F.H. Black & Company

In March F.H. Black & Company offered our first Tips & Tricks webinar on CaseWare Working Papers. 40 participants gathered online for 90 minutes to discuss some often-overlooked or little-know features in Working Papers which can be used to improve the financial reporting process.

I am happy to report that it was a success! It was not completely hiccup-free however. Partway through the presentation we had an issue with our audio and some time later we had an issue with video.

In an attempt to see if we should continue offering these webinars, we sent out a survey to see what people thought. Here is a summary of the results:

• Our average score for overall satisfaction was 4 out of 5 (5 being best, 1 being worst).
• 78% of respondents felt they got more tips & tricks than they expected.
• 85% felt they received "good" or "excellent" value for their money.
• As you might expect given the technical problems we had, we scored lower on Audio quality (2.4 out of 5) and Video quality (3.6 out of 5).

Based on these very positive results, we have begun planning the next webinar dates and have been looking into ways to improve both audio and video quality.

Please stay tuned (subscribe to our RSS feed or join the CaseWare Users' Group on Linked-In) for an announcement in late June about our next webinar dates.

In response to regular requests from our clients, we are happy to announce a new webinar series: CaseWare Working Papers Tips & Tricks.

We will offer four (4) different hour long webinars in 2011 covering different areas of the CaseWare Working Papers product family. The cost is $35 per person for each webinar or $120 for all four webinars.

Webinar 1 - Frequently overlooked features in Working Papers

Considering we are about to enter tax time (in Canada), we thought we would explore a half dozen topics that will be particulalry useful at this time of year. Specific topics covered to include:

- improving integration with external applications (including tax software, PDFs & Excel),

- automating completion of alternate returns (for example GIFI tax returns, Financial Information Returns for municipalities or Canadian Association of University Business Officers return),

- little used adjusting entry functionality which simplify things like reconciliation of net income to taxable net income, restating balances for changes in accounting policies or adoption of alternate reporting frameworks (IFRS for example),

- utilizing User Defined balances in automatic documents to simplify analysis,

To attend this webinar, please click here to register.

Topics for subsequent webinars will be announced at a later date. To submit topic sugestions please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Please note that we will be using CaseWare Working Papers Canadian version 2010 for our webinar. If you use a different version, functionality differences may impact your ability to directly apply the tips or tricks discussed.

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.