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Management Accountant moves to www.managementaccountant.in

Posted in Blogging, Career, Management Accountant on September 30, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Management Accountant which was earlier http://managementaccountant.blogspot.com has moved to its own domain www.managementaccountant.in . You will be able to access the blog same as before.

Few statistics I would like to share with you (readers) about the Management Accountant Blog.

Top 10: Most Read pages on The Management Accountant Blog

Top 10 key words search that leads to The Management Accountant Blog

Top 5 countries where readers of the Management Accountant reside

United States
India
United Kingdom
Australia
Canada

Top 10 My Favourites

Management Accountant Blog has achieved a google page rank of 4/10. All the credit goes to the readers of the Management Accountant blog. On my New Year Resolution, there is a quote

Life is like having a cup of tea.
You sit by the side of the window, lift the cup and take a careless sip,
Only to realize, somebody forgot to put the sugar.
Too lazy to go for it you somehow struggle through the sugarless cup.
Until you discover un-dissolved sugar crystals sitting at the bottom…

With Regards,

Santosh Puthran

Cost of buying information

Posted in Management Accountant, Management Fundas on September 23, 2008| 1 Comment »

In the Information Technology age, we have wide sources available for information that would help in decision making. A skilled user of internet will gather information free on internet and the lesser ones will seek advice from their friends or colleagues or buy information in the form of journals, magazines or library subscription.

What will you rely on when you make decisions in your company ?

Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino published a working paper, “Getting Advice from the Same Source but at a Different Cost: Do We Over weigh Information Just Because We Paid for It?”

Gino’s results are based upon an experiment where subjects were asked to answer different sets of questions about American history and were provided the opportunity to receive free advice as well as costly advice—the same advice, as it turned out.

Gino’s conclusion: When the advice is costly, subjects are more inclined to take it into consideration and use it. And that conclusion can have profound consequences for consumers, managers, and organizations in their decision making, she says.

Click here to read More – Interview with Sean Silverthorne

Are you going to hire Management Consultants for a business process change in your company or rely on your own employees to initiate a change ?

Regards,

Santosh Puthran

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Financial Accounting e-book project – Dr D V Ramana & Team

Posted in Financial Accounting, Management Accountant, Management Accounting on September 18, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Dr D V Ramana Ph.D, Professor, Accounting, Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.

Dr. D V Ramana has converted his teaching notes into an e-book. This is opened for the students on a pilot basis to get their feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Visit http://www.accounting-ebook.com/

The e-book contains videos on various topics on finance. Dr D V Ramana would like inputs from you on this project. You will be glad to know that he is also working on IFRS e-book project.

I congratulate him for his efforts on Financial Accounting e-book and wish him All the best for his future projects.

PS: Dr Ramana is a subscriber of Management Accountant Blog. If you are interested to make a guest post on the projects you have undertaken or your article on specific topic that would help the readers, I would be happy to post the same on the blog. Please contact me.

Regards,

Santosh Puthran

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Financial Accounting e-book project – Dr D V Ramana & Team

Posted in Financial Accounting, Management Accountant, Management Accounting on September 18, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Dr D V Ramana Ph.D, Professor, Accounting, Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.

Dr. D V Ramana has converted his teaching notes into an e-book. This is opened for the students on a pilot basis to get their feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Visit http://www.accounting-ebook.com/

The e-book contains videos on various topics on finance. Dr D V Ramana would like inputs from you on this project. You will be glad to know that he is also working on IFRS e-book project.

I congratulate him for his efforts on Financial Accounting e-book and wish him All the best for his future projects.

Regards,

Santosh Puthran

Do you like to be updated in Accountancy ?

Visit MA Stores ? You will find something you are looking for ….

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Beyond Budgeting

Posted in Applications, Management Accountant, Management Accounting, Technology on September 16, 2008| Leave a Comment »

A radical proposition? – From The Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT)

Budgeting, as most corporations practice it, should be abolished. That may sound like a radical proposition, but it is merely the final (and decisive) action in a long running battle to change organizations from centralized hierarchies to devolved networks. Most of the other building blocks are in place. Firms have invested huge sums in quality programs, IT networks, process reengineering, and a range of management tools including EVA, balanced scorecards, and activity accounting. But they are unable to establish the new order because the budget, and the command and control culture it supports, remains predominant.

