If you want details of topical business issues to help you in your professional exams or simply want to keep up to date with relevant business news in an easy to read, fun way then please enjoy our blog. If you’d like a copy of our free study notes and videos for the ACCA and CIMA exams visit ExPand (ExP Advice, News & Discussion).

So there I was sat down yesterday having a nice cup of coffee and reading the Sunday Times when lo and behold I saw a full page advert on page 8 which was rather intriguing.

It was interesting as it wasn’t clear what it was advertising. There was no reference to a product or company.

It started with the heading “What are you waiting for?”

Further down the advert it says:

“You’re the … type of person we might be interested in: Dynamic, but patient. A team player that can work with complete autonomy. Someone who can form strong relationships, yet thrive it the isolation of a foreign country. Who is already in successful employment … with the sensitivity to seamlessly integrate into the day to day society of a different country.

By reading between the lines, you’ve probably guessed what we’re after… you’ll find out more about MI6 at www.sis.gov.uk/careers.”

Wow – it’s an advert for a job as a spy with the British government and look at this, it also says:

“Perhaps you’re thriving in the high-octane world of finance.”

So, they are looking for new spies and one of the attributes they highlight is experience in the high-octane world of finance.

Well move over James Bond as there’s a host of accountants about to apply.

All your hard work studying for the ACCA or CIMA exams is about to pay off with a deluge of fast cars, fast women and vodka martinis (shaken but not stirred of course).

I may well apply myself as although I’m unfit, a bit overweight and have never driven an Aston Martin I’ve got the complete box set of the James Bond movies so know what needs to be done.

Although not an official MI6 test, here’s a quick test to see if you have the mental dexterity to become a spy:

1. Sit at your desk in front of your computer, lift up your right foot off the floor and make large CLOCKWISE circles with your foot.

2. Now, whilst drawing the circles with your foot, draw the number “6” in the air with your right hand. If you’re a cool James Bond wannabe you’ll be able to draw the number “6” but if you’re not made out to be a spy your foot will change direction.

Good luck with your application…

Have you ever felt the need to close your eyes for a few seconds at work? Maybe even for a few minutes? In fact, have you ever fallen asleep at work?

Now, whilst there may be occasions where people are working such long hours that they are physically exhausted and maybe grab a quick rest, there are also some people who are just, how can I put it, but plain lazy.

If you have lazy people working in your team there are various ways to deal with them. For example, setting clear targets and finding out what really motivates them.

Over in China though some senior employees at a tax office in the Shanxi province were told to attend video conference training on how to get rid of laziness in the office.

The aim of this training was to remind officials that they couldn’t play games or undertake other recreational activities at work.

Although this was a good idea in principle, in reality it didn’t prove to be particularly successful.

The training was by way of 2-way video conferencing and five of the senior level officials from the tax bureaux that attended the “laziness prevention video conference” were spotted either reading newspapers or sleeping.

Brilliant! You’re told to attend a conference on dealing with laziness and you then go and fall asleep during it.

The end result was that they were all suspended from their jobs.

Looking on the bright side though, being suspended from work will of course enable them to catch up with some sleep at home.

He’s just been appointed as the new head of Ernst & Young with ultimate responsibility for the 152,000 EY people in 144 countries but what does his mum think?

It must have been a proud moment for Mr Weinberger as getting to be the head of such a prestigious organisation as EY is a pretty good achievement in anyone’s books.

His bio on the EY site makes impressive reading but after a quick search on the net you come across the local newspaper where he was brought up in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Citizens Voice has a few words from his mum.

Now Mums, Moms, Mothers, Mummies or whatever you call them are great. Always there when you need them and we wouldn’t be the impressive grownups we are without all their help over the years.

One thing though that a lot of mums do tend to forget is that their children do grow up.

Sometimes they can still treat you as though you are, how can we say it, but still the baby of the family.

Mr Weinberger may therefore have been a bit worried when he heard that his mum had been interviewed. After all, were we about to hear all his embarrassing stories from when he was a child?

Well, according to the paper, Members of his considerable extended family were delighted to learn the news, but perhaps none so much as his mother, Goldye Weinberger, of Scranton.

“I’m his mother, I always knew he was destined for greatness,” she said.

She just didn’t know in what. She remembers her son – one of four children, the rest girls – always outside, playing baseball or basketball with kids in the neighborhood. He was a good student at Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, but not a “numbers” kids and not bookish. She called him “a student of the world.”

She admitted she’s somewhat surprised her son, who is a lawyer, is head of a renowned accounting firm.

So all’s well for Mr Weinberger – he’s head of the company and his mum didn’t say anything embarrassing about him.

