A small crop of questions shows the value of www.duncanwil.co.uk! Katie still wants to know when my financial accounting pages will be ready to buy: Dear Katie, I'm working on it! I have spent a very frustrating time trying to sort out my eshop and have found ecommerce "experts" are almost useless in terms of what they will do for free. That is now behind me and I will be posting three management accounting sections for sale later today. I will then begin working on your suggestion and would estimate that within the week I will have a completed package. OK? Thanks for remembering: your exam in early in June isn't it? Plenty of time to stay with me and succeed!! Graeme is a Benford's Law geek like me and he asked Duncan, I have an interest in the practical application of Benson's Law to catch financial fraud. Do you have, or know of a a website that has a downloadable spreadsheet for Benford's law that I could run my own data series through? Regards Graeme Here's what I was able to do for him: Dear Graeme, I mess around with Benford's Law from time to time and develop my own spreadsheets. I have attached one of my spreadsheets: let me know if you find it difficult to work and I'll explain! Best wishes Finally for now, Frank wanted the complete case; power point presentation, tables for all days' output and the weekly combined total, solutions. Frank I sent it to him! More glorious weather forecast for today! DW

Good news everyone! I have now finally got my eShop open for business. If you are in the least bit interested in GCSE Business Studies examinations for the coming Summer series, you NEEEEEED to take a look here Case Study Shop Window for full details and Business Studies Shop to buy and pay by using the highly secure PayPal system It has taken too long to get this shop up and running but it's there now and over the next few days you will find three or four major new management accounting resources for sale ... watch this space. DW

Tony replied and said: Hi Duncan, Once again, you hit the nail on the head. Thanks Tony There you go! DW

Flushed with success, Tony came back with a request for information on goal congruence in budgetary control systems. Well, without being too specifc, I decided to research goal congruence in general and let Tony pick the bones out of it! Here's an almost anaonymous page that compares the Balanced ScorCard with GE's famous 8 key result areas: when you go to that page you'll see why I say it's almost anonymous. This PDF file looks good: a fancy tile in academicese but the content looks good: Graham Francis provided an NHS based example for my book! This pave has a huge number of ideas that relate to budgeting and other things too. Again, semi anonymous ... people who put together such good resources have the right to tell people who they are: don't be so shy! Elementary but you never know: a presentation on basic budgeting Slightly more advanced but not the bee's knees! Chris Lamb's excellent listings service comes up with another excellent list, on goal congruence this time, of course. Some intriguing diagrams here! Another basic page, another PDF file. Finally, you might find this short page sparks something too! That should be useful, tony! DW

We've had a month of the best daffodils that I've seen: honest, I've found that watering them every day has made them tall and strong and long lasting. That was in the back garden and now the daffodils in the front garden have just started to open, along with the tulips that are there too. Marvellous! Dima's away for the Easter Holiday so Mrs W is giving ME all the jobs that either he normally does or that we normally share! What a life! DW

This morning, the BBC is talking about a meeting of firefighters in England today ... are they the same firefighters who have just swept through Iraq? Just pointing out the nonsense that can arise when clots start to steal language from another culture. We have firefighters x 2 now and they do completely different jobs. Let's go back to firemen and gun fighters! At least we know where we are with those two. DW

Steven wrote a rather cheeky note: Could you please let me know the web site for Canada which can provide information about the following: 1. evolution of accounting in canada 2. accounting standards setting boards in canada 3. accounting professional bodies in canada 4. governmant influence 5. environmental factors cheers Steven Cheeky because it looks like his assignment, nothing more or less. Still, given my come one, come all attitude, I am here to help; and this is what I have found for him. I couldn't find just ONE web site to answer this question, Steven, so here is a good essay to start off with AccountingEducation. It's a teaching guide has been prepared to provide users with an overall understanding of accounting and assurance standards in Canada. You can also go here which is the web site of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. There's the Accounting Standards Oversight Council of Canada, too that has a lot to think about. I did a search for accounting professional bodies in canada and found this page from Hong Kong ... scroll down for Canada ... if you're searching for other countries, take a look, there's just a few more! Here's a really useful page from IASPLUS.COM, that fantastic IAS/IFRS based resource that has generally useful pages, too. There you are Steven: a cracking start, I think! DW

Follow up from Tony. He replied as yet another satisfied customer: Hi Duncan, Thank you so much. The material you have found for me is exactly what i'm looking for. Thanks again, Tony Aw, shucks, I'm blushing! DW

Let me put on record just how useless the BBC weather forecasters are. There! Done! They promise sunshine and we get cloud. They promise temperatures that mean we can fry eggs on the pavements, t'flags as we call 'em up North and my new Peach tree ends up half dead from frost bite. They promise 'unusually warm for the time of year' and Mrs W sits in our South facing living room wrapped up in a blanket in the middle of the day. Rubbish. They also tell us 'right now' this and 'right now' that and the glorious weather we're having (as if!) will hold through Thursday ... what on earth does that mean? Rubbish weather forecasting and rubbishEnglish! DW

Tony from Liverpool wanted to know what I could tell him about the Behavioural Aspects of Budgeting This topic is one of those that a search on the internet that returns virtually nothing but syllabuses from Universities, tables of contents or seminar schedules. Here’s the best I could find. Firstly, though, take a look at chapter 14 of my book: Cost & Management Accounting published by Prentice Hall. There’s a set of basic lecture notes from Exeter University at Lecture 16 and Lecture 18 although the author makes the mistake of calling zero base budgeting zero based budgeting in lecture 16: an elementary and unforgivable error. Chris Lamb’s excellent service out of UNL comes up with this massive resource list under the heading of Behavioural Aspects of Budgeting: and under the heading of budgeting and budgetary control Under the heading of organisational goals and Investors in People have an introductory page on this sub topic, too. In spite of what I said at the start of this, here is an academic page that looks very useful as a starting point This is written in academicese so needs to be read carefully. It’s also long and needs to be filtered I have been hearing several people talking about participation and ownership recently in connection with managing change and here are a couple of pages linked to these ideas: not all directly connected with budgeting, but you can extend the ideas: firstly two from yours truly: e budgeting zero base budgeting Here’s a seminar schedule that gives a few ideas: just scroll down to BARRIERS TO SUCCESSFUL BUDGETING A PowerPoint presentation with some good starting points although the author makes the mistake of calling zero base budgeting zero based budgeting: an elementary and unforgivable error. Finally, you might find this useful Best wishes anyway, Tony DW

I took my life in my hands and reworked my template myself. I have lost all of the customisation I made but that wasn't too serious. So the glorious look and feel of this Blog is restored!! DW

Brian wrote, from Singapore I think since his surname is Ng! This is what he wanted to know and what follows is what I was able to tell him. Dear Sir, I would like to know the answers regarding:- 1)explain briefly the IAS 1 including fair presentation,accrual,consistency and going concern and suitable examples to illustrate the answer for each explanation? 2)Objective of financial statement to provide information to users.Who are the main categories of users of financial statement of their needs? List and describe the Qualities or Characteristic of useful information. Thank You for provide the answers to me. Hello there Brian, Good to see you visiting my IAS pages. Let me point you in the direction of my other financial accounting pages for your answer. I have a few pages on the basic introduction to financial accounting that I have constructed to apply both the UK accounting and IAS accounting and US accounting ... Go to my home page and choose the financial accounting section and then follow the links for accounting concepts, the going concern concept, what are the objectives of accounting. Don't forget to read through the IAS Framework page in the IAS section, too, though. I hope this is all OK for you but let me know of any further questions. Best wishes DW