Notes from CIMA/BPP IFRS update, Russell Hotel, London

Changes for periods after 1 Jan 13

IAS 19 employee benefits including holiday pay
IFRS13 Increased disclosure where fair value accounting used

Changes for periods after 1 Jan 14
IAS 27 separate financial statements
IAS 28 investments in assocs and jvs
IFRS 10 consol fin statements. Vodafone is good example of explaining valuation methods
IFRS 11 joint arrangements - looks at control to define ownership

New standards affecting this year
IAS 8 para 28 about new standards adopted this period and effect
Para 30 where has not applied yet but adoption in future will affect accounts
Highlight areas requiring significant estimate or judgement

3i good example for financial instruments

Lease accounting Exposure draft could be effective in 2015
Capitalise if have right to control use of the asset.
Capitalise fair value at acquisition then depreciate
Note that leased asset are to be shown separately from owned assets
Options to renew only taken account of if there is significant financial incentive to extend (but this could be just the moving costs?)

Ifrs4 insurance

IAS 18 revenue published at 2014. Waiting for EU approval.
IFRS 15 Revenue from contacts with customers. Examples Vodafone and Arm Holdings

FRC corporate reporting review key messages - worth looking at.

Project summaries available from IAS website

Efrag website to show what standards have been adopted by EU.

To do:

Read up on FRS 102  uk gaap revised in Aug 14 effective for SMEs from 2016; info on FRC website. Staff eduction notes SEN prefix.
New std on lease accounting

Where it says early adoption permitted - remember needs to be ratified by EU first.

Using Rally to track progress in Agile Scrum projects

Received training from Ernst and Young and I spent my first few days using Rally. Rally is a productivity tool specifically designed for teams delivering projects using the agile methodology. It seems excellent for taking a user story and allowing team members to add tasks to it.  The tasks each have an expected time to complete, which can be easily updated and directly feeds burn down charts both for the whole project and for the individual.

This looks as if it will be a very useful tool for capacity planning, understanding current progress and helping team members to continue to motivate themselves.

Agile scrum training

With one of my projects now moving out of the inception phase and into its first sprint, my team has had some additional training from Ernst and Young. Up until now, we have been working on user stories which are details of user requirements and how to test them. Now we have identified the first user stories that we are going to deliver and each member of the team is now defining their own tasks to help deliver those stories. This is being tracked using Rally (see separate post).

Capitalism: the conflict between performing today and investing for tomorrow

Took part in a professional association cross sector CPD and networking event at the University of Brighton (organised by CIMA). The speaker was John Mardle,

This was a fast paced lecture touching on the following topics:

• capitalism – what is the problem?
• Banks – have they now lost their role as main provider of finance to business?
• Other disruptive innovation to the financial system such as institutional reputation, regulation, capital adequacy stress tests (one in five ECB banks failed the test).
• The financial supply chain: the important link between each part of the chain (suppliers, customers, investors, inventory,CAPEX).
• The reliability of published accounts. Giving Tesco as an example of how unreliable the accounts may be. The purpose of accounts is to inform investors but companies never want to give bad news. To have more up-to-date information, big investors and other stakeholders may ask for management accounts. These have the advantage of being more up-to-date and possibly designed to be more useful, but are unaudited.
• ITV given as an excellent example of linking KPI's to statements strategy. ITV's accounts apparently well worth looking at as an example of good practice. DHL also given as a good example, they have a long-term issue to do with pension fund deficits and are explaining in their accounts and explaining how they are dealing with it.
• Uncertainty about pension funds and the changes to the rules may affect investment. Pension funds typically look for long-term investment opportunities. If the rule changes mean that more people take their money out of pension funds then they may invest it in other places or may spend it. The effects of this on economy are uncertain, it may give a short-term boost or may even be a longer term boost. Parallels drawn to selling off council houses in the 1980s.
• A brief discussion about ethics. Mentioning Primark which has addressed its negative publicity following the Indian factory collapse by implementing a series of checks on all their suppliers. This led on to a discussion about Apple which controls its suppliers by having bought them all. This though have had its own problems by stifling innovation of those suppliers.

Speaker Details:

John is an experienced trainer and facilitator in Working Capital Management and Optimisation.
Working Capital is no longer financed by traditional means or from traditional sources like banks. Working Capital now requires a strategy that embraces the whole Financial Supply Chain from market penetration, through procurement to service delivery, project completion, balancing production  and then onto invoicing, compliance and reconciliation to cash.

For the past 6 years he has delivered one and two day course for leading UK accounting institutes including CIMA, ACCA, ICAEW, and CAI and for the Association of Corporate Treasurers.
He has developed, facilitated and implemented in-house working capital/cash management courses for the likes of ABB, Alstom, Daimler Benz, Parsons across the globe in the permanent role of Working Capital Change Champion.

Recent corporate work has included ITV Plc., Astrium and DHL, while in the SME sector working capital strategy has been developed with organisations from all sectors whether it is financial services, manufacturing, construction or telecoms.

