Thanks to Alan Cosgrove, the latest duncanwil.co.uk visitor to find and report one of the site's dead links. Not only did Alan find and report the dead link but when I still couldn't find it he sent me a screen shot and further details. Well done Alan! Anyone who's tried to go to http://duncanwil.co.uk/spread.htm and then my page on Building a Trial Balance using a Pivot Table in Excel but failed, fail no more as Alan has shown the way. The link works now: if you're interested, I'd created the menu item and ended it with .html.html ... obviously only .html was needed! Thanks again Alan and to everyone who reports my dead links. DW

I am now a mega TV star! Well, I spent part of yesterday at Channel 4 Studios in central London being interviewed by the Einstein Network. The topic of my intereview was the work I did in the former Soviet Union on product cost systems development. If I say so myself it went well and I think I acquited myself well enough. I've appeared on the telly before but never in a formal setting such as this and it was an interesting experience, of course. It will be interesting to see how they turn the interview into the finished article: the interview plus a study pack. The interview was taped as if it were live; start, carry on and finish with no interrruptions and then finish. The interviewer was very good as she received her script just before I went in and although she was using a teleprompt for her questions, she put some life and soul into her performance! DW

Are you following the Disney and Dell Top Job split stories? Up until this week both companies had one person doing both Chairman and CEO jobs: Michael Eisner was forcibly ousted from one half of his portfolio earlier this week and now Dell’s founder Michael Dell has [voluntarily] announced that wef 16 July he will hand over the CEO job to someone else. Remember corporate governance? Combining the two jobs is seriously frowned on here in the UK so for students it may be worthwhile reviewing this issue as it’s still fresh: what better background than Mickey Mouse, too? DW

Last week I pointed out that the UK government has announced that it is to let market forces determine the future of executive pay packages but that the EU is considering further investigation into whether it feels that legislation in this area is needed. From the USA now comes this, hauntingly familiar, headline: Will the Government Legislate Executive Pay? Apparently, William McDonough, the chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board warned that the US government could intervene to control executive compensation if company managers do not. Meanwhile in Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph there was the story about the CEO of Bradford and Bingley who is about to move to take charge of Visa International, the credit card company. The DT quoted B&B chairman Rod Kent as saying “This answers the doubting Thomases in the fat cat debate who do not believe there is an international executive pay market. McDonough told a meeting of the Economic Club of Chicago it would be good riddance if a chief executive quit because his or her pay was being cut. I would turn to the directors and point out that there are lots of fine people in America, many of them in this room, who would be happy to be CEOs at more rational levels of income, said McDonough, according to the report. More food for thought! DW

I'm deeply grateful to Ian Baker for this cartoon and hope that everyone enjoys it. DW

Saurabh wrote to me from India last week with a plea for help on calculating machine hour rates. I replied to the efect that she should go to a factory and ask them all about it since she is doing a Master's degree and should be able to cope with that. She replied: Thanks for sending reply. Firstly i was confused about calculating Machine Hour Rate (MHR) as therotical and practical are different.I have collected information about MHR in local indian books. But when i visited one small scale industry I came to the conclusion that it was different to what was written in books. 1] MHR = FIXED COST + VAR COST. Var.cost includes costs like power, heating etc.S ome authors prefer to add wages but some don't consider it. What is the correct way? 2] while calculating fixed costs, how to calculate building cost? In the Books generally final amount is given. Here's my response: 1 Remember that books often seem to be different to real life because books speak very generally about cost accounting whereas a business is very specific. Another problem is that some practising accountants aren't very sure about their theory and they can make mistakes! Look carefully at what you find and check that it really makes sense. Ask the accountant at the factory to explain why they do what they do. When I do real factory work, this is what I do! Some companies have no proper accountant so they do what they can even if it doesn't always make sense. They NEED an accountant but think they can't afford one. To answer the question of what are fixed and what are variable costs you need to consider the situation you are studying. Again, this is a problem with text books. Many authors simply copy what other authors have written and blindly write the same things without thinking about them. Take a look at my site for examples of fixed and variable costs. If you are not sure about the behaviour of costs in a real business, plot their total costs on a graph with output or sales on the horizontal axis and total costs on the vertical axis and it should give you an idea of fixed costs. If you're not sure about this, collect your data, send it to me and I'll show you what to do. Direct wages were always considered to be variable costs and probably they are on a unit by unit basis. However, many companies then realised that even when output if low, they have the same labour costs as when their output is higher ... their direct labour is partly fixed and they don't even realise it. Ask your company's management what really happens to their labour costs. 2 For this question are you asking what comprises building costs? Building costs are made up of such items as rent, property taxes, repairs and maintenance ... anything that you can directly associate with the building in just the same way as you can associate labour costs with labour and material costs with material. I hope these answer your questions. Let me know of any other problems you think I can help you with. Best wishes DW

