HOW TO GET A JOB OR WORK WHILE OTHERS ARE BEING RETRENCHED

I was fortunate to get my 1st job just a month after my graduation. It was not a high flying one by any standard but I was so excited to have got a job! Many a graduate would have despised it, which Bachelor of Commerce degree holder would have wanted to work in an Indian family owned service station in a small town?

A couple of months into the job, they announced that they were going to retrench because the company was not doing well. I remember they had to choose between a secretary who could do accounting work or an Accountant who could do secretarial work. I happened to be the latter. Sadly therefore the secretary and personal assistant to the MD lost her job. I therefore became an Accountant and Secretary-cum- personal assistant to the MD.

The end of the accounting profession as we know it?

The accounting profession will face significant changes in the next three decades, and professional organizations, their members, and educational institutions should respond

Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) research—Drivers of Change and Future Skills—has explored these important changes, expected to be encountered by the year 2025. I was privileged to have been part of the team from Uganda discussing the future of the Accounting profession. One of the highlights was on the need to have professional Quotients and below is an excerpt from the report.

PROFESSIONAL QUOTIENTS (PQ): This analysis suggests that to add value for their employers and clients, the professional accountant of the future will need an optimal and changing combination of professional competencies: a collection of technical knowledge, skills and abilities, combined with interpersonal behaviours and qualities. By 2020, all professional accountants will need to develop and balance the necessary professional quotients to fit their role and stage of career.

PRO BONOs DO PAY

A friend called me to speak to a group on a topic ‘Successful Financial Management Practices for SME's’. She made it clear that it was going to be pro bono and I willfully accepted because it’s a topic I am passionate about. After my presentation, one of the group members who had come in towards the end of my presentation requested if I could go and speak to their senior management team. She asked me how much I would charge for an hour but for some reason I felt hesitant to quote a fee and left it to their discretion. I was therefore very pleased to receive an honorarium from this organization after making the presentation.

A couple of weeks later, I received an email from the same organization requesting for my profile for possible future areas of engagement. This was followed by ‘interviews’ for potential consultancy work. We ended up signing a contract for 15 days of consultancy work and eventually other support services.

The point is, there are somethings that one can do for free, expecting no payment or reward, but in the right time, the reward duly comes. The reward may not be monetary; it may be new friendships, networks even new knowledge. Money is good! However, it should not be the only motivation to offer a service.

As the good book states, cast your bread on the waters: for you shall find it after many days. May 2018 be a year filled with many of those days, may it be a year of a bountiful harvest!

HOW TO SURVIVE A RECESSION

Image Credit http://startuptipsdaily.com

Business as with life has its ups and downs. There are times when everything is going on well and there are those times when you have to tighten your belt to survive. In this article we will look at some tips on how to cope when the economy and conditions for business are not favourable.

Tax Planning Basics #Uganda

How you plan your business affairs can cause you or your employees to pay more taxes than necessary. The ability to understand the tax statues and how you structure your operations plays a key role in tax planning.

Tax planning is a process of looking at various tax options in order to determine when, whether, and how to conduct business and personal transactions so that taxes are eliminated or considerably reduced.

Although tax avoidance planning is legal, tax evasion – the reduction of tax through deceit or concealment - is not.

Basic compliance requirements for an #SME in Uganda

‘When it comes to a business and corporate management, compliance refers to the company obeying all of the legal laws and regulations in regards to how they manage the business, their staff, and their treatment towards their consumers. The concept of compliance is to make sure that corporations act responsibly’ writes Gary Trainor in an article Importance Of Compliance In Business. He highlights that the benefits compliance brings into any business include: avoidance of criminal charges, building positive reputation and higher productivity in the company.

#SMEs: Change should be the only constant!

In a place where yams were not common, a husband bought a huge healthy yam and took it home for his wife to cook. To his astonishment, she took the yam and cut of a quarter of it from each end and threw them in the bin and prepared the remaining half.

"Why did you do that?” He asked, “That’s what my mum did when cooking yams” she replied. Curious, he called his mother-in-law to seek for an answer. “That’s what my mum did when cooking yams” was her response. Determined to get to the root of it, he called his grandma-in-law and asked her why they cut off the quarter ends of the yam and throw it away. She told him the yams were too big for her cooking pots and so she would cut off to leave what could fit in the pot. Plus they had plenty of yams in the garden which they could take whenever they needed more!

The Must-Have Mobile App for Ugandan Taxpayers #AskURA

I had an incident when I was filing VAT returns , this supplier’s document had an 11 digit TIN number! Now as you know the TIN number is only 10 digits, how then would I know which of the digits was the wrong one? Another incident happened that I uploaded a VAT return file and the system warned me that the supplier was not registered for VAT.

A business without financial statements is like a car without a dashboard

Imagine driving around, completely unaware of how fast you’re going or how much fuel you have left. If you ignore the financial dashboard of your business, you could lose your entire business.
In this video, I spoke about this and more on managing business finances at a business conference for small businesses. Watch this video and watch out!      

For Every Business Owner Without An Accountant

 “I am told you can create financial statements for my business?” the client asked “No I can’t” was my response.
I said no because he had no records for the period for which he wanted the financial statements produced. Accountants are meant to help you organise your existing records in order to produce financial statements and not to conjure up figures. This means that you have to get into the habits of keeping records. If you cannot write them down somewhere then at least keep the source documents (receipts, vouchers, invoices, bills etc.) and someone can help you organise these into a report.

This client wanted the financial statement in order to file income tax returns. What one should know is that whatever you file with the revenue authority should be kept available to them for a period of at least five (5) years. When they come to audit you, they will need documentary evidence of how the financial statements were arrived at.

What to consider before installing an Accounting Software

A lady told me she could not understand the figures in her financial reports. I asked if I could have a look starting with the balance sheet. From her laptop she generated one in a horizontal format and guess what, balances under the title other current assets category were appearing on the liabilities & equity side of the balance sheet! The accounting equation is: Assets = Liabilities + Equity.