Ancient Finances will explore finances and money during the Viking age and Roman Empire. Lots of posts on other blogs addressing those topics have been cross-posted to the new blog. This includes lots of discussion of the loot Alexander the Great lifted during his rampaging world tour.
I’ve been having loads of fun reading about the Viking age and am intrigued by finances and money during the Roman Empire.
Why a new blog?
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A few interesting reads for accountants.
5/30/17 – Bill Sheridan at Business Learning Institute – Robots aren’t stealing our jobs. They’re setting us free. – Mr. Sheridan describes how we as accountants could thrive as computers take away the basic number crunching parts of our work.
Those tasks we do that can be automated will shift. That will leave the strategic thinking, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and anticipation to us.
In my little brain, I have a way to describe this – So let’s say you have a program that can review 100% of disbursements instead of you drawing a sample of 40 or 60 items. Cool.
In any client that still uses humans to run their organizations, how many exceptions do you know think you will need to address?
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Accountants coping with change. PTIN fees tossed out. New audit report from PCAOB.Read More »
Adrian Goldsworthy provides a good description of a Roman shield, called a scutum, in his book The Complete Roman Army on page 129. A well-preserved shield was found at Dura Europus that dates from the 3rd century.
The shield is 3’ 3” tall by 2’ 8” wide in a curved shape.
It is two inches thick, consisting of three layers of wood glued together.
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Description of Scutum, a Roman Legionnaire’s shield.Read More »
Here are a few of the comments from CalCPA’s May 24, 2017 Not-for-profit conference about major overhaul of financial statement presentation that I thought would be of interest to others in the nonprofit community. This post addresses ASU 2016-14. Part 1 addressed tax, revenue recognition, and single audit update sessions.
(Cross-posted from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)
Accounting update – The first presenter is a FASB staff person. While comments made are the presenter’s opinions, we ought to pay attention to such a person’s opinions. Another disclaimer is the following summaries are from me.
ASU 2016-14 is the document changing not-for-profit financial statement presentation. We all need to get to the place where ASU 2016-14 or 16-14 easily rolls off our tongues.
ASU 2016-14:
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Here are a few articles to stretch your brain when you are ready for some mental exercise:
5/17/17 – Tom Selling at The Accounting Onion – Double-Entry Accounting and Modern Times – As a real brain stretcher, consider whether our double-entry accounting system is fundamentally broken.
Work with me a minute while I highlight and summarize a few ideas from the article.
A basic concept of double-entry accounting is that debits on the left side of the balance sheet represent all the assets of the entity. This includes all of the resources that are available for the entity to use in order to make money and all the assets against which creditors have a claim.
On the credit side, liabilities represent all of the claims against the organization. The equity section represents the value that belongs to the owners.
Prof. Selling points out there’s a variety of problems with using the statement of financial position as a representation of economic reality.
He points out and then moves past the idea that not all debits are assets and not all credits are liabilities. That’s easy to understand.
More significantly is that not all assets are reflected as debits and not all liabilities are reflected as credits.
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