Busy season, what is it good for?

Turns out, six things.

I’ve been very busy lately at work. It’d be depressing to write a post about how crappy that is, so I’m going to write about what’s good about it:

  1. Seeing co-workers more frequently. It’s the nature of the business that I don’t see them very often, but during busy season I find myself heading back to the office when the client closes shop at 5pm. I’m not alone.
  2. Free food. I can’t work more to earn more with no overtime pay, but I can work more to pay less for necessities. Dinner is usually ordered at the office around 7-8pm.
  3. Hours. One of the experience requirements on the road to a CA is certain requirements to work so many audit, review, compilation and tax hours. During busy season, hours are plentiful.
  4. Avoiding rush hour traffic. You start early and end late, so the roads are pretty good when you’re on them. That really helps on the snow days.
  5. Winter. It’s the worst months of the year that you’re cooped up inside, and things are really laid back through the summer. If it has to be this way at some time of the year, they picked the best time.
  6. New faces around the office. We get new Co-op students each January, and older Co-ops start full time. The office is full of life.

There. That was a lot better than complaining.

UFE buddy for everyone

I got a mass email about a week ago from the person in my firm who runs the UFE prep program for our UFE writers. She wanted to know if any of the recipients, who were passers of the exam in recent years, would be willing to be a “UFE Buddy” to a 2007 writer.

This is not a new program in our firm – or others I would imagine – I had a UFE Buddy last year. The Buddy is there to provide general advice, mark cases and be a listening ear in what is generally a high-stress time in a prospective CA’s life.

My Buddy came through when I needed him last summer, when I was feeling stressed out and thought I’d already peaked several weeks before the exam. So naturally I jumped at the chance to be a Buddy for a co-worker just beginning their journey to CA-hood.

So far I haven’t heard back yet about who I’ll be Buddying up with. In our office we have about 7-10 people who could be writing if they pass the School of Accountancy in June, which is a quite a lot.

Which brings me to the point of this post (about time, I know). I receive a smattering of email from UFE candidates from across this huge country thanks to this very blog and my numerous posts from the last year on the topic, when I went through the process from start to finish. In that way, I kind of consider myself a UFE Buddy for everyone.

I’m always willing to give the straight dope on the process as someone who knows just how harrowing it is. So keep sending me your questions, I will do whatever possible to help you get through the most challenging exam you will ever write.

IT departments are not leading innovation in firms

An article in The Economist’s December 23, 2006 holiday double issue caught my attention. It reported on how Arizona State University was converting their email system over to use Google’s free hosted service, under the “Google Apps for your Domain” offering that I blogged about back in August last year. I’m still using the service for my @neilmcintyre.ca email and it works great.

Unlike the university’s old system, which stores emails [sic] on its own server computers, the new accounts reside on Gmail, Google’s free web-based service. [The IT department at ASU] is not forcing anybody to change but has found that the students, many of whom were already using Gmail for their private email, have been voluntarily migrating to the new service at a rate of 300 per hour.

Unfortunately since The Economist protects its online content and I’m not a subscriber, I don’t have access to the online version of the story and cannot link to it in its entirety. Shame.

[The new head of IT at ASU] is ahead of his time because most IT bosses tend to be skeptical of consumer technologies and often ban them outright. Employees, in turn, tend to ignore their IT departments.

That passage really resonated with me. I think accounting firms have the most extreme cases of this happening since so many employees of firms are young like me and have used these technologies since early high school. I know more of my peers at work with banned software on their computers than I know without.

But as long as IT departments are so out of touch with their own area of expertise, it will continue. Just last week our IT department sent out an email with this gem: “Windows XP is extremely stable…”

I can’t figure out whether they were trying to put on a strong face about our critical IT infrastructure, or whether they actually believed the fiction that Microsoft products resemble anything close to stable.

There are myriad free tools available to improve productivity in corporations. Accounting firms should lead the charge given that auditors are most often out of the office at client sites where IT resources are varied and usually inadequate for our needs.

Tools like Basecamp for organizing and collaborating with audit team members, IM using Google Talk or MSN, and web-based email such as Gmail which integrates smart calendaring and the aforementioned IM, would lead to massive productivity gains. Security is the only issue at this point, but with the right approach to mitigating the risks, it can be done, and it can be done now, rather than years from now.

Apple’s “select” listing on the Nasdaq in jeopardy

Apple logoApple has informed investors that due to the ongoing investigation into their options backdating problems, they may be removed from the Nasdaq‘s special “Global Select Market.” How select, you may ask? Well, a mere 1/3 of companies listed on the Nasdaq are privileged enough to make the cut.

Wait, was that a typo? One-third of companies on the entire exchange are “select?” Kind of redefines the word now doesn’t it? According to the Times Online story:

Membership confers an extra degree of respectability on a company’s accounting and corporate governance procedures and, accordingly, gives investors an increased level of confidence.

Given all the tech companies that are having options troubles lately and the concentration of tech companies listed on the Nasdaq in general, this may not be the last one we hear with their “selectness” up in the air. Heck, Activision‘s on it and they just filed a non-reliance 8K for the past 15 year’s financials last week! More details:

Apple acknowledged in December that it had falsified records to show that a board meeting was held to approve the move when no such meeting took place. Apple also said that Mr Jobs was not aware of accounting implications of backdating and that he returned the options so that he would not benefit from the practice.

Fair enough. He’s not an accountant, after all. But was Mr Jobs unaware of the implications of falsifying records as well? Or is legitimate corporate record-keeping now… obsolete?