This is a joint blog post as I am posting it simultaneously to my own blog and to the OxBowBusiness blog.

There are times when it pays to listen to advice. I was brought up in the West Riding of Yorkshire whose motto was audi consilium: I listen to good advice.

A web site that many readers of this site will know and use offers a lot of good services and products: both free and for payment. What they do not do well is control or assure their quality. Several of the things they publish are wrong. Of course, we all make mistakes but how we deal with being told about mistakes says a lot about us: how we use our emotional intelligence.

Whenever I find mistakes in my own and others' work I like to help by sorting out the problem. Tell me I've made a mistake and I'll check it and correct it if appropriate. Don't we all do this when we want to be helpful?

In an education discussion forum, at the Times Educational Supplement site (www.tes.co.uk), you can see that someone (Honest John) wrote to the web master of the other site and s/he received abuse in return. John pointed out that in one quiz of just ten questions, at least seven of the answers given were either wrong or that the question was ambiguous. John was told that they probably lacked knowledge and experience so the web master would post some links to some of their other resources that would help them. John gave a specific example of where they used the word forecast throughout the quiz when they really meant budget. Clearly the person making the comment understood the problem, was able to deal with it but know that an uncertain or weak student would worry. A budget is a financial or quantitative plan for the future. A forecast is a prediction based on fact or fancy. A forecast may become a budget. A budget is not necessarily a forecast. And so on.

My view is that any decent management accounting teacher will make the distinction between a forecast and a budget because examiners ask questions about the differences and because there are differences.

Anyway, at OxBowBusiness we pride ourselves both on the quality of our work and on our ability to cope in an intelligent way when someone points out a mistake we might have made.

As a matter of interest, having followed this story I went to the other site and looked at the quizzes that were being discussed. I can't say that I found all of the errors that Honest John was claiming but I did find a significant number and have prepared a quiz with the right answers AND the reasoning behind my answers for anyone who has a problem with them. Go to the OxBowBusiness web site, click on the quiz menu item and find your way to accounting and then management accounting. Go to http://www.oxbow.org.uk/php/index.php

DW