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Posts Tagged ‘Accounting’

When choosing the right career, some people find themselves overwhelmed with the various educations that go along with their career of choice.  Do you find that you’re the type of person that panics because they’re unable to find what exactly is right for you? Picking the right career can be a tricky process, particularly if you’re at the start of your life. Luckily, there are career coaches that are instrumental in spearheading the path to your ideal future professional existence. Whether they’re computer science careers, accounting careers and/or finding the right computer programmer salary; there is career information for everyone. By discovering significant ‘key’ areas in self-assessment, decision making and creative implementation, there are certain careers that are suited to match a specific person’s skills, talents, and personality.

The Guide to Success

• Ask yourself the right questions in order to discover what you really want and need from a specific career opportunity.
• Let’s say that you have a particular interest in say, ‘Accounting Careers.’ Well, it would be wise to do your homework on that specific career and whether or not it is right for you.
• Some career choices are a little more complex, like computer science careers but your dream job is what it is and what you make of it.

• In some cases, individuals will encounter obstacles starting down a career path and you have to find resources to overcome those. For example, if you’re trying to achieve the highest computer programmer salary around; you better do some research on the type of education needed and then get a lot of work experience so that you’re able to get the most with regards to compensation.

• Both professional and personal skills are necessary to get the job of your dreams. You must find education avenues to further your knowledge in a specific area so that you’re getting the most from any career opportunity. Especially if you’re looking at a computer programmer salary and computer science careers; these areas can be highly technical in nature and staying ahead of current technology trends will give you a huge leg up on the entire field of career candidates. Same thing goes for accounting careers or anything that is highly analytical in nature.

With regards to career choices, don’t settle for anything you know is second best. Always be on the look-out for more information and opportunities for advancement based on you level of expertise. If your motto is, “knowledge is power”, and “hard work pays off” then you’re well on your way to success.

PCAOB

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), sometimes referred to as Peekaboo, is a private-sector, nonprofit corporation that was created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The PCAOB is under the jurisdiction of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the creation of the PCAOB was a direct result of the accounting fraud scandals of Enron and WorldCom. The purpose of the PCAOB is to oversee auditors of public companies in order to protect the interests of investors and further the public interest in the preparation of informative, fair, and independent audited financial statements. This was the first time that public companies were required to have audits on the effectiveness of their internal control over corporate financial reporting. The PCAOB has established auditing, quality control, ethics, and independence standards to be used by registered public accounting firms in the preparation of audited financial statements for publicly traded companies, as required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires the PCAOB to: register accounting firms that audit publicly companies,; inspect registered accounting firms and their associated Certified Public Accountants (CPA’s) annually for those whom annually audit over 100 public companies and a minimum of once every three years for those that audit under 100, assess the degree to which the firms comply with the act, the rules of the PCAOB and the SEC, professional standards in connection with the performance and issuance of audited financial statements and attest services; related matters involving public companies, and investigate and discipline any accounting firms and related accountants who are in violation of specific laws or standards. All firms are still required to have peer review of their auditing and accounting practice in order to satisfy the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) membership, federal regulatory (Generally Accepted Auditing Standards) and/or state licensing requirements. There are currently over 2,000 public accounting firms registered with the PCAOB, with more pending registration. A list of current and pending registered firms can be found on the PCAOB website.

The PCAOB currently has pending a requirement that all registered firms submit an annual report on Form 2, provided on the PCAOB website, by June 30th, except for those firms that have been registered between April 1st and June 30th of that year. Also they will be required to pay an annual fee to the PCAOB by July 31st. As these requirements are still pending approval, the annual report and fees are not required for the 2009 calendar year deadlines. In these reports the registered firms must provide various information for the year including: audited financial statement reports issued during the year; disciplinary history of any accountants that joined the firm during the year; a break down of the fees for services provided to all clients during the year, showing the percentage of the fees billed to public audit clients for audit services, other accounting services, tax services, and non-audit services. The PCAOB also requires registered firms to submit special reports on Form 3 within 30 days of the occurrence of the special event. Such special events include change of name or contact information, withdrawal of an audited financial statement by an auditor if the client did not report withdrawal in the 8-K filing with the SEC, and if legal, administrative, or disciplinary action have been taken again the firm or its related accountants. These reports, along with reports from the PCAOB on its inspections of public company audits will be available to the public on their website.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s goal is to improve the quality of audited financial statements, reduce the risk of auditing failures, and increase public trust in financial reporting processes and of the auditing profession. To do this the PCAOB regularly issues reports detailing its inspections of public company audits. One of their main concerns resulting from their inspections is to refocus and remind auditors of the standards required of them regarding fraud and for them to be diligent about their responsibilities relating to fraud. One of the main purposes of audited financial statements is to detect material misstatements and false or missing information caused by fraud.