Don't you just hate it when: you go to a web site for the second time, having set your user name and password on the first visit, only to be asked to input them again ... and again on the third visit ... and again on the nth visit? you go to a supermarket or other self service shop to find that a woman (never a man, note, unless he has tattoos, earrings and is wearing a baseball cap) is blocking the very shelf that you NEED with her body, her trolley (parked longitudinally and not latitudinally) and children if appropriate? That woman will then amble through the things she wants at turtle neck speed until she is comfortable. Don't you just feel like dashing to the local self protection shop to buy one of those 20,000 volt zappers, dashing back to the supermarket and zapping these oh so slow shoppers? The first of these just happened to me at Blogger.com for the umpteenth time and the second of them happened yesterday at Waitrose: not once, not twice but three times in one visit. Mrs W has a cold or flu and is incapacitated hence my reluctant retail experience. End of first rant for a while! DW

I've been busy at eBay recently and almost fell for a scam that could have wiped out all of my assets. I got an email from aw-confirm@ebay.com that asked me to update my eBay registration details. I have to confess that the message is unusual in terms of the grammar they use; but I won't reveal here what it is otherwise the thieves will change it for their own betterment. I did start filling in their online form until I spotted that they asked for my credit card details, eBay does that; but then they asked for the 4 Digit code used in ATMs. I KNOW that no self respecting organisation would ever ask me that: not even my bank does that. So I contacted eBay's security people and sent them the message's header and other information that just might lead to these awful people being put behind bars. If ever in doubt contact eBay's security team and send them everything they need then delete the spurious message and if by chance you have opened any web pages, close them without entering any details. DW

If you don't believe me, believe my customers. Here are two sets of unrelated comments that came in from a couple of my customers over the weekend: Firstly, The reason I like [your Introduction to Management Accounting ebook] is that your explanations are wonderful, even for someone Japanese like me. Secondly, I have had a quick look [at the Financiel statement Analysis ebook] and it seems to be very impressive - so impressive that I decided to buy your case study too. There, well worth the small amount of money they cost. DW

Don't wish to ofend anyone at all but I went to Cranfield University the other day and even though the University has an excellent reputation, it's a desolate looking place. Shoe box architecture and no mistake. Being situated smack bang next to an airfield makes life a bit more interesting I suppose. I had a massive shock the other day when the desktop opened up with all Windows text (icon titles, title bars in dialogiue boxes etc) all showing Wing Dings rather than text ... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhh! Panic, save all of my latest data files ... called Microsoft and found that somehow, some way, the Fonts entry in my registry had disappeared completely leaving the system with just three or four fonts. Couldn't be a virus since I'm well protected, couldn't be an attacker since I have a firewall, couldn't be the family ... or could it? Oh, the laptop died again. I reformatted the hard disk as advised but it died as I was building up my software base again. Still, for a short time it was nice to see 35 Giga bytes of space available on the hard disk! I'll keep you informed. DW

