F.H. Black & Company

If you work in the finance department in a municipality in British Columbia and are attending the 2011 conference in Victoria in June, be sure to attend F.H. Black & Company's presentation: "Automating Municipal Financial Reporting with CaseWare". The presentation will take place on Wednesday, June 1 from 11:00 am to 12:00 noon.

During this 1 hour presentation, Jamie Black will introduce the many benefits that municipalities can obtain by implementing CaseWare Working Papers. The session focuses on the annual reporting process and a solution to many of the year end struggles that municipalities face.

"The municipalities that implement CaseWare Working Papers report dramatically reduced time investment to generate financial statements, less risk of error and a generally less stressful year-end process" says Mr. Black. "On top of this, many are able to negotiate reduced audit fees because their auditors get better information earlier in the audit cycle. We have had a lot of success with numerous municipalities and word of mouth has really begun to spread. We are excited to speak to BC municipalities about their opportunities this year."

For more information on how CaseWare Working Papers can simplify your reporting processes, please contact us or for more information on the conference please vist http://www.gfoabc.ca.

Harry Black, Managing Partner of F.H. Black and Company (FHB) and Hal Dreidger, Managing Partner of H.H. Dreidger (HHD) are pleased to announce the merger of their accounting practices, effective December 2010.

F.H. Black and Company, located at 36 Roslyn Road, will retain its present location and all current FHB employees and will welcome the relocation of H.H. Dreidger to the Roslyn Road office.   Clients can anticipate the continued  high level of servicing they have come to expect from FHB and HHD as the partners and employees anticipate a smooth amalgamation.

Managing Partner, Harry Black will oversee  the continued growth and development of the firm and will be directly involved in all client related matters.  Hal Dreidger, while looking forward to retirement in the next few years, will continue to play a key role in client management and servicing.   In addition to providing full service accounting services, F.H. Black and Company provides H.R. Consulting and I.T. Services to all clients

For more information about F.H. Black and Company and its professional services, please contact us at either (204) 949-9113 or (778) 785-3752.

CaseWare International has released version 9.00 of their GAAP Financials CaseView template. This update has taken a bit of time to arrive, but contains some major enhancements which will benefit all users of the template.

The most significant new feature is the ability to create multiple copies of the financial statements inside of a single CaseWare Working Papers file. No longer will you have to create separate GAAP Financials files for your annual statements and your quarterly statements. Along the same lines, the multiple statements can be used to report at various levels of your consolidation tree structure.

Another very-often requested feature which we will finally get our hands on is the ability to insert more than one Do It Yourself table into a statement area or note. We've gotten into the habit of inserting back-to-back schedules or notes and modifying the header as necessary to make it appear like one section, but now he can just select "Insert New DIY Table" out of the menu structure.

Governmental clients will be happy to know that you can now sort the columns in your tables. The Public Sector Accounting Board guidance to report your current-year budget balance in the left-most column on your statements should now be a much simpler requirement to satisfy. We no longer have to resort to DIY tables; the standard CaseWare-authored formats will be able to be sorted into the correct order.

Linkage between notes and statements has been improved, especially for those special or odd notes which don't follow a simple 2 column current-year-then-prior-year format. Your odd tables showing net book value of capital assets can now be properly linked to the statements.

One smaller feature of the new GAAP Financials template which will be appreciated by everyone who uses it to develop statements is the addition of keep-together sections to the notes and policies. In the past we have had to manually enter page breaks into the disclosure section to achieve the presentation we want, and then revisit them each time something changed. The presentation can now be dynamically and automatically reset with each change to keep your notes together and looking correct.

There are several other new features and changes.  For more information, see here. To discuss how these enhancements can benefit your organization, contact us.

GAAP, PSAB, IFRS....regardless of the standard, financial reporting is becoming more onerous for municipalities. Tight deadlines, reduced staffing levels and increasing demand to be fully accountable and transparent all make the job of finance professionals more difficult.

With this in mind, Canadian municipalities are asking, "How can we trim hours off our year/quarter end preparation time, while significantly reducing the risk of fraud and error?" For many, CaseWare Working Papers has become the answer.

For a better understanding of CaseWare's benefits for municipalities, please join us for one of our upcoming webinars. During these 90 minute presentations, we demonstrate how CaseWare simplifies the generation of  financial statements and the audit binder, reduces the risk of errors and can ultimately lead to reduced audit fees.

Click here to register for upcoming dates.