He must be so happy that he will no doubt be singing along loudly with this EY video…

“More iPhones were sold than babies were born worldwide”. That’s a pretty staggering claim but Apple have just released their quarterly earnings for the 14 weeks ended 31 December 2011 and the results were pretty amazing with:

Quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion (vs. $26.74 billion in the prior year comparative quarter)

Quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion (vs. $6 billion)

Gross margin of 44.7% (vs. 38.5%)

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO said that “We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs.”

Historically Apple has had an incredible amount of cash on their Balance Sheet (Statement of Financial Position).

Their cash balance continues to grow and their latest results show cash together with short and long terms investments totalling $97.6 billion. If you’re into rounding figures, that’s a cool $100 billion (yes billion and not million)

So, $100,000,000,000 to give the number the full amount of zeros that it deserves.

We’ve blogged elsewhere about Apple having more cash than the US government so I won’t dwell on the cash balance but back to the incredible success of their iPhone sales.

In the 98 days to 31 December they sold 37.04 million iPhones. This averages out at 377,959 iPhones sold per day.

A few years ago the World Health Organization estimated that the number of babies born each day was 365,000.

So, more iPhones sold than babies born.

This does of course does mean that there are plenty of iPhones around to take photos of the newly born babies.

Direct Line and Churchill are two of the UK’s largest and best known insurance brands.

Unfortunately though, despite being in the “premier League” of insurance companies they have been a bit naughty and were recently fined £2.2 million.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA), which amongst other things oversees the insurance industry, told the companies that they would be undertaking a review of their closed complaint cases.

These were files where customers of Direct Line and Churchill had complained and the aim of the FSA was to ensure that the procedures for dealing with these complaints were adhered to.

In preparation for the FSA review the two firms asked a major accountancy firm to do a sample review which found that 28 per cent of the 110 files reviewed failed the assessment.

It seems though that Direct Line and Churchill decided to do their own spot of cleaning up after receiving the accountants report as when the FSA subsequently visited the Firms’ offices at short notice they found that “27 of the 50 files had been altered before they were sent to the FSA, and seven internal documents were found to contain staff signatures forged by one member of staff”.

Not very good is it? The review by the accountancy firm identified the errors and then more than 50% of the files that were sent to the FSA were amended before they were sent and seven documents had forged signatures!

For those of you in the UK that have seen the Churchill TV adverts with Churchill the dog, then I guess the adverts need changing to include the question “Churchill, do you forge signatures?”

The answer of course is “Oh yesssssss”.

I’m an accountant and I’m proud of it.

I think the education and knowledge that you acquire both during your studies and continuing professional education are fantastic.

At the start of my career when I worked for one of the Big 4 I spent several years in the Audit department and this was a great opportunity to find out how a variety of different companies worked.

Sometimes though it has to be said that the term “auditor” doesn’t always have the most exciting of images to the general public. People may think that an auditor is merely somebody who checks other people’s work.

To be honest though a simple piece of rebranding whereby “auditors” were known as “financial detectives” would go a long way to removing some of the negative perceptions that some people have in terms of the excitement of the profession and could create a whole new generation who want to become auditors financial detectives.

Now, whilst most people have heard of the term “auditor” a lot of people don’t really fully appreciate how it works.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) have recently released a website called “True and Fair” which in their own words aims to “help you find out anything you would like to know about the process known as audit – or to use its full title “Audit of Financial Statements”.”

I think it’s an excellent site and if you are an auditor and want friends or family to find out what your job entails then you should direct them to it (although admittedly if you’re on a first date with somebody and they ask you what you do then maybe say you’re a financial detective).

For any of you that are attempting an ACCA or CIMA paper with an auditing content it also makes for very good background reading.

The site can be found at www.trueandfair.org.uk

It’s a fact of life that in any job you are likely to receive some form of criticism from your boss.

If criticism is done well then it really isn’t criticism but instead is a form of feedback.

Making sure that the feedback is fair and reasonable can help ensure a productive workplace exists.

It’s also important how you react to receiving feedback. If you take the points on board and can learn from things then it will no doubt help you improve your performance.

It’s not always the case however that people take criticism or feedback that well.

Jonathan Oliver, a 40 year old from Hampshire in the UK had a job whereby he created designs for gravestones.  Note that I said “had a job” rather than “has a job”.

The reason he no longer has a job is that his boss criticised his work and he reacted in a far from professional way to her criticism.

After the criticism he secretly filled the sports style water drinking bottle that his boss brought to work with water from the toilet.

Luckily for his boss she noticed that the water tasted a bit funny and didn’t drink enough to make herself seriously ill.

