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

They've ruined the look of my Blog and they won't sort me out! I'll do my best over the weekend. As an indication of what I'm doing now, here's some correspondence I had with Katie. Hi, My name is katie, im currently doing ACCA part 1..I was wondering if you had any relevant notes on profit and loss accounts and balance sheets? Your website is really good, the best for accountancy. Any help would be appreciated as exams are so near. Many thanks. Dear Katie, I know the ACCA syllabus in part and know that I can download the whole thing from their site. I am currently building a commercial arm to my web site and am happily prepared to start the financial accounting section with your topics in mind. Depending on how it goes and how long it takes to mark up into HTML, it could take a week to 10 days to prepare the first section that would deal with P&L accounts and balance sheets then we would move into double entry ... around two weeks all in all from now. Each section would be comprehensive and would consist of the basic theory and underlying practice and will have loads of examples from me and for you to do, with solutions; plus end of section questions with fully worked solutions. Take a look at www.manacc.duncanwil.co.uk to see what a section generally comprises. I would then charge you just £10 and you would have full and free access plus email support for each section. Please let me know and I will move this job higher up my list of priorities. You would find that the sections would have a fair amount of ACCA focus so it would be targeted at your studies. Let me know what you think. Best wishes Hi That is a very good idea! In the meantime, you got any good sites on financial accounting? Katie Dear Katie, You are probably finding there my web site is one of a kind in that it is difficult to find a fully focused set of resources ... what you are looking for. That's why I am developing my own site in this direction now. Still, I did a search for Accounting resources on www.bized.ac.uk and came up with this In a couple of weeks, I will be sending you a message with my latest resources based on your message. Best wishes There you go: working really hard to be the best on the web at what we do! DW

There's something wrong with my Blog pages. As you might be able to see as you read this, the layout is manky. I've writen to www.blogger.com whose fault it is and can only hope that they can sort it out for me. Otherwise my perorations don't look so smart, do they? DW

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

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

Took some time out yesterday from work to take Mrs W to Broadway that's about an hour away from home: along the A44 from Oxford. A lovely olde worlde village, a glimpse of which is provided here with a couple of pics I took. We ate at the Italian Restaurant in Broadway and I have to say that the salad that came with the quiche I ordered had certainly never heard of Italy: no olive oil, no balsamic vinegar, no Italian style herbs: just a typical plodding English salad comprising iceberg lettuce, sliced onion and sliced tomato. Mrs W had, ahem, fish and chips! Chips that came out of the freezer and into the deep fat fryer, fish that came from a similar source! The public toilets in the car park just behind the high street deserve a mention: the normal British public toilet is a disgrace with its smell, its damage and its lack of decency; but here we had a clean and very well kept set up. The attendant was even listening to Radio 4 rather than that blethery Radio 1 or the soporific Radio 2. Whilst waiting to be served an ice cream in a shop, came across two products that came as a shock: a toffee cow pat: we used to call them cow clap in the North; but it means the same ... toffee cow droppings! mutton buttons: chocolate covered sheep poo! It has to be asked: who on earth wants to consume products derived, however tenuously, from animal excrement? These things cost around £3 each, too. Here's a couple of pics for you: Broadway's a nice place to visit and the drive there is interesting, too: especially when the sun shines as it did yesterday. DW

I am beavering away at my new web site and although I am making good progress I am stalling at the setting up of the ecommerce end of the thing. Currently in negotiation with a chap about setting up the site, it's relatively slow going. The technical content side of the site is going well and by early next week I should have section 2 finished: a major section on the behaviour of costs. DW

Grace is a student and needed some guidance on stock management (that's inventory management for our American cousins) and credit management. Grace wanted advice on the application of stock and credit systems in a particular organisation ... couldn't give the fine detail but there is a lot on the web to help. Here's what I said. Dear Grace, Stock management: Tesco is a brilliant case study for stock management: they are at the forefront of all developments in supply chain management, including stock control. Look here: I then searched for Tesco at this site and this page shows what they have. The Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply is a good place to look, of course http://www.cips.org/ There's a link on the left that will take you to the "CIPS Purchasing & Supply Management (P&SM) Model" which is a good looking pdf file Take a look at this as it gives headings for you to think about if nothing else. Look here, too, as you can follow through a stock management system that they are selling ... some screenshots and descriptions that could be helpful. Cumbria County Council has a stock management newsletter that you can download at and it might be worth a look. Maybe you would like to look at web based systems. A nice bright and bold site comprising a presentation format. Credit management: You can start here at Credit Management; but will have to register to make much progress: registration's free and painless! This is a commercial site but a lot of content is free. I went to the Institute of Credit Management but couldn't see much of interest, perhaps you can. The Credit Protection Association could have a few things of interest. Another commercial looking site but some useful looking links, I think. Well, Grace, I hope that's been worthwhile and you have a lot of work to do now! Let me know how the seminar went ... don't forget to talk to me! DW