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By john mce

There are a lot of people with finance backgrounds and it is a very competitive environment, however saying that there are a lot of jobs in finance out there and it can be a very rewarding job to do.

If you want to get a good background in finance, a good way to start is to take an accounting course. Accounting degrees and courses are available in universities and school across the UK and also online.

There are a lot of places online that you can get an accounting degree - this is great if you have a busy schedule and need to fit in your degree between work/other studies. The same applies to a correspondence degree.

You can also get an accounting degree as at your local university or community college. Community colleges often offer the same night and weekend options that would also be fulfilled by the online class. If you go to university you will get an accounting degree that is likely accredited and from someplace a little more recognizable to the public at large. You will also be able to attend college in a more traditional manner. In the end, it is just a matter of your personal preference and also money.

A degree in finance is a more focused degree than accounting. For a career in finance you need to have strong mathematical skills and a good business sense. Employers will look for people who have a good academic background and possibly have some good work experience in the finance industry. It is good to try and do some volunteer work/work experience/ internships etc.

While a bachelor’’s degree might help to get a start in the industry of finance, typically most careers require a master’’s degree. Some of the positions in big banks/companies require a master’’s level education even if they are not management level positions. A degree in finance combines managing finances and understanding the markets along with critical thinking skills,learning how to use technology in the field and applying ethics in the standards of your work.

A degree in finance will not just help you to get a job in a bank. You can also look at jobs in investment companies, insurance companies and brokerage firms.

You can obtain your degree completely online, at university or a combination of both online and off-line study. The majority of universities offer financial degree programs

You can also check with a career centre to see if any investment banks are recruiting. A lot of banks will put everyone through an extensive training programme when they start and they do not need you to have a degree or any formal qualifications to get into one of these programmes. Some banks prefer that that you haven”t done a financial degree as they like to teach you from scratch, often taking in very young students. What you do need to be is very hard working, highly motivated and smart (being a little greedy doesn”t hurt either as this is all about money - the more you want it the harder you”ll work.)

About The Author

John MCE writes on behalf of Commercial Finance people, a financial recruitment consultancy, which was established in 1998 to place candidates in banking jobs, leasing jobs and factoring jobs. http://www.commercialfinancepeople.co.uk

By Terry Cartwright

It is a natural phenomenon for small business to be deeply involved in the particular skills and operations of the business. A fundamental issue that many small businesses overlook is that the particular industry in which they work and their personal skills are just tools of the trade not the trade of business itself. That trade of business is to produce a satisfactory bottom line.

While all business keeps financial records and many use accounting software the serious benefits of producing the accounts has a tendency to be restricted to accounting for tax purposes. The most useful function of a good bookkeeping system is however to use the financial information to generate higher levels of profitability.

The first step is to acquire and adopt an accounting software package suitable for the skills and knowledge of the small business. The second essential step is to produce a regular monthly income and expenses statement, usually called a profit and loss account.

Any individual monthly profit and loss account is of useful by limited value as a financial tool. Several consecutive monthly financial accounts can be indicative of where action can be taken to use the bookkeeping tool as a tool for accounting for profit.

Having produced a set of monthly accounts the next stage is to simply sit back and look at the numbers. The financial numbers tell the story of how the business has performed financially and with an intimate knowledge of how the figures came about the small business owner is perfectly placed to consider all potential options.

Sales turnover is a critical area to be considered. The historical sales income should be viewed in three separate modes being sales volume, sales prices and marginal profitability, the most critical and important of which is likely to be marginal profitability.

It is useful to stand back from the numbers and consider how the sales volume was achieved, what the driving forces where to achieve that level and what additional promotion can be done to increase sales volume even higher. Thinking about how the sales volume was obtained is the basis for determining how even higher levels can be produced in succeeding months.

Selling prices are often driven by market forces and product costs. An important area to consider is whether the sales prices obtained where the maximum prices obtainable at the same volume. Other considerations would be to consider the effect of increasing sales prices which would increase profitability if the same volume is maintained and even the effect of reducing sales prices if the volume of business increases to produce a higher level of gross profit.

Businesses in niche markets can charge a high selling price for the products or services without affecting the demand for the goods. On the other side of the coin the supermarket approach could be adopted by generating high volumes of sales from promoting the products at the lowest available prices.

The most critical area to be considered is the marginal profit from different products or services. The marginal profit is the gross profit which is the difference between the net selling price and the variable cost of that business area.

A lot of time can be spent working in the wrong direction, By identifying the most profitable items compared with the time and effort involved the small business can become more financially efficient by diverting more effort to those areas producing the highest financial returns.

The essential tool to this study is to maintain accounting records on a regular basis and produce a monthly profit and loss account. Periodically take a step back and consider the direction, future and opportunities available based on historical performance and the changes required to positively influence the bottom line, using and viewing the accounting software as a business tool. That tool is accounting for profit.

About The Author

Terry Cartwright, accountant and CEO at DIY Accounting, designs Accounting Software at http://www.diyaccounting.co.uk/ providing accounting solutions for small to medium sized business in the UK with payroll software at http://www.diyaccounting.co.uk/payroll.htm for up to 20 employees

By David Stockwell

Chains of reasoning or calculations arise where one statement depends on another, which in turn depends on another. In evaluating a circular chain of reasoning, the calculations are form a circle.

