Creative visualizations-military history illustration

(cross-post from Attestation Update)

I’ve been interested lately in creative ways to show data.  We accountants are great at absorbing a lot of numbers and finding the patterns.  Other people who don’t have our mind-set can not see what we see.  We need to find new ways to explain things.

How would you summarize the location and intensity of wars over the last several centuries?  One of my favorite historians would do that verbally over the course of a full-length book or a dozen columns.  (And I’d love every word of it too!)

Jordi Colomer has done so in a 5 minute video:

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Jim Ulvog

Going concern issues under SSARS 19

I have two posts at Attestation Update explaining how to address going concern issues under SSARS 19.  The guidance found in SSARS 19 is rather brief.  Here are the posts:

I won’t cross-post those comments to this blog.  Please click the links above to read the discussion.

Update – SSARS 19 had been replaced by SSARS 21. All the reports have been revised. You can check out these posts at my other blog, Attestation Update:

Jim Ulvog

Convergence report from La Piana Consulting – part 1

I previously discussed an article by La Piana Consulting here and here and now would like to discuss their report  Convergence – How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector.

One of their key concepts is convergence.  That is the title of their report, so I guess it would make sense that is the overriding issue.  Their point is that not only are there some very major trends that are going to have a dramatic impact on the nonprofit community, but these trends will interact with each other to reinforce and compound change.

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Jim Ulvog

How to get 20 co-workers fired – today’s lesson on how NOT to use social media

Seems that a fellow who was doing some marketing work for Chrysler sent out a tweet criticizing the driving skills of Detroit drivers and threw in an obscenity for spice.  He sent the tweet while stuck in traffic. 

Unfortunately, he accidentally used the Chrysler brand twitter feed instead of his personal twitter account. 

Oops.

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Jim Ulvog

Don’t have all your backup media on-site the day you swap out media

So you are taking backup data off-site on a regular basis.  Good. 

Your key staff person faithfully makes a daily backup of your server to a portable hard drive.  Once a week this person dutifully brings in the portable hard drive used for last week’s daily backups.  As directed, this person disconnects the portable drive with the newest data from the server, plugs the other one in to the server, then puts the drive with new data in her backpack to take it home that night.

What else could go wrong?  Do you see the risk?

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Jim Ulvog

How could an auditor pick up any red flags to this corruption case?

I’m writing a series of posts on my other blog about a corruption indictment of officials in the city of Upland.  The focus of that series of posts is a case study for CPAs based on a live, developing situation.  Since the audience will be CPAs, I will not cross-post those discussions to this blog.  If you’re interested, the posts start here and continue here and here.

Jim Ulvog

Take backup data off-site

What could go wrong in this picture?

Your church has three portable hard drives that are used to back up the server data.  Every day one of your faithful staff dutifully swaps out the portable hard drive and makes a new, complete backup of your server.  When a backup is complete, the portable hard drive with the fresh set of backup data is put on the shelf over the server, where it belongs.

What’s the problem?

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Jim Ulvog

Move the “Reply All” button to reduce the chance you will becoming the subject of a newspaper article

Various tales of disasters arising from people hitting the ‘reply all’ button were told in an article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.  Simultaneously entertaining to see other’s embarrassment and fear-inducing that you could do the same thing.   I’d like to give you a link so you can read the full article, but it looks like the WSJ doesn’t like that idea anymore. 

Got a great idea from the article you might enjoy:

Move the ‘reply all’ button so you can’t accidentally hit it.  Also requires a more intentional effort to choose that option.

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Jim Ulvog