The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) have launched a consultation seeking views on a simplified reporting regime for ‘micro-entities'.

It is proposed that a micro-entity is a company or unincorporated business that trades for profit and does not exceed two of the three following criteria:

The British Museum is an amazing place - well worth a visit if you are ever in London.  Describing itself as a museum of the world for the world, it has a bold global agenda to help us all understand the past and shape our future.  So it made a perfect location for the CIMA bi-annual Howitt lecture 'Global governance - time for a behavioural revolution' which was delivered this year by CIMA's Professor of Accounting and Financial Management at the London School of Economics, Wim Van der Stede.

Social media is a rapidly-expanding technology which is generating a radically different way of doing business.

However, as we have read via Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock”, our inability to keep up with and adapt to rapid changes in technology can leave us all left behind and unable to benefit from it.

•    Is social media a Marmite product which we either love or loathe ?
•    Is this technology only for young people to benefit from?

Come 2011 Sri Lanka will be keeping an important step in the field of financial accounting, as it will report the first comparative financial statements based on the international accounting standards. Simple as it may sound, it is not such an easy task!

Hi,

One of our members has asked us the following:

You will have read about CIMA's involvement in an exciting collaborative project with PwC and Tomorrow's Company researching the barriers to the effective development of corporate reporting.

CIMA Sri Lanka recently held a focus group discussion among industry leaders to discuss the way forward for corporate reporting in Sri Lanka.

Hi there

 Has anyone come across the abbreviation "th" in financial reports? For example, a company is reporting its results and after Balance sheet in brackets it says (th GBP) or (th USD), what does the th stand for?

 Many thanks

Mike

We have the issue where we are consolidating 7 ERP's and 11 business units (all owned by the same legal entity in the UK) which currently trade with each other using various different pricing rules. Some are cost + freight, other make a good margin on these sales.

We will move to one shared virtual warehouse so potentially we can "transfer" this stock however this is cause some emotive discussion as there are some business units who genuinely add value to a product and wouldn't therefore get the benefit.

I am looking to upgrade/replace the current finance system within our organisation in the next year to enable better reporting and provide better quality information to our management team while reducing the time taken to produce the monthly accounts.

Our business is an IT services and support company that provide a variety of IT solutions, consultancy. Which involves many different types of billing, support contracts, product invoices, services invoices, staged payment plans etc etc.

Following England’s tense victory over Slovenia in the World Cup this week which I watched with fellow CIMA staff in the Council Chamber, I attended a Tomorrow’s Corporate Reporting project meeting with colleagues from Tomorrow’s Company and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The meeting was significantly more relaxed but nonetheless successful.

Whatever your views on the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, it certainly hasn't produced a clear political direction on how to respond to global warming whether that's man-made, part of the natural planetary cycle, or simply a marketing strategy to fund Al Gore's next election campaign. So does that mean it's up to us now?

One of my responsibilities at CIMA is to formulate our policy to the many and varied developments in financial reporting.  This predominantly relates to proposed changes to IFRS but also covers local GAAP.

Dear All,

Has any one got any ideas of any web sites I can visit with a simple & easy comparison & updates on convergence between IFRS & US GAAP. I have looked at many web sites & you have to trail through lots of information.

This would be useful for the P8 exam.

Thanks