IFRS 2 Share Based Payments has never been a popular accounting standard with many in the business community. It’s also often unpopular with students, especially the deferred tax elements of it.  This is despite the fact that share based payments often provide an opportunity for easy marks (we promise!) The reason given for finance directors’ [...]

Fancy having a drink of beer and getting some shares in the company as well? Well, if you’re in Australia that is exactly what you can do at the moment. Taking a novel approach to raising finance the Australian beer brand Broo is currently offering free shares with purchases of their beer. Consumers need to [...]

Classic Russian novels are famous for being somewhat large. My copy of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” weighs in at 1,024 pages.  That is a big book. Some day, I will get beyond page 20. Dostoyevski’s “Crime and Punishment” is 448 pages.  I’m up to page 25 on that one. According to a recent survey by [...]

BSkyB is the largest broadcaster in the UK, reporting a profit of £11.7 million on revenues of £5.9 billion in its most recent financial statements. Its ownership structure is dominated by News Corporation, the transnational media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose other ventures include numerous newspapers and Fox studios in the USA. It’s fair [...]

After a long wait and a fair bit of speculation, rumour and expectation, we accountants now know who the next chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board is going to be. Now, this might not sound quite as exciting as we’d like to make it sound, but this really is very significant.  When a new [...]

On Saturday Wayne Rooney the England and Manchester United footballer was dropped for the game against Everton. According to the Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, he was dropped so that he wouldn’t have to endure excessive abuse from the Everton fans (whilst the married Mr Rooney has recently gone through a barren patch of scoring [...]

I often believe that society at large does not get best value for money from auditors. That’s not to say that we deliver bad value for money.  Quite the contrary in fact; audit work does not attract especially high fees, has high costs of provision and very high insurance costs as a result of fairly [...]

BP chief executive Tony Hayward was grilled yesterday by the US Congressional panel. The failure of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform has been a catastrophe for lots of people. Stakeholders ranging from individual fishermen through to major shareholders have all been severely impacted. Being natural accountants though, we couldn’t help but think how this would [...]

I’ve been a qualified accountant for a fair few years now. I had the pleasure of bumping into my first auditing lecturer last week. It was at a business mixer event and even though it was a long time since we last saw each other he really hadn’t changed that much. We got talking and [...]

Historical cost accounting lies at the core of accountancy.  It’s derived from the simplicity of debits and credits and is therefore where we all start in our studies and practice of our profession. The idea is simple; I pay some cash and that gives me either an expense or an asset.  With the exception of [...]