2.4.03

The death of Cost Accounting? Dima showed me some of his notes from school the other day and it sounds the death knell for cost accounting ... my life is now in turmoil. If you want to calculate the cost of ingredients for a meal in a restaurant or at a food processing factory, go to your local supermarket, butcher's or green grocer's, work out the cost of the ingredients and mutliply the total cost by 0.7. To find the selling price of your product, take the cost you have just calculated and multiply it by 3 ... hey presto! Let's boil that down to an even better process: find your costs and simply multiply by 2.1 (that's 0.7 * 3) and whoosh, the selling price in a nonce! Have I been wasting so many years of cost accounting endeavour? DW

1.4.03

My good email friend Kenneth from Malta is a hard working young man who is finishing another post graduate programme and he is about to work on an assignment on Mergers and Acquisitions. I promised I'd try to find some useful web links for him: he doesn't need the answers spelling out for him, just a leg up to get started. The Mergers & Acquisitions Report from Thomson Learning seems to be a good starting point, although the meatiest part of the site is probably for subscribers only: as far as I can tell, registration is free and simple. Not sure how useful this is, UK Business Park page on M&A ... it's a massive list with promise of more lists from previous years! Grant Thornton has a site dedicated to M&A: that looks useful with links to here and there. RBA Information Services has an M&A section that provides links to real examples and useful looking links. The Ofgem is the regulator for Britain's gas and electricity industries and might give some good insights, too. Ananova is a news site that has an M&A news section filled with goodies ... again practical rather than theoretical. There's an American Site that gives a long list of M&A leads that might provide a researcher with some views on who is doing what: they ar relatively small business; and there are US and International links to follow. The Mergers & Acquisitions Advisor has a newsletter and other practical news and advice for its readers. There's a download section, too, that you need to register for to access ... looks free and simple so why not give it a go? The Mergers & Acquisitions Benchmarking Consortium has objectives and missions clearly stated; and there's yet another free and simple registration process to go through! is currently a free association of companies and organizations with mergers and acquisitions organizations. MABC™ conducts benchmarking studies to identify practices that improve the overall operations of the members. MABC™ Mission To identify "Best in Class" mergers & acquisitions processes, which, when implemented, will lead member companies to exceptional performance. There's what is called Mergers & Acquisitions Primer from Find Law in the USA that might be useful to start off any review of the legal aspects of M&A. Reuters Newsagency has an M&A section and down the bottom and left of the page this link takes us to there is an archive section that has a lot of information even in today's link is empty. VentureReporter.NET looks useful as it has a New Research section that takes us immediately to PDF files ... be careful as they take time to download if you don't have a braodband connection! You will need to spend time at this site to get the best from it I think. The Standford Graduate School of Business has announced an Executive Education programme and they publish their topics here: I always find the topics for high quality seminar programmes can be a good source of ideas and inspiration for research. This could be interesting: US Mergers & Acquisitions Calendar for March 2003 Well, Kenneth, that's a lot to think about to start with: a practical rather than a theoretical beginning. Best wishes as ever DW
Putting together this new web site is taking a massive personal effort. By the end of last week I was on the verge of collapse almost. Still, I'm about to announce another new section and I'm working with other people to get my new site fully operational so that you can buy what I am selling! Nera wrote from Jakarta asking what help I could give on ratio analysis and management accounting. Here's what I said: I have just finished a big new section on ratio analysis. When you go to that site you will see at the top of that page and right in the middle, the announcement for this page. When you click on that link you will go straight to the section. The ratio analysis section on biz/ed includes a special database that you can use for yourself and with your students. As far as management accounting is concerned, my site has a he section dedicated to it. I am now setting up a new web site for management accounting that you can take a trial of by going here. There is a lot of information on management accounting on my site. Look at the spreadsheet section of my site, too, for even more that will be useful for you. I hope this is OK but let me know if I can help you further. Best wishes