Here's a useful Excel macro function for simple working capital models where you want to model changes in cash cycle inputs, such as supplier and customer payment terms. It's low on error checking for inputs :-)

I'm the author and I put this into the public domain. It's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

Option Explicit
Public Function agingMonths(startCell As Range, ageMonths As Double) As Double
 ' this function is designed for working capital spreadsheets
 ' consider receivables. Collections are based on past sales.
 ' The function takes a cell reference, and a payment term, in months.
 ' this function first takes a cell reference pointing to the sales of the current month
 ' The prior month is assumed to be one cell to the left, and sales of two months ago is assumed to be
 ' two cells to the left
 ' If the average payment term is 6 weeks, pass 1.5 (one and a half months) as the second parameter
 ' it will return the receipts
 ' error checking should make sure that the startCell is exactly one cell: todo
 ' startCell should be the current month.
 ' Prior months are immediately to the left

 Dim integerPart As Integer
 Dim fractionPart As Double
 Dim firstMonthColOffset
 integerPart = Application.WorksheetFunction.Floor(ageMonths, 1) ' if the ageMonths is 1, then the first month is one month ago.
 ' if the ageMonths is 1.5, then the first month's share is 0.5/1.5 = 1/3 and the second month's share is 2/3.
 ' the second month comes from two months ago.
 fractionPart = ageMonths - integerPart
 firstMonthColOffset = -integerPart + 1
 Dim firstMonthsShare
 Dim secondMonthsShare
 secondMonthsShare = fractionPart
 firstMonthsShare = 1 - secondMonthsShare
 'cell index (1,1) is the current cell
 'cell index (1,0) is one cell to the left
 agingMonths = startCell.Cells(1, firstMonthColOffset).Value * firstMonthsShare + _
 startCell.Cells(1, firstMonthColOffset - 1).Value * secondMonthsShare

End Function

 

Five steps to transforming Finance at a small business

In the first of five articles, Tim Richardson gives advice on five projects hellping a small finance put Finance at the center of commercial decisions.

1. Introduce a contribution-margin profit and loss

If you want to make a simple change to move the profit and loss report from being an historical document to something that's a tool for decision making, change it to a contribution margin report. Gathering variable costs together and showing the contributoin margin is surprisingly easy, yet it transforms the relevance of the P&L.

There are complicated ways to help people understand the relationship between sales, fixed costs and profit. Projects like setting up Activity Based Costing give great insight, but they are time-consuming and hard to explain.

Introducing a contribution margin P&L brings great results with only a few hours of work.

A contribution margin means the following questions can be accurately answered, directly from the profit and loss statement.

• If sales increase by $1,000,000, how much does the bottom line increase?

• Sales can be increased by $500,000 through increased marketing, but how much more marketing is justified?

• Saving fixed costs improves the result. How many dollars of sales would be needed to get the same benefit as cutting costs by $100,000?

• If sales are going to drop by $500,000 in a month, how much fixed cost must be taken out of the business to compensate?

Anyone with an accounting education will know what a contribution margin is: it's the margin left over from sales which is available to contribute to covering fixed costs.

Le Petit Paris opens for Term 3 2010,  running a French language immersion program for Melbourne pre-schoolers (of kindergarten age, mainly). The preschool classes are small (never more than ten per class), and the teachers (two per class) are native or fluent French speakers who will work with the children to foster their love of language and learning and language. There are sessions for 2yo, 3yo, 4yo and special activity programs (such as cooking and music). Congratulations to Mindy and Ley for starting this up ... good news for parents sending children to the Camberwell Primary School French bilingual program. Le Petit Paris is based in Boroondara, on Burke Road.

I'm hosting the site. Le Petit Paris is entirely built with Google tools (Google apps and Google Sites).

When Australians choose to buy a mobile phone, they usually buy the phone as part of two year contract with a network provider.

The handset will be theirs for no down-payment; obviously the hardware is being subsidised by the contractual fees. That's not so interesting.

It's the amount of calls and data provided by the plan which is interesting. Most Australian plans are so-called "Caps". These are fascinating  deals. Fascinating like a horror movie. If you're in a hurry and about to buy a plan: there is now an alternative, where phone calls are ten times cheaper, data twenty times cheaper, and you only pay for what you use in a month (TPG), on the second best network in the country. This exposes caps for what they are: an incredible rip-off. Hopefully this article is going to sound like a relic from a bydone era soon.

A typical cap plan is advertised like this:

For $79 a month, you receive $800 worth of call value.

What a great deal!

The call value is ludicrously inflated by valuing calls at very high prices. In a typical plan, calls are priced at $0.90 a minute. Data charges and text messages are likewise priced at very high amounts. If you use the $800 of credit purely on voice calls, you get 889 minutes of calls for your $79, which is really a cost of 9 cents a minute. In fact, if you hunt around, there is a "pay as you go plan" from a small player, just launched, which charges you $1 a month, and then 9 cents a minute for call (it's a TPG plan). So it seems $0.09 a minute is a reasonable value.

You might wonder what the difference is between a pay-as-you go plan and the cap: they both end up at $0.09 a call.

The first big difference is that the cap is a huge bag of minutes; whether you use it or not, you've paid for it. And there is no credit for unused minutes; the slate is wiped clean each month.If you were getting a discount for buying in bulk, that wouldn't be so bad, but you're not. Even at the best case, where month after month you use exactly your pre-purchased minutes, you pay the same per minute that I can get by only committing $1 a month (for which I get 50MB of data).

