I was amused by this secondary heading in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal It reads: “Finance chiefs say they have had to tweak their forecasts …” (see Note below) I remember revising my forecasts as a CFO, but never tweaking them, nor twisting them, jerking them or pinching them. And perhaps in…
One of my stories about a CFO who was not a qualified accountant, could be made into a case study about internal controls and priority setting. It happened when we had four separate unconnected IT systems to run the company: manufacturing, inventory management, sales and accounting, but what was important was there were insufficient, even…
So CFO does not stand for Chief Financial Officer but chief fiddling officer because they ‘manage’ earnings in the financial statements. I did not invent this title. I saw it by chance searching for accounting articles in The Economist [1] and being an accountant myself, I thought I would muse about it. The subject matter…
I have discovered the most boring book in the world and it’s a bestseller. I forced myself to read parts of it recently. It is expensive: 120 Euros and profitable for the publisher. It has 607 pages. Its style is perfectly adapted to make one fall asleep after reading a couple of paragraphs. But even…
Accountants adore uncertainty so much they have invented and defined at least three different official versions of it. I found the first one in the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting issued by the International Accounting Standards Board called measurement uncertainty. But there are two others. Measurement uncertainty arises when, to use their pompous words, a…