather than being my elusive bridal shopping list, the pages were a list of receipts of purchases that others had made from the kiosk. I saw people’s names, product purchased, and the last 4 digits of all the credit card numbers. At that point, I noticed the kiosk had a credit card reader, touch pad, and the red glow of a UPC laser scanner. This wasn’t just a bridal registry kiosk. You may also be pleased to note that there are default passwords in use on many...
I just mentioned CH Canada last week . 2 days after my post, they went bankrupt . Ouch. Here's a list of the dead sites, courtesy of the bankruptcy trustee : As a consequence of the bankruptcy, DB Media will not be fulfilling any customer orders through its DVD clubs as of December 9, 2010 as the Canadian operations have ceased. The following lists the DVD Clubs affected by the bankruptcy: DVD CLUB: http://www.columbiahouse.ca/ DVD CLUB: http://www.columbiahousecanada.com CHCanada: http://www.chcanada.com/ French CHCanada: http://www.cineetcie.ca/ HH: http://www.healthharmony.ca/ Bookscene: http://www.bookscene.ca/ Although the company is dead, and no more shipments will be going out, if you owe money, they'd like you to pay up: A&M Canada, serving as Trustee, is now in the process of collecting amounts owed to the book and DVD clubs. If you have an outstanding amount owing to DB Media, we would appreciate immediate payment of your account in full. What a very polite sentiment...
Remember last year's garbage strike? It's a distant, smelly memory. Here's a great little round-up discussing the stink, or lack thereof, at the collective public dumping grounds . There's always an alternative to the city union's approach, though it's not always necessarily better for the environment. I think the city union is kicking itself. They could've gone to work for a year without a contract, and then dropped the hammer right before the G20 . Instead, they went on strike during one of the mildest summers in recent memory, and had to make a few minor concessions. Actually they made out rather well - one can only imagine how much more of a killing they could've made if they threatened to strike before a global summit though. Perhaps they were smart though - and realized that the RCMP would come and tazer them all back to work, so it's for the best. Besides, with a billion dollars sloshing about, I'm sure that anyone remotely involved with the...
BBM station domination campaign at the TTC's Yonge-Bloor subway station Having alluded to Eurocents , I managed to trip over an interesting little article that came out two years ago and yet is still oddly relevant: a scientists decided to poke the cell phone industry with a sharp pointy stick and calculate the price per megabyte for transmitting a text message. He then compared that to the cost of transmitting data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Verdict? “ The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs. ” Transmission from space only costs about £8.85...
Globally I'm sure this is still off the radar, but in Canada we're all in a state of shock, having learned that the government plans to spend a billion dollars hosting the G8 and G20 summits this month: the G8 in the rural town of Huntsville, and the G20 in downtown Toronto. $1,000,000,000. Nice. I've seen the first wave of spending allocated to installing more security cameras, presumably temporarily removing the garbage cans downtown and replacing them with transparent bags taped to lamp posts - which just look fabulous in a ghetto chic sort of way - and let's not forget the coup de grace. They're scraping all the posters and political propaganda stickers off the lamp posts as well. I've seen it on my bike rides to work. Heaven forbid Obama learn that Paul Oakenfold had a show at the Koolhaus in March and they didn't invite Barry to check it out. Newspapers are hot on the trail of this unfolding fiasco. The Post asked the ten federal agencies getting this...
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...
If there's one question students in university may find hard to ask - even though it echoes in their mind all the time - it's "how much am I going to earn if I get hired by a CA firm?" If you're bold and outgoing and have friends who are already employed, this can be easier to find out. Otherwise, hopefully you'll stumble across either this post or the next forum as you turn to the all-knowing internet for answers. Stefano at mycasite took it upon himself to contribute to our collective knowledge by conducting a public survey - you can see the results here and comment on the outcome in this dedicated forum . He reports that the range of median salaries runs from $29,300 in Winnipeg to $45,000 in Toronto, with the size of the firm - big four or regional - playing less of a role than some might expect. A fair question you may ask, though, is why there's a 50% increase just for moving over one province. This is explained by the fact that regional pay depends...
I once alluded to instances of ignorant rants being granted precious space in newspapers. The most recent guilty party was written by a Toronto Sun columnist who misunderstands what "smart meters" are supposed to accomplish. Before you ask why I bothered with the Sun, I must explain that I'm willing to read pretty much any newspaper if you give it to me for free. It's in some ways a bad habit, although I've learned to fight it by skimming over the worst whiners. I'm exposed to enough poorly thought out thought processes as it stands when I travel by air. Who was, after all, the genius who designed this sign at O'Hare? Closer to home, an angry letter writer lauded this column , blasting the provincial government of Ontario for having the audacity to try and get people to conserve energy for all the right reasons. The angry protests about forthcoming doom caused by power prices going up by a fraction of a penny was simply too much to take. Let's not talk...
The sad news I broke ten days ago about "layoffs" hitting writers coming back from the UFE is being discussed in greater detail at mycasite.com . Click here to go to the article and read more details about the unfortunate "welcome back from the exam, pack your desk up right away" terminations. What's most troubling about all this is the fact that the website of the firm in question (which one of the unfortunate former employees identifies here ) actually has, as of writing, a job posting for a CA articling student . Uh, what, sorry? If I was drinking something at the time, I probably would've done a spit take all over my monitor on seeing that. It's more bizarre than anything I saw at Nuit Blanche. Well, with the possible exception of the young father who wanted to smoke up instead of returning to his lady and child. That was even weirder, but only by a small degree. And this wasn't bizarre at all, just cool. In the firm's defence, their website...
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