The even bigger difference is that if you exceed the limits of your cap, you discover that the ludicrously-inflated call rates are suddenly real, because for your 890th minute on the $79 cap, you will pay $0.90.On TPG's pay as you go, that minute only costs you another 9 cents. 890 minutes is a lot of calling in a month, but the cap value of $800 is consumed by everything at very high prices: SMS, voicemail, data. It's like using Zimbabwe dollars (until you run out of them). Why they are called caps is not clear: when you exceed what you bought, you are charged like a speeding driver. Kim Jong Il couldn't make it up.

So the cap is a contract where one partner has paid for a bundle of usage credits. There is no benefit for consuming less than the contracted amount, but a huge penalty if you do. If your only choice is between one cap and a higher cap, a risk averse person should choose the higher cap because exceeding your usage results in extremely expensive charges. For example, the cheaper alternative to the Vodafone $79 cap is the $49 cap, which provides an incredible $450 of call value (at $0.90 a minute, which is 500 minutes). If you spend 889 minutes on the phone, your additional charge will be $350. To avoid that risk, you can pay $30 a month more and rest easy. The higher cap appears to be insurance, but the insurance is protecting you from the company selling you the insurance. I don't mean to pick on Vodafone; all the major networks are offering the same type of deal. These caps are a marketing piece of genius. Professionally, I'm in awe. Take a commodity (data), rebrand it as voice, data, social networking access and text messages, create a need (to avoid nasty billing surprises) and sell an incredibly overpriced solution, locked in for two years, and seduce the customer with a "subsidised" handset with no money down.

One month of overshooting your cap can cost hundreds of dollars, so why not insure yourself against that risk by buying a plan way above your expected use? You've bought peace of mind, like a home insurance policy. The only way this makes sense is if you can only choose between "cap" plans. This probably explains why pre-pay plans are caps as well. The moment you can choose a sensible and fair pay-as-you-go option, the caps look horrible. Like Elizabeth in Pirates of Carribean,  you see in the moonlight what monsters you have for shipmates.

This is an amazingly good deal for the network providers. On-top of everything else, they are convincing people to pay for capacity which they will never fully use, which means that capacity can be sold again and again. Imagine if the only way you could fly between Melbourne and Sydney was to pay two years in advance for four times as many flights as you expect to use. The airline company would oversell seats,I would imagine.

Of course, this is only possible if the choice between plans is a choice between caps. In Australia, most pre-pay plans are caps as well. How odd.

Note that the TPG $1 pay as you go plan: where calls are priced at $0.09 a minute, not $0.90 a minute, and where data is $0.027 per MB, not $0.50 a MB. Yes, TPG is 10 times cheaper for voice, 20 times cheaper for data, and you don't pay for what you don't use. Plus it's on a network with better coverage.

We can't quite say "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" in this case, but it's a lot harder for people to take seriously the ALP's committment to due process in employment decisions.For all of us who've been in the situatoin where someone is not right for the job but who find it frustrating to prove this via a long, laborious process, Julia and the gang have proved a point.

Dear Kevin, are you aware of http://www.fairwork.gov.au/Termination-of-employment ?

When is a dismissal harsh, unjust or reasonable?

When FWA considers whether a dismissal is harsh, unjust or unreasonable, they take into account a range of factors including:

• if there’s a valid reason for the dismissal relating to the employee’s conduct or capacity
• if the employee is notified of the reason and given an opportunity to respond
• if the dismissal relates to unsatisfactory performance, then whether the employee is warned about it before the dismissal.

With reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Rudd and the loss of his job on a few hours notice.

The family is in a carpark when a lady driving a 4wd parks next to us.

Xavier: "I want a big car, Daddy. Why does the lady have a big car?" (he previously learnt that big cars are expensive).

Daddy: "The lady has enough money".

Xav: "How do you get lots of money?"

Daddy: "Well, she probably works hard".

Xav: "Daddy, I want you to work harder".

Just spent a few too many minutes trying to find an email sent by a colleague months ago, which he couldn't recall. My Windows desktop is indexed by Google Desktop, but we had a very hard time finding the email. It had two graphic attachments and only a two word subject, with no text in the body. Hard for search engines to do much with that. We are an online company with world-class expertise in making sure our content is indexed by google for good search results.

Conclusion: Use good subject lines in email and use in as many keywords as you can. Do unstructured tagging in email.

Daddy: "Xavier,what's eight take away two?"

Xavier: fairly blank look.

Daddy: "Xav, how many legs does a spider have?"

X: "Eight, daddy".

Daddy: "If you chop off two legs, how many legs are left?"

X: "Six!"

Tick.

Tip: xdebug is packaged for debian and sets up a configuration file for apache in /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d

The file is xdebug.ini. After installation it has the zend_extension parameter set. To use with eclipse and the PDT modules, add these lines:

xdebug.remote_enable=On
xdebug.remote_host="localhost"
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp"

install PDT via the existing repository in eclipse. It's under web development.

To get started: the series of articles here was written for an earlier version of eclipse, but it's easy to adapt.

I have 3.5SR2 (installed from eclipse.org, not using the Debian package) and I got it working within a few minutes of starting. Being able to step through a PHP page connecting to a database makes PHP seem a lot easier to learn. I had to configure iceweasel as the external browser in Eclipse.

 

 

 

Greece is the G in PIGS. The other countries (P, I and S) are keen not to be tarred with the same debt-risk brush.

Portugal is the P, and it's a small country and the next most at risk. So it's trying very hard to distance itself. But it's funny that the PM of Portugal is "Socrates".