travel-4-business.co.uk

7 Responses to “Book-keeping and Accounting for the Small Business: How to Keep the Books and Maintain Financial Control Over Your Business”

1. 

   Anonymous
   

   25. Aug, 2010

   Review by for Book-keeping and Accounting for the Small Business: How to Keep the Books and Maintain Financial Control Over Your Business
   Rating:
   Oh dear. There are three pages in the appendix that include “useful website addresses”, “2005/6 tax rates” and “Computer bookkeeping software”.
   This is the almost the only evidence I could find that this book has in any way been updated in the last fifty years, although it was allegedly revised as recently as 2003.
   All records are supposed to be kept in hand-written books of account, with the occasional reference to carbon copies. Spreadsheets? They don’t even rate a mention.
   As an accountant trying to help small businesses, I feel that HowTo Books should withdraw this completely irrelevant volume from sale, as anyone starting up a business who reads this will at best get a headache and at worst follow the instructions and waste a lot of time that should be spent in the 21st century.
2. 

   Zordano
   

   25. Aug, 2010

   Review by Zordano for Book-keeping and Accounting for the Small Business: How to Keep the Books and Maintain Financial Control Over Your Business
   Rating:
   Run a small business or planning one? Need to build competence in setting up and running your books? Need to really understand VAT?This book is the best of the many available. It won’t scare you – you’ll learn a great deal and build confidence.It’s clear and comprehensive. It also addresses finance and accounting matters and the record keeping you need in relation to both of these.It also briefly addresses various available pre-printed paper record keeping books and book-keeping software and offers guidance on where to get these.I found it invaluable when preparing to get my small retail business off the ground (I read it twice beforehand) and I still use it as a reference work.This is a newly updated edition of a book I found indispensable.
3. 

   Anonymous
   

   25. Aug, 2010

   Review by for Book-keeping and Accounting for the Small Business: How to Keep the Books and Maintain Financial Control Over Your Business
   Rating:
   Example: He advocates using exercise books to keep accounts. In 2006 this is unacceptable and possibly negligent advice.
   Use a spreadsheet at a minimum, at least then you can create backups.The book would be fine if you wish to have the pain of record keeping and accounts by hand, or it were still the 1950s, but it isn’t and there is no need to perpetuate the out-dated and laborious methods cited in this book. I’m going to look instead for a book about computerized accountancy.
4. 

   F. Hamilton
   

   25. Aug, 2010

   Review by F. Hamilton for Book-keeping and Accounting for the Small Business: How to Keep the Books and Maintain Financial Control Over Your Business
   Rating:
   I bought his book as a way to get a basic understanding of book-keeping. The first two chapters are useful if you want to set up a very simple system. Chapter three gives a good overview of VAT but doesn’t give enough details about how to create a VAT return, which is not very helpful.

   As your business grows, you will want to increase the sophistication of your book-keeping. Unfortunately this is a particularly weak aspect of the book. The chapter on double-entry book-keeping is very poor and I certainly couldn’t follow it. You need a good understanding of debits and credits to be able to do double-entries, which if well-explained is easy. But the author doesn’t explain it well and the examples confuse things further. By comparison, accountingforeveryone dot com provides a much better explanation and it may be worth buying the online book (though I haven’t yet).
5. 

   S. Gwyn-Smith
   

   25. Aug, 2010

   Review by S. Gwyn-Smith for Book-keeping and Accounting for the Small Business: How to Keep the Books and Maintain Financial Control Over Your Business
   Rating:
   I’m starting a small business. I figured I’d best brush up on my book-keeping skills so I went to my local Boarders and ended up buying this.

   Bit of a dissapointment. Admitedly I’ve only read the first two chapters in depth, but that’s enough for me, and it obviously was for the author, because the first two chapters (well, just the second chapter really) are the only ones that brush upon pure book-keeping. And it doesn’t even do that very well. The examples are vaugely supported, but have little to no explanation as to where some of the figures come from. I actually had to get a calculator out to understand exactly what they were trying to illustrate and still came up short.

   Don’t be fooled by the “Revised and Updated” seal of approval either. Supposedly having been revised in 2003, it only deals with cash or cheque payments, with no consideration of electronic or debit payments. Also in the tiny section on computerised book-keeping it recommends that your computer will most likely have a Windows based operating system which is (and I quote) “a graphical interface which provides an intuitive and efficient work enviroment for your personal computer”, ha! Unbelieveable! I bought the book to learn about recording cash flow, not to learn the basics of Personal Computing! It gets better…. it recommends that this intuitive operating system will most likely be Windows ME! Laughable!

   But I digress. This book was updated in the sense of a few extra paragraphs to include Limited Liability Partnerships and suchlike, and the rest of the book was obviously left without tweaking.

