This blog now has an Apple News channel

I got approval today to my application for this blog to be a channel on Apple News. As an Apple nerd I'm really pleased. This perhaps means very little to most readers of this blog but if you have an iPhone or an iPad and you use the Apple News app you can read the entries from this blog inside the app. Choose the search icon at the bottom of the app's screen and search for managing public money and then check the heart shape that appears next to the channel name.

I don't know if Apple News has taken off as well as Apple wanted. I've begun to use it more once I figured out how to customise the stories to see ones I want and, more particularly, not see stories I don't want (there was a time I was seeing lots of articles about Meghan Markle and I'm just not interested).

Apple News includes analytics so I will be able to see how many people view my articles there versus direct on this site and versus Medium, where I will also post some of the articles. Let me know in the comments if you plan to read this in the Apple News app.

Can you sum up public financial management in two sentences?

I mentioned that this website was built and is hosted on the Squarespace service. There are a number of site-wide settings to complete when setting up a new site and one of them is for search engine optimisation (SEO). Squarespace asks you for a couple of sentences to describe what the site is about. You want these sentences to have plenty of keywords in so that whensearch engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo (my favourite) display your site in search results the searcher can see what your site is about.
This turned out to be quite a challenge for me. At first I considered not writing sentences and simply listing the key words as a string. But then I decided to do it properly and below are the two sentences I came up with.

Public financial management is the fine art of managing public money to deliver vital services to the public. It involves budgeting, accounting, controlling, auditing, reporting, policy-making and decision-taking.

Do you think this sums up what managing public money is? Can you do it better? Let me know in the comments section. 

Free online course about managing public money

Last year I spent several months working with some good people in the Open University to create a MOOC (massive open online course) about managing public money. It’s available on the FutureLearn platform and can be studied for free (but there is a fee payable if you want permanent access to it and/or a certificate of completion). 

The course runs over 4 weeks and there is about 3 hours of content each week. The content is not just text. There are videos of some interviews I undertook especially for the course and links to third party videos (such as a BBC video about tax avoidance). There are also activities and quizzes and participants are encouraged to use the site to discuss their learning and their experience.

The course was presented for the first time in October. It is going to be presented again in February and September this year. You can register your interest here and you will receive reminder emails as the course presentation dates draw closer.

I’m proud of the course. I hope lots of people around the world sign up for it.

New year, renewed blog

The turn of December into January is an arbitrary time to make changes in life but it is convenient so I’ve made some. One of them is relaunch my blog and make it part of a fuller website about managing public money. As part of that broader remit I acquired the managingpublicmoney.co.uk domain and had a surprising amount of fun learning how to use Squarespace (www.squarespace.com) to build a website. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to build a website, whether for a business, a blog, a hobby or a special event like a wedding. One of the useful features of Squarespace was the painless process for importing all of my old blog posts from Wordpress and re-formatting them to match the theme of this new site.

As before, this blog will cover a wide range of topics related to public financial management. I am based in the UK but my interests are broader than that and I will try to include international subject matter (such as a post about my recent experience as a guest speaker at the inaugural meeting of the public sector wing of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka). 
For now the site is just the blog. I have lots of ideas for posts which I will write up and publish over the coming weeks and months. I also have ideas for development of this site, such as a mailing list and downloadable e-books and PDFs. Some of those digital documents will be free but I plan to sell some. More details about that when I am nearer to publishing them.

Online accounting training for one

I wrote previously about the work I do for Ibba Girls Boarding School in South Sudan and the trip I made to the school in February 2015 to recruit a new finance manager. The school is (almost entirely) funded by a UK charity, the Friends of Ibba Girls School (FIGS), and it is important to FIGS that the school has high standards of probity and governance to go with the high quality education. That’s why the school is willing to employ a finance manager whose primary job is to manage the school’s cash on a day to day basis.

Last year the school’s finances were managed by an experience teacher from Australia, Jamie, who was working at the school for the year alongside his wife, who was the co-head. Jamie had no financial training but was experienced with IT so he taught himself how to use the cloud version of QuickBooks to maintain accounts during the year. At the end of the year I made the sorts of adjustments that accountants make when they pull together the annual report and accounts.

