report

Feedback from Optimising your financial reporting systems for long-term value

by

Well I did say the test of transparency would be whether I rushed to put up a poor evaluation of a presentation.  I did a roadshow for CPA Australia in July (24th and 25th) in Sydney and Melbourne to the topic of ‘Optimising your financial reporting systems for long-term value’.  The feedback that was received was not as good as I would have liked but if you’re going to give presentations you’re not going to find it possible to do really well all the time.

I did spend at least a day putting together the presentation and trying to convert COBIT-type thinking to a more practical consideration.  Probably predictably the feedback was mixed.

At any rate I am posting the feedback.  It’s always a good thing to be transparent and honest, I am sure.  Just ask governments.  Firstly the average overall rating was 3.9 (where 1 = poor, 2 = fair, 3 = average, 4 = very good and 5 = excellent).  So I suppose if we rounded it’s still a ‘Very Good’ assessment.  Technical content received an average of 4.27 and presentation skills 3.96.  CPA’s look for 4.2 so I guess that’s not as good as it could have been.  I’m hoping the audience were hard markers.

Comments specific to my presentation included:

  • Great.  Nice to see some personality, relevance and interaction with us.
  • Presentation too long – had to rush through part of it
  • Great presenter but subject matter much too vague
  • Good speaker, covered the topic well, shame we ran out of time
  • Gave some practical things/going to ask myself
  • Great – very knowledgeable
  • Too much consulting waffle
  • Great – Entertaining

The only unambiguously negative comment of course is the ‘too much consulting waffle’ comment.  Personally I thought I had added just the right amount of consulting waffle but perhaps some people don’t like as much waffle as others do. :).

Overall the ratings are a ‘Very Good’ and it’s of course silly to go off the deep end over that.  Still I would have liked to do better on that score.

Ah well, ‘Must try harder’.  

Communicating financials to management: Developing effective reporting mechanisms

by

I seem to be doing an awful lot of work for CPA Australia lately – which is good, I kinda like the place.

On 26 August I am presenting a session entitled ‘Communicating Financials to management:  developing effective reporting mechanisms’.  Apparently this session needs to explain:

  • How to develop effective reporting mechanisms that ensures data of high integrity and quality
  • Responding to management information needs: how to develop a process that ensures timely response
  • Other key reporting and systems issues that affect how information is presented and used

Hmmm.  Should be quite a trick. Ah well, turning my mind to this thought at the moment.  Looking forward to it – apparently I present at the Royal on the Park.

As is my usual practice, I’ve uploaded the brochure here.

Optimising your financial reporting systems for long-term value

by

I presented for CPA Australia on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, firstly in Sydney, and then in Melbourne.  The topic was ‘Optimising your financial reporting systems for long-term value’, and was part of their streamlining finance processes conference.

Overall the presentations went fairly well.  There’s always a conflict between war stories, which are interesting and helpful, and content, which is helpful.  I try not to have a lecture, but I still managed to run out of time both times.  Note to self:  cut down, cut down, cut down.

Anyhoo, I promised that I’d upload an example survey tool and my speaker notes, so they are attached to this blog post.

You can download the Speaker Notes here, and you can download the full presentation here. The speaker notes are just the dot points I intended to cover off in the presentation.

The example survey can be downloaded here.

I stayed at the Sydney Marriott overnight – that was quite nice:

If you attended, please feel free to give feedback.  I hope something was obtained from the presentation, and if there are questions please feel free to give me a call.

Effective business reporting

by

I’m a great fan of the COBIT and VAL-IT frameworks, but I also like to try and reconcile complex frameworks. I also hire a translation company at https://www.espressotranslations.com/gb/french-translation-services-london/ to make them a bit easier to understand for our non-native English speakers. I also like to talk in terms of people, process and technology, as I think that conceptually we can easily get our heads around it, and it also helps us turn complex things into stuff we can use in a small business and specially in home based business.

Frameworks like COBIT provide us with a way of distilling out the unnecessary.  It is so easy with an IT area to have it seem so complex that you don’t know where to start.  COBIT lets us see what matters, and it provides a strong link between the strategic direction and management of the business, and allows us to identify from those business goals the things that the IT area needs to be doing  That is the fundamental basis of the Getting IT Right service line that I provide through my company, Applied Insight Pty Ltd. It isn’t just something I made up, it has a real basis in research into the practice of IT management.

So for the effective business reporting presentation, I have taken the people-process-technology relationship, added environmental factors in the context of the financial reporting system (so, financial capacity, regulatory compliance, and business strategy), and then linked this to the COBIT process framework (DS11 – Data Management).

