I’m a great fan of the nap. I only wish there was time for more…

Just occasionally the nap almost forces its way upon you – like when you look up from the computer screen and something just goes ‘doing’ in the front of your head.

Sinus I expect following the heatwave of the week so far and back to back meetings taking over four hours in total might have something to do with it.

So back to the (home) office following the meetings – an aside, first meetings this week I’ve not worn shorts to, temperatures have been seriously un-British for the whole of the week. 30C and above? Longest time since 1976 I read yesterday – and the scary thought that the hottest summer of my recollection was not experienced by more than half my audience. “Only” 41 years ago – doesn’t time fly…

Still I owe everyone an apology for my lack of presence these last two weeks – the most recent due to holidays and the first due to trying to make sure various tasks had been dealt with. Otherwise I might NOT have been away on holiday.

That is a story in itself – a story of unintended consequences.

FRS102.

Probably means nothing to most readers – not sure it means anything printable to me!

Financial Reporting Standard No.102. I’m not even going to mention FRS105 (damn) as that might cause even more confusion.

Warning – THIS IS NOT THE OFFICIAL DEFINITION:

• Every now and then the (accounting) powers-that-be decide the larger firms are abusing the rules, usually to boost the short-term remuneration of the board of directors by recognising profits (good) earlier and losses (not so good) later giving more chance of any bonuses vesting
• What happens is that any adverse news gets buried more and more
• The other truism is that the average life of a FTSE 100 director is around three years
• This is the length of time it takes for the average executive director to be found out as actually no better than their predecessor
• After a quiet bloodletting the directors move on and are replaced by the next lot
• The new lot then offload all the adverse news (and a bit more if possible) and the whole cycle starts again
• SO, every now and then the rules change

IF there was any common sense in the world (assuming, say, 1,000,000 companies – which is probably an understatement – of which 1,000 are of significance and/or public interest) legislation would work for the 999,000 and an EXTRA layer of rules would impinge upon the 1,000

To an extent that has been how it has worked for the last few years, itself maybe the fourth iteration of what constitutes a “true and fair” set of accounts since I qualified. Also the information at Companies House has been minuscule and not overly onerous to produce.

Well…

Someone forgot to tell the people revising this time to exercise some nous.

Admittedly there has been a three year hiatus since the larger firms adopted the new rules BUT, even assuming the number of accountants does not vary linearly with the number of companies

• 1 accountant in 100 has used the systems for three years and the other 99 have not
• the one works for a firm large enough to have some sort of technical department which can help them with interpretation and formatting
• the rest of us are dependent on our software suppliers to provide this function…

which means that, even if the software business has assumed there will be higher demand, they weren’t imagining it was going to be 99 times the demand (probably not quite that bad in actuality) so they’ve not upskilled enough of their support team (or taken on enough additional persons) and excellent support response times are absolutely decimated!

So – a FOUR DAY wait for the initial response to a query (forget the automated email – it really doesn’t count) and an HOUR conversation to sort the question. Most previous queries have been solved in a quarter of the time.

Maybe I should try not to overthink these situations but I cannot see who benefited from my travails. maybe you can…

I’ve not said anything about the current week but, boy, have I offloaded my stress and angst for a while.

Produced a set of FRS102 accounts that weren’t quite what I’d have expected to do but, having explained my predicament to the client, there are no issues at that end I’m pleased to say. Considering I’d been concerned I’d let the client have their AGM without a completed set of accounts or had to eat into my holidays to prevent this it could have been a lot worse.

But intended consequences, I hope not. Is it? Nice waterfall. We walked here on our hols…