Max ROI

Science has given us several fundamental laws which describe how our world, and the entire universe for that matter, will always operate. Take Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion or the three fundamental laws of Thermodynamics as an example. From these seemingly simple laws, much of our entire complex world can be described. Modern scientists and physicists are still searching for the ultimate universal law, a theory of everything, which will capture the very nature of the universe mathematically. Until they succeed, this article will now present the three laws of creating competitive advantages for your business. I urge you to use their power wisely. Before you read anything else, I want you to ask yourself two questions. What is the one thing that my business does better than anyone else in my marketplace? Can you state it within the context of your Business Center of Gravity (BCG)? If not, I urge you to go back and answer that question after you finish this article and have put some thought into it. Until you can answer that question, your business will continue to struggle. Now, was your first answer related to differentiating your product or service? Odds are that it was. The two basic forms of strategy suggest that a business will pursue a strategy of either cost leadership by achieving the lowest price or one of differentiation where specific attributes of a business set it apart from all others. The following laws correlate creating competitive advantages through differentiation as we encourage the pursuit of a differentiation strategy over a cost leadership one. The first law of competitive advantage is the principal of conservation of differentiation. This law states that competitive advantages based on differentiation are neither created nor destroyed, they can only change form. This is critical to understand because in an ultra-competitive marketplace, a competitive advantage will not remain an advantage indefinitely. Remember, your competition as the ability to adapt. The consistent transformation to new competitive advantages is what will generate long term cash flow and prevents the erosion of your strategic positioning. The second law of competitive advantage is the principle of the constant factor rule in differentiation. This rule allows you to separate constant factors of your business outside of your business model and concentrate on differentiating the business itself. In other words, there are certain things that are required to be done by any business and certain industries require certain things to be preformed. Such constants must be examined separately from the truly differentiating factors of the business. For example, just because a wedding photographer delivers photographs to her clients, this alone does not giver her competitive advantage in the wedding photography industry. The third law of competitive advantage is the principle of Business Center of Gravity (BCG). This law says that a competitive advantage is proportional to the significance of the BCG times the impulse of the business in the market. A Business Center of Gravity is what your business cannot function without and is directly linked to what your customers and clients cannot function without. The significance of your BCG times the force your business exerts in your marketplace over time directly results in the influence of your competitive advantage on your ideal clients. This means that you must understand and know your Business Center of Gravity as well and create massive and rapid forceful actions within your market if you are to truly leverage the power of your competitive advantage. With these laws in mind, it is important to understand that competitive advantages are generated by the communication of the Business Center of Gravity and that creating new competitive advantages is critical to business success because your differentiation will erode over time. A good fourth law would be to forget the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis. It has useful applications for keeping people busy, but within the context of the laws of creating competitive advantage it is unsupported and will not help you in creating true and powerful differentiation. Just like the greatest scientific laws that describe movement and energy, the laws of creating competitive advantage will provide you with a clear and actionable understanding of the nature of your business so that you can generate revenue by truly leveraging your differentiation.

‘Accounting for a Better Life’ is a book in which John Passmore proposes a new, simplified and fun approach, to home and personal bookkeeping and accounting.

The new methods, based on what he calls, domestic well-being accounting, enable people to gain control of their personal and domestic, financial affairs. The system provides the necessary visibility so that users will know exactly what their money is being spent on, and how well balanced their spending is, in relation to its distribution.

The balance is across basic domestic needs and responsibilities, discretionary spending on holidays, leisure and entertainment, and provision for future well-being. Knowing about the current and past spending patterns, users can determine where and by how much, changes might be needed. Budgeting and associated feedback, facilitate the monitoring of such financial planning.

The author believes the new methods have the potential to be adopted as a formal, sub-discipline of business accounting, eventually perhaps, with suitable certificates and diplomas for those who learn how to use it successfully.

With such recognition, the motivation for appropriate investment from industry and the state becomes real, so that domestic accounting, its further calibration and an associated training infrastructure, can all be further developed and refined.

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