In some cases circularity generates an error. In others, circularity in spreadsheets is used intentionally to solve critical issues. Although it may be easy to get answers from a spreadsheet, it may be difficult to get the right answers when circularity in spreadsheets is involved.

When you deal with spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, circularities or circular references may lead to significant problems. Circularities in spreadsheets occur when one code requires information from another code, which requires the information from the first code. Patrick Burns, in his article on “Spreadsheet Addiction” (http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html) says that the spreadsheets that are available today, including Microsoft Excel and Works, have limitations in terms of operational risks. He goes on to say that some of the spreadsheets in the market available today will go probably obsolete due to lack of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is a United States federal law in response to major corporate scandals including Enron, Tyco International, and WorldCom.

If you are dealing with a large spreadsheet, tracking down all the circularities would be a tedious task. Since you have to calculate iteratively when you deal with a spreadsheet with circularities, you might witness higher recalculation time, sometimes ending up with incorrect solutions. Excel apparently inserts the number zero in cells affected by circularity, which may be incorrectly interpreted as the correct value.

Many vendors, such as Spreadsheet Advantage (www.Spreadsheetadvantage.com), are there to help you deal with circularity in spreadsheets.
Custom-built software solutions to track down circularities are able to fetch you the circularities in minimal time. All you need to do is submit your spreadsheet containing circularities to the circularity finding software and the software will generate a list of all the circularities in your spreadsheet. Software solutions from vendors such as Advantage for Analysts (www.advantageforanalysts.com) include capabilities like handling circularities in spreadsheets, goal-seeking and optimization.

In another productive approach to circularity, Cliff T. Ragsdale, Department of Business Information Technology Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, USA, uses circularities and array formulas to implement project management systems. His formula helps in determining the critical activities in a project network, irrespective of the amount of activities involved in the project.

While circularity in spreadsheets is can be used intentionally to solve specific problems, it may be difficult to get the right answers when circularity in spreadsheets is involved.

About The Author

David Stockwell PhD is helping people to develop and market web-sites by applying statistics similar to those developed in ecology to discover new species.

http://nicheshape.com - From Content Creation to Web Dominance.
http://landshape.org/enm - The Science and Statistics of Niche Modeling.

By Amit Mehta

Accounting fraud is often characterized by the:

1. Misuse/misdirection of funds
2. Understating/overstating of revenues
3. Understating/overstating of expenses
4. Overstating of corporate asset values
5. Underreporting of liabilities

Prosecuting accounting fraud is often aided by a whistleblower disclosing unethical practices or unlawful tactics. At times, the whistleblower is someone who also participated in the accounting fraud.

Law enforcers may offer a plea bargain with a diminished sentence or penalties to the whistleblower for exposing his “guiltier” associates. Protection from retaliation may also be provided. In extreme cases, the whistleblower (along with his family) may also go into the government’’s witness protection program.

In publicly listed companies, creative accounting tactics, not necessarily among those listed above, may be regarded as fraud. When such tactics are detected, a government oversight agency, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, may launch an investigation.

Sarbox Response

The Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act, also called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (or Sarbox), was speedily passed in 2002 in response to the wave of accounting scandals that occurred in corporate America that year.

It was in 2002 that the countries biggest accounting firms, like Arthur Andersen, Ernst & Young, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, etc., were charged in court or admitted negligence in their duties.

The government held that these accounting firms were tasked with identifying and preventing the publication of bogus financial reports. As a result of their neglect or collusion, their clients were able to publish reports that gave a misleading impression of the client company’’s financial status. Accounting fraud reached billions of dollars in some cases.

Sarbox contains provisions, such as the following:

1. Public companies must assess and divulge the effectiveness of their internal financial reporting controls.
2. Independent auditors must vet these assessments and disclosures.
3. Financial reports must be certified by CEOs and CFOs.
4. Personal loans to any director or executive officer are banned in most cases.
5. A stock-exchange-listed company must have a 100% independent audit committee whose sole task is to oversee the relations between the company and auditor
6. More severe civil and criminal penalties for violating SEC rules and longer jail sentences plus bigger fines for execs who intentionally misstate their company’’s financial status
7. Protection for whistleblowers to win
a. Reinstatement
b. Back pay
c. Benefits
d. Compensatory damages
e. Abatement orders
f. Attorney’’s fees and legal expenses within reason

Fallout from Fraud

In the three-year period before Sarbox became a law, the SEC reported that accounting fraud showed a 41% increase: from only 79 cases in 1998 to 112 in 2001.

Many believe that the stock market downturn of 2002 was caused by a widespread perception that many publicly listed companies (such as Enron and WorldCom) may be cooking the books.

More recently, an accounting fraud scandal arose to rival Enron and WorldCom. AIG is still being investigated for accounting fraud as a result of the mutual funds and insurance fiasco of 2004. But recent investigations uncovered more than a billion dollars in accounting transaction errors.

Oftentimes, the worse punishment is loss of support for the offending company. So far, AIG has already lost around 50 billion dollars in market capital as a result of the investigations.

About The Author

Want to Know the Top Sites to Find Criminal Records? Read Dr. Amit Mehta’’s Unbiased Reviews - http://www.recordssitereviews.com/criminal_records.php