John is a member of the Genesis Group that informs and influences the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee when it meets quarterly and in that capacity he also regularly meets leading MP’s like Vince Cable and Michael Fallon. John has also been a panellist and facilitator at recent Lloyds FD Game plan events and regularly submits articles that are published in the likes of GTnews, Treasury Today, CIMA FM, FX-MM, and is an expert on ‘Managing the Financial Supply Chain’ (re-the transactional efficiency and change management of Working Capital) the bi-annual publication of the same name is due January 2014.

As a contributor to many discussion groups like the Institute of Credit Management, Purchasing Insight, Supply Chain, Strategy Management Forum John brings governance, corporate social responsibility , integrated reporting, evidence based narrative and board level cash sustainability via graphics and working capital reports to bear on many strategic decisions driven by working capital management.

Attendance certificate here.

A (good) picture is worth a thousand words

Immersed in world of projects, it has been great to see so many other people explaining the world with diagrams and flow charts.  It looks like my much used www.mindmeister.com may be replaced with Visio for a while.  Skimmed through a 47 page document on Business Process Modelling Notation (private link here due to copyright).

Intro to Agile Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - What is Scrum? - YouTube

Inception phase begun for project.  Had a day of start up and explanation with Ernst & Young (EY) including this short intro to Agile.  It is not in any way officially endorsed by EY.  Apparently there is some advertising blurb at the end but the beginning is a concise and useful quick run through.

NEW Intro to Agile Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - What is Scrum? - YouTube:

Pension contribution limits

Started the weekend by reading an article about allowable contributions to pensions. Pension contributions are now subject to new limits of £40,000 a year (down from £50,000) and a further limit that employee's (not employer's) contributions must be less than salary.

Below is a link to the article that I read, however it only works for me because of copyright restrictions on the article. If you really want to read the article you will have to subscribe to www.tipsandadvice–tax.co.uk.

My restricted link

Excel data verification to ensure that the value in a cell starts with a C

Click this link to see instructions and screenshots.

Excel - avoiding cross casting errors (or SAP rejection due to decimals)

This is a good solution to those times when your data has say 3 decimal points but you are showing your numbers to 2 decimal points and so your totals do not seem to add up.  Excel will round the numbers to the decimal points you have shown.

Warning: remember to check that the total comes back to the number that you had in mind (if there is any cumulative rounding you may need to adjust one of your numbers somewhere along the way).

This is also really useful for SAP journal uploads where any numbers with too many decimals may be rejected.

Scrum reference card

This article is an introduction to the scrum way of working. The scrum is a self organising cross departmental team to deliver a project in a series of sprints. Each sprint delivers a version of the project which can be seen to be working, and although initially greatly simplified, is more complex than the previous version. This aims to avoid the risk of a project that gradually becomes more and more delayed and bogged down with unresolved problems until it fails.

Training related to client project

Three hour training session relating to client project. Access to this link is currently restricted due to client confidentiality.

Lean, Scrums and Projects

Spent first full day with a client's project team working with Scrum and Lean methodologies.  Seem to be some good ideas for tracking ideas through, maintaining drive and keeping strong communication with other teams.

This site (which I have not yet studied in detail) seems to have outlines of the principles with some video training materials.

I'm Giving Away My Bitcoin. You Should Too. | LinkedIn

Interesting article about Bitcoin.  A completely different conclusion to the writer of that article might have come to would be: increasing supply with slower increasing demand may lead Bitcoin value to fall which could lead to Bitcoin panic and a crash.

I'm Giving Away My Bitcoin. You Should Too. | LinkedIn:

How to Sync Google and Outlook Calendars: alternatives to the defunct Google sync utility - PC Advisor

How to Sync Google and Outlook Calendars: alternatives to the defunct Google sync utility - PC Advisor:

This is a really useful article if you or your family have some users using Outlook and others using Google calendar. The top part of the article covers how to avoid the problem (mainly by sticking to one or the other). At the bottom of the article is a suggestion of some free software that sorts the problem out.

Do note though the limitation: this works well for synchronising one Google calendar with Outlook. It does not seem to work so well where you may have a situation with multiple Google calendars that you may wish to synchronise into Outlook.

'via Blog this'

Excel name box tips

Handy tips from the LinkedIn group 'Excel Gurus'.  Ever been at the bottom of a long spreadsheet, scrolled up to read the title but lost the column before you got to the top?  Typing c in the name box will select the whole column containing the active cell.

Caffeine: The Silent Killer of Success

Caffeine: The Silent Killer of Success:

Especially interesting is that caffeine has a half life of 6 hours - so your lunch time coffee is 25% still active after 12 hours.

Further facts from Wikipedia: 
1 Decaffeinated drinks contain typically 1–2% of the original caffeine content, and sometimes as much as 20%.
2 A generally accepted statistic is that a cup of normal black (often called red in China; as distinct from green) tea contains 40–50 mg of caffeine, roughly half the content of a cup of coffee.