Want a few tips on what to read to mug up on business events and what they mean? Here's a couple of issues you might look at then: The NHS Eurotunnel The NHS This section is in two parts: pricing and then overall management Pricing A cost accountant's dream come true! The NHS has announced its strategy on average cost pricing today and I have put together a brief review of it. Moreover, the NHS has posted a wealth of information on their various sites. You can find my file here: it’s 291Kb in size. The NHS has also published their NHS Costing Manual that has some excellent real live information for cost accountants and for teachers of cost accounting. There's material enough here for hundreds of case studies and I am available to be sponsored (ie paid) to write at least some of them! There are many implications for economists in this initiative too. Anyway, a fascinating topic that could provide hours of endless mirth and merriment! Management There was a fascinating story in the Sunday Times yesterday (9 February 2004) entitled "How the new money is making the NHS sicker”. Although the author of the article spent 11 months shadowing various people in the NHS, including patients, a lot of the evidence seems anecdotal, in style at least. Still, it’s a chilling reminder that throwing money at a problem does not necessarily guarantee results. I think this is a great article for discussion providing you steer it away from the emotional and political side of things. Concentrate on · management · financial management · management structure · management of change · power shifts · tasks and roles within the NHS · and so on and you could have a cracking debate: you could even try role play! This article is available here and for those of you in London you can join the author at this do on Wednesday of this week: She's Not My Patient! Policy Exchange, Clutha House, 10 Storey’s Gate, London SW1P 3AY. Nearest tube stations Westminster and St James’s Park. 18:30, 11 February 2004 Management of the NHS Eurotunnel Eurotunnel celebrates the tenth anniversary of the tunnel itself this year but there seems to be little to shout about even though In the car shuttle business Eurotunnel had 47% of the market in 2002. The truck shuttle had a 41% market share, and coaches a 33% market share. From the Letter to Shareholders, see link below. The BBC reports Eurotunnel, the operator of the Channel Tunnel, has posted a 2003 net loss of £1.33bn after huge asset write downs. The BBC’s report hides the fact that Eurotunnel made a £170 million Operating Profit and a Net Loss of £34 million for 2003. The latest Eurotunnel letter to shareholders can be found here and it is a fascinating mixture of cold, hard business information and this: As you may have heard, a group of French shareholders led by Nicolas Miguet, a financial journalist with a criminal record, and Joseph Gouranton, leader of a small French shareholder activist group, have been attempting to force the company to call a shareholder meeting to dismiss your Board and the Group’s senior management. Good tips for writing endearing letters to one’s business colleagues! Note the barbs: Nationality Criminality Small Activist Forcing Dismiss Take a look at their latest report in PDF/Presentation and easy to read format where accounting buffs can read about an impairment of assets charge in accordance with FRS11 of £1.3 billion. The report explains the effects of the impairment charge and why it came about. Since the company is a British-French joint venture, you can even brush up votre Français as you read along. A bientôt DW

Along with all the other junk mail that hits my inbox, who is it that thinks that I desperately, many times a day, want to know all about 17 rich coffees; 17 flavor experiences? I like coffee but I don't need the stress of these adverts! The car battery died overnight and it cost me to get a man out to start the car for me and it cost me a lot to buy a new battery: well, a 3 litre engine takes some firing up! DW

A cost accountant's dream come true! The NHS has announced its strategy on average cost pricing today and I have put together a brief review of it. Moreover, they have posted a wealth of information on their various sites. They have also published their NHS Costing Manual that has some excellent real live information for cost accountants and for teachers of cost accounting. There's material enough here for hundreds of case studies and I am available to be sponsored (ie paid) to write at least some of them! There are many implications for economists in this initiative too. To download the pdf file I have now prepared go to my PDFs File page and click the relevant links. Anyway, a fascinating topic that could provide hours of endless mirth and merriment! DW

Good news on the computer front. My laptop has been repaired and the problem that caused the whole thing to go comatose? My brand spanking new version of Office 2003. When I get the computer and report I will consider whether to make a claim against Microsoft for time wasting, frustration, stress, loss of earnings ... My desktop has been saved. After numerous crashes over an extended period that seemed to get worse once I started using it (well, what's wrong with a bit of paranoia?) I eventually tracked it down to my Plextor CD R/RW drive. Proces of elimination got me there and whoopee! Can't write CDs until I get the laptop back, though and Master W is being profligate with our hard drive. I delete 1 Gb of stuff and he puts 2 Gb back on. Progress that hasn't spilled over onto the car yet. There's always something! DW

This is supposedly genuine: from a council house tenant to Islington (London) Council's Housing Department: This is to let you know that our lavatory seat is broken and we can't get BBC2 DW

