September 2005

Fire and brimstone

September 26, 2005 Tax and Ethics

Simon Sweetham has sparked a furious outpouring about the appointment of KPMG by HMRC to review the administrative burden faced by small business taxation. At a cost to all of us of £6 million. Here’s some of the debate: Simon opines: "But deep down it bothers me that the people doing this work are KPMG, [...]

Read the full article →

Arctic Systems – an exercise in torture

September 19, 2005 General

The Arctic Systems case is of interest to many professionals. My interest is in how this gets communicated to clients. AccountingWEB talks about the technical approach and Institute guidance. Great. Menzies previously offered advice in June. Its tone is matter of fact yet accessible for the man in the street. So did Grant Thornton. But [...]

Read the full article →

Help is always welcome

September 16, 2005 Marketing

Here’s an update. John Stockdyk at AccountingWEB gave us a massive hat tip this morning. Visitors shot through the roof – like 580 visits this morning and 890 since last Sunday morning. I need to tweak the visitor stats thingy to figure out where people are coming from and all that but WOW. Who else [...]

Read the full article →

Mobile strategies

September 16, 2005 General

The announcement that BDO Stoy Hayward is deploying 000′s of mobile devices made me laugh. They’ve made the classic mistake of deploying across multiple hardware (read Blackberry, Orange, etc etc) instead of standardising and then cutting the best deal possible. There’s also insight into their charging structure. A Blackberry’s usage gets paid for in an [...]

Read the full article →

Blogging ROI

September 10, 2005 General

Remember Conversations 101? I posed the question: So what choice are you going to make? Waste 45 minutes on three non-productive calls or… Spend ten minutes writing a post while you’re having coffee 45 minutes at say £120/hr = £9010 minutes = £20 Additional costs: Crank out standard letters (personalized using MS Word macros (yuk), [...]

Read the full article →