COA Solutions - Business Accounting Software

As we approach the end of the financial year, there is going to be increasing scrutiny on company results, especially given the current economic climate.

Following the announcement of the change to VAT on Monday 24th November, giving a grand total of 4 working days notice until the new rate becomes operational, we have had a busy couple of days helping our customers make sense of the changes and making sure they are in the best position to cope.

So the Chancellor has made his pronouncements in what must be some of the worst kept secrets of the pre-budget report ever! The headline-grabbing changes in VAT and income tax were there, as predicted, along with a number of other measures targeted at increasing spending and getting the economy going again.

I’ve just started reading ‘The Snowball’ the biography of Warren Buffett, ‘Oracle of Omaha’, written by Alice Schroeder. It’s difficult not to warm to a man who has such a down to earth approach to business and life. Who has an overwhelming desire to keep proving himself and who has a deep reverence for his father whom he felt the world had treated unjustly.

COA Solutions was very well represented last Thursday 30th October at the Sift Media Business Software Satisfaction Awards 2008 at the Brewery in London.

Version One attended the glitzy DM Awards 2008 ceremony at The Tower Hotel in London last night and came away with yet another award in recognition of the company’s quality document management products.

Two recent announcements from the SEC may start to breathe life into the XBRL initiative that is doing anything but delivering on the early promises of reduced cost, greater efficiency and improved accuracy.

Recessions have an upside. No longer are dinner parties dominated by people telling you how, by the simple reason of staying alive they have miraculously increased the value of their house, the flats in the city centre and the little ‘bolt hole’ in France.

In a HARDtalk interview broadcast on 2 September, Allan Little talks to private equity financier John Moulton.

I attended a very useful session yesterday run by the Cranfield University School of Management on ‘Marketing and Sales in a recession’. I was doubly interested as COA Solutions is running a similar event in September, only this time aimed at financial executives with a slightly more upbeat title, ‘How to prosper in a downturn’.