Search Not Just Numbers

Tuesday 27 October 2009

Warren Buffett and Rudyard Kipling

I was just reading Warren Buffett's best investments on the BBC web site, giving an insight into why he invested in some of his biggest successes.

A theme that seemed to come through from pretty much all of them, and particularly his latest headline grabber, Goldman Sachs, reminded me of a line from a poem I remember from when I was a child and which I now read to my son:

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...."


Read it through again, here. It could be written for dealing with a credit crunch!

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Tuesday 13 October 2009

More wake-up calls for accountants and traditional software companies

I have touched on the threat from the cloud computing world to the traditional accounting software providers, and to the way accountants work with them, previously on this blog.

Last week's UK Software Satisfaction Awards rather hammered the point home with Internet-based Software as a Service (SaaS) providers winning almost all of the accounting categories. A noteable exception was a couple of prizes for Pegasus, but the message is clear - if you have not taken a look at what these providers can do - do so now. If you are an accountant in practice, do so before your clients do.

The full list of winners is available at http://www.softwaresatisfaction.co.uk/ and Accountingweb provide a good summary of the event on their site.


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Thursday 8 October 2009

Is it Pivot Tables or Age that is puggling my mind?

Earlier today, I told a client I didn't want a late finish next Friday because it was my birthday. I then put the telephone down and it wasn't until about 20 minutes later that I realised that my birthday is tomorrow!

I have narrowed the cause of this bumbling behaviour down to two possibilities:

  1. Naturally age is a contender, always front of mind when another year passes, but one would would hope that senility was still a while away at 39;
  2. Excessive exposure to Pivot Tables over the last 10 years or so.

My money's on the latter. I'd appreciate any of your confessions of your own bumbling in the comments below both to make me feel better, and to give us all a laugh on a Friday!


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Two personal milestones this week

This week marks two personal milestones for me:

  1. I turn 39 tomorrow (Friday), only one year to go until the big 4-0. It's now going to take some serious cramming to hit the 'millionaire by 40' goal!
  2. I have only just noticed that the previous post, Do you build your spreadsheets yourself?, was the 100th post on this blog. Not exactly prolific but I am pleased at how the volume of information builds up if you keep at it, and it seems a milestone worth noting (to me anyway).





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Friday 2 October 2009

Do you build your spreadsheets yourself?

One of the things I have noticed in the first few months of my Spreadsheets by Email business, is how our clients are often senior (and expensive) people in finance (and other fields) who were planning to build the spreadsheet themselves before stumbling across the service. This got me wondering how many of you out there do build your own spreadsheets, and how many use others inside or outside of the organisation.

Please let me know who builds your spreadsheets by voting in the poll at the top-left corner of the blog.

You can also see the results so far - assuming you are not the first to vote!




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