10 reasons why budgets cause problems:

Budgets are time consuming and expensive.
Budgets provide poor value to users.
Budgets fail to focus on shareholder value.
Budgets are too rigid and prevent fast response.
Budgets protect rather than reduce costs.
Budgets stifle product and strategy innovation.
Budgets focus on sales targets rather than customer satisfaction.
Budgets are divorced from strategy.
Budgets reinforce a dependency culture.
Budgets lead to unethical behaviour.

There are twelve principles (two sets of six) that govern the Beyond Budgeting Model. One set relates to adaptive management processes and the other set relates to a devolved leadership.

Process Principles

The six principles of managing with adaptive processes are as follows:

Goals – set aspirational relative goals for continuous improvement, don’t negotiate fixed contracts
Rewards – reward shared success based on relative performance, not on fixed targets
Planning – make planning a continuous and inclusive process, not an annual event
Controls – base controls on relative KPIs and performance trends, not on variances against plan
Resources – make resources available as needed, not through annual budget allocations
Coordination – coordinate interactions dynamically, not through annual planning cycles

The results of applying these principles include setting aspirational goals, reducing gaming, encouraging ambitious strategies and fast response, reducing waste, improving customer service, and promoting learning and ethical behaviour.

Leadership Principles

The evidence from our cases is that there are six principles that leaders should adopt:

Outcomes – focus everyone on the outcomes, not on hierarchical realtionships
Processes – organize as a lean network of accountatble teams, not as centralized functions
Autonomy – give teams the freedom and capability to act, don’t micro-manage them
Responsibility – create a high responsibility culture at every level, not just at the centre
Transparency – promote open information for self-management, don’t restrict it hierarchically
Governance – Adopt a few clear values, goals and boundaries, not detailed regulations

The effects of these principles include: a clear governance framework leads to the acceptance of local decision making by front-line teams throughout the organization; a high-performance climate leads to sustained competitive success; the freedom to decide fosters innovation and responsiveness; team-based responsibility results in a greater focus on creating value and reducing waste; customer accountability builds more commitment to satisfying customers profitably; and finally, an information culture based on openness and “one truth” promotes ethical behaviour.

SAS can assist with the implementation of these principles as follows:

Target setting – obtain information on competitor activity and link to external databases
Strategy – make the update and maintenance of objectives and targets an easy process
Growth and improvement – build hypotheses and scenarios and test against capabilities
Resource management – track the life time cost and value of resources
Coordination – search for and use cause and effect relationships across business units and processes
Cost management – identify areas of cost which need attention through analysis (eg. Activity Based Costing) and data mining
Forecasting – create and maintain rolling forecasts
Measurement and control – implement a balanced scorecard with leading and lagging indicators
Rewards – track actual performance against targets
Delegation – maintain personal information portals.

SAS is the only software supplier that is capable of collecting, transforming, modelling, analysing and supporting the complex information needs of organisations. Our flexible framework adapts technology to the management processes – not the other way around.

Sources:

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Beyond Budgeting – A radical proposition

Posted in Applications, Management Accounting, Technology on September 16, 2008| Leave a Comment »

A radical proposition? – From The Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT)

10 reasons why budgets cause problems:

Budgets are time consuming and expensive.
Budgets provide poor value to users.
Budgets fail to focus on shareholder value.
Budgets are too rigid and prevent fast response.
Budgets protect rather than reduce costs.
Budgets stifle product and strategy innovation.
Budgets focus on sales targets rather than customer satisfaction.
Budgets are divorced from strategy.
Budgets reinforce a dependency culture.
Budgets lead to unethical behaviour.

There are twelve principles (two sets of six) that govern the Beyond Budgeting Model. One set relates to adaptive management processes and the other set relates to a devolved leadership.

