MCA – Business Members Conference

Yesterday I attended the annual Business Members Conference organised by the Manchester Society of Chartered Accountants at Old Trafford LCCC. 

David O’Leary and John Tillotson of Deloitte’s in Manchester highlighted some interesting and complex matters to help save tax in challenging times.  The subject matter covered the reclassification of Industrial Buildings for Capital Allowances, tips on Research & Development followed by reward schemes through bonuses and shares, Family Benefit Trusts and  imminent changes to Pension legislation. 

Len Jones of Practical Car & Van Rental Ltd treated us to an insight into our personalities through a series of cryptic questions and answers using an abstract of the Myers-Briggs type Indicator (MBTI).  Somehow Len managed to get a roomful of accountants happily drawing pictures of the Eiffel tower and a map of where we were before testing us on our levels of integrity.  The dubious results of this session concluded that the majority of the accountants in the room were highly intelligent touchy feely extroverts with the utmost integrity!

Richard Anning of the ICAEW IT Faculty briefed us on Cloud Computing, Virtualisation, the rise of social networking, Green IT and XBRL.  The first two topics are areas I am doing a fair amount of work on at the moment, so watch this space for updates on Hyper-V, VMWare, XenServer and others in due course.  

John Oates of Baker Tilly highlighted the steps businesses should take when embarking on a Business Process Improvement project.  Through his experiences John strongly believes that organisations should be able to generate at least a 10% saving, if the project is properly managed.  This is easier than it sounds, because proper management is key to the success of these types of projects, where management and staff must be involved and committed throughout the process if it is to realise the anticipated improvements. 

One subject I found particularly interesting and thought provoking was KPI’s, presented by Jon Scopes of Carter Scopes.  We all use KPI’s in one form or another to measure performance, but Jon seems to have taken this to another level.  “A set of measures focusing on those aspects of organisational performance that are most critical for the current and future success of the organisation”.  I’ll now be spending a bit more time identifying the Key Performance Indicators that are really critical to business operations – in the words of Jon, “Twenty is Plenty”.

The day wrapped up with a sobering panel debate – “Plotting Your Way out of Recession”.  The panel included a couple of ‘old hands’, who’d seen it all before, except during the course of the debate it was clear they hadn’t seen anything like this before.  Anyway, let’s not get too depressed, because there’s always opportunities in a time of crisis.  Good sound business management, minimising risk and holding onto your cash would seem like very good advice for the time being, until wee all see the green shoots of recovery.