His boss wasn’t flushed with happiness over this though and was understandably pretty upset. The police were called and further investigation led them to Mr Oliver who admitted filling her bottle with water from the toilet.

He was recently sentenced to a four month suspended prison sentence and has to carry out 150 hours of unpaid community service work.

The lawyer defending him was quoted as saying that his client had reacted to problems at work in “an entirely inappropriate fashion”.

With the start of a new year it’s often a time when people start thinking about new beginnings and even changing their job.

So what would you look for in a new job and what things are important for you?

An interesting study by Cisco shows that it’s not just salary that is important and for the younger generation that have been brought up with tech gadgets like Smartphones and social media sites such as Facebook there are certain things that are more important than extra cash in your pay packet.

Cisco’s Connected World Technology Report surveyed nearly 3,000 young professionals and college students aged from 18 to 30 in 14 countries and there were some interesting findings for any companies that are looking at the remuneration package that they should be offering new recruits.

The study identified that 33% of “college students and young employees under the age of 30 said that they would prioritize social media freedom, device flexibility, and work mobility over salary in accepting a job offer, indicating that the expectations and priorities of the next generation of the world’s workforce are not solely tied to money”.

So money isn’t everything in a remuneration package and in fact 45% of young employees said “they would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility”.

Whilst the report identified changes which could impact on staff recruitment there were also some more “personal findings”.

It found for example that 33% believed the “Internet is a fundamental resource for the human race – as important as air, water, food and shelter”.

Now, call me old fashioned but whilst the internet certainly is important, I personally feel the long term impact is slightly different when comparing your internet going down for two hours with for example your air supply being turned off for 2 hours.

In terms of the future of the human race there was also a slightly concerning finding where it was identified that “40% of college students aged 18 to 23 thought the internet was more important to them than dating or going out with friends”.

More and more companies are using social media such as Facebook to engage with their customers and potential customers.

KLM, the Dutch airline, has just introduced a new initiative which could make your next flight with them very interesting.

They are allowing their passengers to link their Facebook profiles to their check-in information.

This in effect means that when you check in you can view the Facebook profiles of other people on your flight who have agreed to show their profile.

If you like the look of them or think that they would be interesting to sit next to for the flight then you can choose a seat next to that person. KLM call it the “meat and seat” service.

A quick discussion in the office this morning showed opposing views on this one. Some thought that it would be a great opportunity to meet new and interesting people whilst others thought it would be a bit creepy for someone to select you to sit next to.

Either way, it’s certainly a novel approach by KLM in terms of integrating social media into a core function of their business.

Personally, I think it’s a great idea and I shall straight away set up a Facebook profile identifying myself as extremely overweight, opinionated and loud mouthed as well as suffering from severe personal hygiene problems.

With any luck that will mean that the seat next to me will be free and I can read the newspaper in peace and quiet…

The team here at ExP are now taking a break over Christmas and we’ll be back blogging in January but we will be posting on our Facebook page though and with no requirement to check into a flight, our Facebook page can be found here.

Thanks to all of you that read our blog and we’ll see you in 2012!

It’s a sign of the times but two of the UK’s highest profile high street shopping chains are in financial trouble.

La Senza, the luxury women’s underwear shop, has reportedly called in KPMG to help restructure the business.

Whilst some of the less professional male readers amongst you may well suggest that the first thing they should do is to undertake a reasonableness review of the lingerie brochures, the chances are that KPMG’s consulting work with La Senza will involve a lot more.

It’s possible that the retail chain will either get additional investment or perhaps more likely close a number of shops or even put the company into administration (this is where a company is controlled by an administrator who is independent from the directors and in effect decides for example whether the company can become a going concern again or whether it should be broken up or even liquidated)

Is it really a surprise though that the bottom has fallen out of the luxury underwear market?

With the onset of the recession many people are buying less luxurious underwear or simply making do with what they’ve got.

With the emergence of internet shopping there’s also the fact that the cost structure of these “bricks and mortar businesses” is significantly higher than retailers selling over the internet.

In simple terms, revenue is down but costs are still high. The end result is that a formerly profitable company has turned into a loss making business and La Senza is at risk of going bust.

Deloitte meanwhile have been appointed as Administrators of the shoe shop chain Barratts.

Barratts has nearly 200 shops in the UK and according to press reports Deloitte are said to be “working closely with suppliers to ensure the business has the best possible platform to secure a sale, preserve jobs and generate as much value as possible for all creditors.”

Whilst it’s not good news for the employees of La Senza and Barrats, I’ve got a feeling that unfortunately there will probably be more retail companies facing trouble on the high street in the near future.