F.H. Black & Company

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.

Finance professionals usually view spreadsheets as THE answer to many of their day-to-day problems. What they often don't realize is just how dangerous this can be.

During the course of many of our consulting engagements, we work with clients to help them understand this risk and ultimately to mitigate it.

The client may initially comment "I don't believe that these errors occur as frequently as you say". Or "Surely if the mistake was significant, someone would catch it". So periodically we need to prove our point. This is often done via a careful review of a couple of their spreadsheets. The shock can be considerable.

So for those of you that may have similar doubts, here is a 1.7 million dollar example of just how risky and damaging reliance on spreadsheets can be: http://www.postalnewsblog.com/2010/03/17/baltimore-district-overpaid-grievance-settlement-by-1-7-million/ .

To better understand WHY these mistakes are so prevalent, click here to go to an article we have published on it.

CaseWare International Inc. recently released version 8.00 of the Canadian GAAP Financials template. It is now available for download.