   If your parents want to understand how to balance their cheques and maybe keep financial records of the logers rent then this is the book for them. If thats not what you’re looking for (which let’s be honest…it’s not) then steer well clear!

   I’m off to Boarders tomorrow to ask the nice manager guy if he would give me a refund.
6. 

   Robert Morris
   

   25. Aug, 2010

   Review by Robert Morris for Harvard Business Review On Leadership
   Rating:
   
   Much of the contextual material in this volume is out-of-date, given the fact that the eight articles originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review years ago (1975-1998). However, I think the core concepts remain sound and provide a valuable frame-of-reference for understanding the advances in effective decision making that have occurred during the last five years. For example, if anything, Henry Mintzberg’s article (”The Manager’s Job”) is even more relevant today than it was when it first appeared in the July/August issue in 1975. In it, he examines “four myths about the manager’s job that do not bear up under careful scrutiny of the facts,” such as “the manager is a reflective, systematic planner.” In fact, Mintzberg suggests that managers work “at an unrelenting pace, that their activities are characterized by brevity, variety, and discontinuity, and that they are strongly oriented to action and dislike reflective activities.” Mind you, this was an opinion expressed more than 30 years ago.

   No brief commentary such as this can do full justice to the rigor and substance of the eight articles. It remains for each reader to examine the list to identify which subjects are of greatest interest to her or him. My own opinion is that all of the articles are first-rate. One of this volume’s greatest benefits is derived from the fact that a variety of perspectives are provided by a number of different authorities on the same general subject. In this instance, leadership.

   Readers will especially appreciate the provision of an executive summary that precedes each article. They facilitate, indeed expedite frequent review of key points which – presumably – careful readers either underline or highlight. Also of interest is the “About the Contributors” section that includes suggestions of other sources to consult. Here are questions to which the authors of the other seven articles respond:

   What do leaders do? (John P. Kotter)
   
   Comment: “Institutionalizing a leadership-centered culture is the ultimate act of leadership.”

   How do managers and leaders differ? (Abraham Zaleznik)
   
   Comment: “Managers see themselves as conservators and regulators of an existing order of affairs with which they personally identify and from which they gain rewards [whereas] leaders tend to be twice-born personalities, people who feel separate from their environment.”

   How do “defining moments” help to develop character? (Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.)
   
   Comment: “Defining moments force us to find a balance between our hearts in all their idealism and our jobs in all their messy reality.”

   Note: In Leading Quietly (2002) and then Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature (2006), Badaracco develops in greater depth many of the core concepts introduced in this article.

   What are the ways in which CEOs lead? (Charles M. Farkas and Suzy Wetlaufer)
   
   Comment: “No matter where a company is located or what it makes, its CEO must develop a guiding, overarching philosophy about how he or she can best add value…. A leadership approach is a coherent, explicit style of management, not a reflection of personal style. This is a critical distinction.”

   Why are there so few great managers? (Thomas Teal)
   
   Comment: “Great management involves courage and tenacity. It closely resembles heroism.”

   How to lead others during adaptive change? (Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie)
   
   Comment: “Solutions to adaptive challenges reside not in the executive suite but in the collective intelligence of employees at all levels.”

   “Whatever happened to the take-charge manager?” (Nitin Nohria and James D. Berkley)
   
   Comment: “Pragmatists understand that it is unrealistic to try to avoid uncertainty. Attempts to deny or ignore it can blind managers to the real contexts in which they are working and prevent them from responding effectively.”

   Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out the recently published Harvard Business Review on Making Smarter Decisions as well as other series title in the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series such as those on Becoming a High-Performance Manager, Change, Corporate Strategy, Decision Making, Effective Communication, the Innovative Enterprise, Leadership, Leadership at the Top, and Measuring Corporate Performance.
7. 

   Anonymous
   

   25. Aug, 2010

   Review by for Harvard Business Review On Leadership
   Rating:
   Looking for some informative, original and clear thinking about leadership? This book is a great choice! The eight articles in this work cover: the role of leadership, differences between managing and leading, and ways chief executives lead. Each article begins with an executive summary which, for the fast-forward crowd, is a big plus.So many books are merely ONE GOOD ARTICLE embedded in a thicket of verbiage. Chopping away through such a jungle of verbosity for the gist-of-it-all often proves tedious and disappointing. (Blessed are the laconic!) This book, on the other hand, just serves up a bunch of ‘gists’ -the pure meat and potatoes of ideas. Happily, the HBSP has published several other collections of this sort on such topics as knowledge management, change, and strategies for growth. Each of these is collection of first-rate ‘gists’. Reviewed by Gerry Stern, founder, Stern & Associates, author of Stern’s Sourcefinder The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources, Stern’s CyberSpace SourceFinder, and the Compensation and Benefits SourceFinder.