Process Principles

The six principles of managing with adaptive processes are as follows:

Goals – set aspirational relative goals for continuous improvement, don’t negotiate fixed contracts
Rewards – reward shared success based on relative performance, not on fixed targets
Planning – make planning a continuous and inclusive process, not an annual event
Controls – base controls on relative KPIs and performance trends, not on variances against plan
Resources – make resources available as needed, not through annual budget allocations
Coordination – coordinate interactions dynamically, not through annual planning cycles

Leadership Principles

The evidence from our cases is that there are six principles that leaders should adopt:

Outcomes – focus everyone on the outcomes, not on hierarchical realtionships
Processes – organize as a lean network of accountatble teams, not as centralized functions
Autonomy – give teams the freedom and capability to act, don’t micro-manage them
Responsibility – create a high responsibility culture at every level, not just at the centre
Transparency – promote open information for self-management, don’t restrict it hierarchically
Governance – Adopt a few clear values, goals and boundaries, not detailed regulations

SAS can assist with the implementation of these principles as follows:

Target setting – obtain information on competitor activity and link to external databases
Strategy – make the update and maintenance of objectives and targets an easy process
Growth and improvement – build hypotheses and scenarios and test against capabilities
Resource management – track the life time cost and value of resources
Coordination – search for and use cause and effect relationships across business units and processes
Cost management – identify areas of cost which need attention through analysis (eg. Activity Based Costing) and data mining
Forecasting – create and maintain rolling forecasts
Measurement and control – implement a balanced scorecard with leading and lagging indicators
Rewards – track actual performance against targets
Delegation – maintain personal information portals.

Sources:

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Guy Kawasaki presents "The Art of the Start"

Posted in Management Accountant, Videos, Wits and Speech on September 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »

“The Art of of Start” is an excellent presentation on what you should do when are a start-up business. The presentation has tips and is with humour. Highly recommended video to watch.

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Facebook – Stumbleupon – Digg – Twitter – Technorati – FriendFeed – Plurk

Regards,

Santosh Puthran

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Guy Kawasaki presents "The Art of the Start"

Posted in Videos, Wits and Speech on September 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »

“The Art of of Start” is an excellent presentation on what you should do when are a start-up business. The presentation has tips and is with humour. Highly recommended video to watch.

Unable to View. Then click on this link

Connect me on Social Networking Websites :-

Facebook – Stumbleupon – Digg – Twitter – Technorati – FriendFeed – Plurk

Regards,

Santosh Puthran

Would like receive the next update in your Inbox ?

Management Accountant Store, US – Powered by Amazon
Management Accountant Store, UK Stores – Powered by Amazon, UK
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Chrome A new starter

Posted in Management Accountant, Technology on September 5, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Rumors were put to rest when the Google launched its new browser “Chrome“. The beta version claims

“Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.”

Most of the products that google launches are in beta and they allow the public to test their products till they finally graduate. Gmail which was launched in 2004 is still at beta stage !!!

Source: www.gizmodo.com

The new starter Chrome is a new starter in the browser market which is largely dominated by Internet Explorer. Firefox is becoming a popular open source and has made a dent in the market. With “Enter the Chrome” will the browser users be split in three or one of the browser is going to die.

In my earlier post, “How does Firefox make money ?”, I found that Firefox makes money from Google Search and other affiliate programs. So if there is shift by users to Chrome browser then it would ultimately affect funding of Firefox. This could jeopardize the development efforts of Firefox – an open source browser – since the competitor is google who has now its own browser.

Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Firefox 3 had over 8 million download in a single day and it has set a world record. It would interesting to see whether google publishes the number of downloads of Chrome browser. This would be indication which way the wind would blow.

Personally I would prefer to use Firefox now and use Chrome for casual browsing. The download size of Chrome is 475kb as opposed to Firefox (7.8mb) and Opera (9 mb). So I am not sure whether it is a secured browser for transacting on the Internet.

Anyway, welcome aboard “New Starter – Chrome”. Your induction in the market is welcomed.

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Regards,

Santosh Puthran

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