This approach can be seen here:

And linking through, I can, using this approach, give you a framework you can use to diagnose and assess the effectiveness of your financial reporting systems:

I have done this simply by identifying the key words in the COBIT control objective identified – it talks about words like ‘complete’, ‘accurate’, valid’ etc (as referred to in blue), and then you have a coherent, flexible, approach to the delivery of effectiveness business reporting without the need to make it up (so we know it’s complete) but not so complex and rich that it can’t be understood.

If I as a business can take these factors and score them

in some way, I have a good approach for assessing the health of my business reporting systems.  And that is half of the purpose of the presentation coming up is anyway.

Doing my PhD

by

Well for a long time I’ve been fascinated by business – did my Commerce degree at UQ in 1991 – I tortured myself a fair bit by deciding to do the Honours course.  Which was nothing like I thought it would be, and was certainly the hardest year of my life (so far) work-wise. 

Graduating in 1991 was not a good time.  Today, you graduate, you get paid $40,000 minimum, and the accounting firms fall over themselves to have you work for them for 2 years before you do the London thing.  In 1991, it was quite the other way around. So I didn’t work for an accounting firm.  Or a bank.  Who, in their wisdom, had decided the world actually really didn’t need accountants.  They were protecting their profits, but probably didn’t do too much for the profession. 

I worked in private schools for 5 years before realising that I probably didn’t want to stay in the same role for another fifteen years (advice I actually received – I was ‘too young’ to be promoted any more 🙂 – try that on today!).  So I went looking somewhere where being 27 was not considered a career choice!

I did my Masters in Information Systems in 1996 (finishing in 2000), again at UQ.  I became a CPA in 1997.  That opened up the door to consulting in business systems with both Horwath and then BDO Kendalls when Horwath merged into BDO Kendalls locally.  I joined the ITM CoE in 1998, and became its chair in 2002 after Tony Hayes moved on. 

I mostly loved BDO Kendalls as a firm – of course, we had our moments, but I was there for ten years so something must have been OK.  It’s a great accounting firm, with very talented and hardworking people.  Unfortunately due to family commitments and the need for long hours, I couldn’t stay there forever so it was best I leave and strike out on my own.  That has mostly worked well, although again that’s had its moments.  It’s reaffirmed my understanding of the need for cashflow in a small business in its growth phase, particularly during that all-important startup period!

Where’s this going?

Well, as part of my new-found life, which still very much involves consulting, but not trying to juggle family responsibilities and a national firm, I’ve done a little bit of lecturing from time to time (mostly QUT).  Which has been interesting and has lead to other things.  When I left, though, the plan was to work as a part-time lecturer as a sort of base job. 

I’ve since discovered that, in reality, to do that you mostly need to either have a PhD or be doing one.  I also found out the pay-rates for academics – even in IS, academics are paid less than the tealady in a commercial firm.  When a web-designer with four years experience commands a $70K package, and an associate lecturer gets $54K, there’s an economic imperative at work.

Fortunately I’m not entirely motivated by money – I like to do new things, interesting things, relevant things. Searching out mobile phone plans for clients is not necessarily my cup of tea (not one of my banner-moments in the past!).  Im a tad more ‘big-picture’ than that.  So I approached UQ about doing my PhD, and they just happen to have a scholarship going for a PhD student to review the impact of IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) on IT audit methodologies (see here, at the top of Page 54).  It’s almost exactly what I’m interested in, involves working with the auditors-general around the country, and it’s important (that’s why it’s one of those rare things, a PhD with funding – not a lot of funding really, for what is needed, but funding nonetheless). 

Peter tells me he’s after someone ‘mature’ to do the work – so maybe I’ve shaken off those baby-faced looks from when I was too young be promoted :).  Had to happen eventually I guess.

Personally it suits me to part-time consult and work on this topic.  It’s not quite exactly what I’m interested in, but half the work of a PhD is coming up with a topic, and here it is laid out for me on a platter, with funding and research subjects on the side.  So – I’ve said I’m up for doing it

So – I’m told an office is involved, and that I’ll have to be at UQ a fair amount of the time, but that is fairly flexible and it’s really about outcomes. The picture below is of the building at UQ where I’ll be spending most of my time.  I’ll have to buy myself some suspenders and jeans now that I’m working in academia.  There is a coffee shop and it’s a wonderful location (parking is kind of poor but we’ll deal with that and how bad could it possibly be (gak! famous last words!).

For any clients reading this, please note that I’ll still be available for consulting work – for most clients, pretty much on the same basis as before.  You won’t notice the difference, I promise, and in the meantime I get to work with some great people on a big-picture topic area of interest.  In fact, it’s a topic that’s just crying out for consulting and linking with the business community.

Guess that’s why it’s a linkage grant then, huh.