Obtaining a professional qualification is a tough but ultimately rewarding journey. It’s important to appreciate that whilst your studying before the exam is the key part of your journey, it’s also vital that you keep calm during the exam and focus on good exam technique. We’ve just released our CIMA exam tips (the ACCA tips [...]

Manchester City may have won the Premier league yesterday and beaten Manchester United into second place but are they simply copying the red team of Manchester? Manchester United shirts are currently made by Nike whilst Manchester City shirts are made by Umbro. Umbro also sponsored the England kit and the brand has been around for [...]

Now this is an unusual one. It involves an accountant that wouldn’t accept money… Baverstocks Accountants is a small firm of accountants in the UK that recently fell out with one of their clients. Their client, a Mr Fitzpatrick, got into a dispute with the accountants and withdrew his business from them with an outstanding [...]

Earlier this week we blogged about the CEO of Yahoo telling a lie on his CV. Whilst a number of you no doubt thought this was very bad, here’s a nice ethical question for you – have you lied recently? My guess is that you have. Now before you get all righteous about it I [...]

What’s your CV like? Now I’m not talking about what you’ve actually done. No, I’m talking about a more basic issue here. Namely, is it factually correct? We’ve all stretched the truth a little bit on our CV’s (or to put a more positive spin on it, we all tend to emphasise our strong points). [...]

Whilst the answer would to a certain extent depend on your personal situation, it’s one of the challenges currently facing the pharmaceutical industry. The major pharmaceutical companies all have significant research and development (R&D) expenses. It’s been estimated that to get a new medicine onto the market from scratch it costs over £1 billion on [...]

Any organisation that can create a barrier to entry which prevents new competitors entering the market can, in theory, keep prices high. Economies of scale (think Airbus or Boeing), branding (think Apple) and distribution channels (think Coke) are all excellent examples of barriers to entry but one of the toughest barriers to break through are [...]

Maybe the more important question I should have asked is “if you disagree with your boss would you tell him or her?” My personal view is that whilst you’ll need to show a bit of “emotional intelligence” when it comes to disagreeing with your boss, in today’s business world there should be a certain amount [...]

Have you ever been to lunch with a colleague? My guess is that unless (a) you work by yourself, (b) nobody likes you , or (c) you have a serious body odour problem then the chances are that you have had lunch with a colleague. Now let me guess. What did you talk about over [...]

If something goes wrong on an audit, whose fault is it? Is it the partner’s fault or the junior member of staff’s fault? Over in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper has provided some interesting commentary on a legal case that is currently taking place concerning an audit undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The background to [...]