'via Blog this'

Business case for having dual screens

I have been a great believer in using multiple screens for many years.  If you need to be able to justify this for your team, this business case may help.

Excel subtotals and summaries

Some really useful ideas for Excel especially how to create manual subtotals which can be set up to exclude (or include) hidden numbers.

This could be especially useful where a single layout is used for presenting accounts each month and empty rows are hidden.  If the row is not empty the following month but is still hidden, a SUM formula would still add the number which could allow a balance sheet to balance at the bottom but the total to not equal the sum of the (shown) figures above it.  SUBTOTAL(109,range) gets round this problem or would allow a logical check to test this issue.

Speed reading book review

A short book so a quick read (even for a slow reader).  Key points are:

• Consciously use different speeds of reading for different tasks: proof reading is slow, reading for understanding is medium, skimming to find the important bits, for an overview or to remind can be fast.
• Do not 'verbalise' each word, even in your head.  Read chunks not words so that your eyes bounce say twice on each row.
• Decide why you are reading the piece first so that your objectives are clear.  Bearing in mind your objectives, read the intro, chapter heads and conclusion first to check the rest warrants reading and if appropriate, just read the parts that achieve your aims.

How to Speed Read: Faster Reading, Improved Comprehension and Becoming a Better Reader: A Very Easy Guide (30 Minute Read)

How to use google to search a single website

I am sure this will be a really handy tool on occasions.

Person Action Object (PAO) memory system

This page gives a good explanation and some ideas for creating a PAO system.  Obviously a fair amount of work is required to create one's own PAO and of course to learn it before it can be used.

Project Management novel

Rocks Into Gold by Clark Ching is a similar idea to the excellent series of books by Goldratt where you read a fun fictional story and follow a character learning about something useful.  Goldratt's books are about the Theory of Contraints, this book by Ching is saving a company from collapse by restructuring a project in order that parts can be delivered earlier improving cash flow.  You don't have to be an accountant to appreciate it.  There is certainly a gap in the market for more books using this technique of combining fiction with learning.

Agile Project Management - brief book review

Agile Project Management For Busy Managers by Tony Riches

A succinct readable book introducing Agile Project Management.  In a nutshell, seems to say don't spend ages specing everything out in minute detail because things will change.  Identify easy wins and deliver minimum first followed by more.  This seems to tie in with the 'minimum viable product' ideas from lean manufacture.

Memory book - brief review

Moonwalking with Einstein, the art of remembering everything by Joshua Foer.

An enjoyable and educational read.  Written by a young journalist learning about memory techniques who was told 'anyone can learn this' - so he tried.  He agreed to practice for an hour a day in exchange for tips from an expert thinking about making a business out of teaching the techniques.  Within a year, the journalist won the US Memory Championship.

Interestingly, he still forgets where he left his car and still writes phone numbers down but can remember many things and names when he chooses.  Concentration and actively storing the data seems to be key.  a good overview and basic introduction to some of the techniques.

E-signature and E-sign Software Solution — EchoSign

Have just tested Echosign, Adobe's electronic signature solution.



Would be really good for contracts but a bit over the top for signing off monthly reconciliations (which can be achieved for free with Adobe Reader).  Echosign is about £100 per user per year but only the document originator needs the licence.  Adobe says that electronic signatures are fully compliant with English law although I have not verified this.

Working with text in Excel

http://m.accountingweb.co.uk/article/working-text-excel/559914

Facebook Buying 11,000 Small Drones To Beam Internet To Africa - Business Insider

Facebook Buying 11,000 Small Drones To Beam Internet To Africa - Business Insider: "Facebook Buying 11,000 Small Drones To Beam Internet To Africa"

Perhaps this could be a way forward.  If this idea were extended beyond Africa, it could be a way provide more robustness against attack of the internet in time of war - although we still need a way of protecting ourselves against an EMP (electromagnetic pulse).

Privacy - what data to share

Interesting article from Dr Ian Oliver about privacy (on a nursing website but the lessons are transferable).  He explains (with a Venn Diagram) about the risks of passing on too much information.  My thought though is that in many situations like this, the greater risk is that fear about privacy concerns prevents sharing of information which then poses a greater risk.

Using a real example from this week: an employee is severely allergic to balloons (or the powder that lines them) and tells her boss.  Medical privacy might suggest we can't tell anyone but is this really in the best interest of the employee?  Does the risk of the privacy breach outweigh the risk of death caused by a potential allergic episode each time someone has a birthday and their desk is decorated with balloons?

How To Get Links Removed From Google - Business Insider

Here's a post about something I hope never to need (but useful to know about just in case).

How To Get Links Removed From Google - Business Insider: "Here's How To Get Google To Remove Embarrassing Search Links About You".

Tips for managing remote workers

http://www.cgma.org/magazine/news/pages/201410044.aspx

Research about non-verbal cues for lying

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/how-to-tell-if-someone-is-lying/?utm_source=Socialflow&utm_medium=Tweet&utm_campaign=Socialflow