Weekends come and weekends go but some just linger for ever. This weekend has seen this computer crashing every few minutes Mrs W catching a chill Master W losing his wallet/having his wallet stolen the fence between our house and next door blowing down This desktop computer (the laptop is away at the menders itself!) has taken to crashing at will on a very frequent basis now. It just hangs with no warning and no reason discernible as to why it crashes and what's causing it. I invested in System Mechanic and The Ultimate Troubleshooter software packages and given that and what we have noticed I took the following action: I have cleaned up the Registry every day for the last week I have stopped several background running routines I have tried to backup all sensitive data As a result of cleaning the registry I seemed to see that the CD ROM or DVD drives we have are causing more registry problems than anything so last night I disconnected both drives and will monitor progress. So far so good, touch wood, spit three times ... Such a situation leads to frustration on a grand scale and to paranoia. Every major task is under threat. We have wasted a few CD disks as we have tried to backup our data and whilst some disks have been written successfully others have suffered a mid write crash and have been ruined. If I could pin this down to Microsoft I could very well start an action against them for wasting time, for wasting resources, for stress and duress. I think more of us should do that, by the way: take these computer wasters to task more often. As a major victim at the moment I am seething every time we suffer a crash and yet we have no idea of how to resolve the issue. The only good news is that by systematically watching the crashing process, we MIGHT have tracked down the source. If it's a hardware problem that could be relatively OK since there is nothing that new in or attached to this desktop: computer itself is three years old, CD Drive the same, DVD drive two years old, printer two years old, monitor 7 years old ... SOFTWARE is a different story since I run Office and Windows XP with all updates and service packs, I am running the latest anti virus package and many of my drivers are new and up to date. Mrs W is a bad patient so she is on her last legs according to herself! Master W was gallivating with a young lady as he lost his wallet and only realised his problem as he got to the stage of buying her a drink ... Yorkshire or what? Our next door neighbour kindly took the fence issue in hand and rebuilt it for us. I helped by doing a tiny amount of hammering right at the end. Well done Paul! That was the weekend end then apart from having baked yet another glorious ginger cake ... email me for the recipe as it's so simple yet so delicious! DW

Do you ever wonder about how big things can get? Remember when Bill Gates famously said that a computer with 640 kilobytes of memory would be all that we would ever need? He was forgetting about Microsoft's capacity for writing ballooning software and storage routines! Anyway, 1 kilobyte represents 1,024 binary digits (bits) of data and here are some monsters to think about. Bear in mind that people often write 1Kb as 1,000 bytes and to keep things simple and that's what you're about to see here Kilobyte (Kb) 1,000 bytes 2 Kilobytes: A Typewritten page Megabyte (Mb) 1,000,000 bytes 1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk Gigabyte (Gb) 1,000,000,000 bytes 1 Gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with books Terabyte (Tb) 1,000,000,000,000 bytes 1 Terabyte: 50,000 trees made into paper and printed. Petabyte (Pb)1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes 1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001) Exabyte (Eb) 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999 See this page for the source of that fabulous information. What next? DW

I'm working myway through a Russian State Television series called The Brigade. The Brigade is a Russian Mafia programme that has the most awful English subtitles I've ever seen and whilst the storyline is not as good as it might be, here are the reasons why it's worth watching it doesn't glamourise gangsterism the life of organised crime is brutal shameless ruthless gangsters are always looking over their shoulders the families of gangsters are, whether they like it or not, part of the gang This series has acquired cult status in the Russian speaking world as far as I can tell and I know of head teachers who have had to go round every class in their school and ask "Is there is Brigade in this room?" in an attempt to quell the quasi gangsterism that early teens can dream up. Thought I'd tell you that. I don't know if it's available in the UK but I'm told that it's going down a wow in the USA. DW

What is Game Theory? That was a question that appeared on a discussion list that I subscribe to. Here is what I replied: There’s a page here that gives a decent review of game theory and it provides links to various other sites around the web. Good for you but will need editing for students. If you’re looking for examples, case studies, relating to the various aspects of Game Theory that students might enjoy, why not take a look at this page that has a series of examples taken from films and television programmes: mostly American but some British and all excellent. The language is definitely undergrad but some editing would sort it out I think. There are online tests and some film and television clips too although I haven’t looked at any of them. DW

Ever heard of the Nebra Disc? Neither had I until I watched last night's Horizon programme on the BBC. This is what it looks like this is an astronomical interpretation of it, albeit still encoded and here is the BBC's page that summarises the issue Follow the links on that BBC page and search www.google.co.uk for other references to the world's oldest known observatory record. DW