Jamie’s replacement is Santino, a locally-raised young man with a business degree from Uganda. His degree included the fundamentals of double-entry bookkeeping but he was not experienced in maintaining a set of accounts in a dedicated accounting software package. This meant he would need some help from me to develop his accounting knowledge and skills (and that's fine because Ibba Girls Boarding School aims to do more than educate girls).

After my visit to South Sudan I decided to change the accounting system used by the school to Xero because (a) the user interface looks better and easier to use for a novice and (b) we could get a better deal if both FIGS and the school used it than if we stuck with QuickBooks.

Since taking up his post in March, the most pressing things for Santino to do have been to make sure staff are paid at the end of each month, that food and other supplies are bought regularly so that the girls are safe and secure, and that the (modest) school fees payable by the girls’ parents are collected. All of these transactions need to be captured in the school’s accounts, though, so that reports can be presented to the governors in South Sudan and the FIGS trustees in the UK.

Ibba Girls School finance manager

I was faced with the problem of how to train Santino to do some fairly complicated accounting tasks from 6,000km away. At first I thought I would have to write a procedure manual, a prospect I did not relish since technical writing is very difficult to do well. After a while I realised I could use my presentation skills and technology instead. I decided I would create screencasts and share them with Santino so that he could learn by watching me using Xero.

It is a relatively simple set up. I set up Xero for Ibba Girls Boarding School so I have access to the live accounting information and can create some demo transactions to show Santino what he needs to do. I record my screen, with an audio commentary when I am doing these transactions using Quick Time Player (which is a standard app on all Apple computers). I keep each video to two or three minutes in length and I record each in a single take. I know I could edit clips together using iMovie but I just have a rehearsal before I press record and then go for a take. Mostly they work out fine as first takes but sometimes I stumble over my words or something and I simply scrap that take and start over.

Once recorded I check each video for clarity before uploading to the internet using Droplr. I then email to Santino the short URLs that Droplr creates for each video and he can then watch them inside a web browser (as many times as he likes) or download the videos (in .mov format) to his computer.

So far I’ve done 12 videos covering accounting for payroll and income. I'm pleased with them and I can tell they are effective because I can see the transactions Santino has been entering into Xero. There’s still plenty more videos for me to create and share but I hope that by the time I visit the school in the late summer/autumn Santino will have brought the accounts fully up-to-date and be able to generate reports for the governors directly in Xero.

It's been ten years since my last permanent job

Yesterday was my fiftieth birthday. Today is the tenth anniverary of my last day as the director of financial services at Doncaster Council. This seems a good day for reflection and for thinking about the future. For the last ten years I have been self-employed. At the time I left Doncaster Council I thought I was trading the security of a local government job with a pension, etc for greater variety. As it turned out the job security which had always seemed to me to be unchangeable has been eroded so perhaps I didn't lose much. Certainly, I have managed to do a wider variety of work than I could have achieved if I had always worked as a full-time employee of public organisations. I also finished a master's degree (in public administration) and attended an executive programme at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Initially my self-employed work was in local government but over time I have carried out assignments in charities, police forces, schools and private companies. Mostly this has been in the UK but I have done some work overseas.

One of those overseas assignments turned out to be a turning point. As a result of doing a week-long training session in Juba, South Sudan I got the chance to do some teaching at Warwick Business School. It turned out that I really enjoyed being a teacher notwithstanding the introversion which usually means I try very hard not to be the centre of attention in any gathering. As well as enjoying being in the front of a lecture room full of people, I got good feedback from students because, I think, I tell stories from my direct experience of managing public money to illustrate the theories I teach.

My teaching experience directly led to me getting a contract for a textbook on public financial management. I really enjoyed writing the book. When I look back at my time as a local government accountant, the work I liked best was writing reports so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that I liked writing a whole book. (I may be unusual in being an accountant who likes words more than numbers but, hey, that's me.)

My future direction

One of the things I'm particularly proud of is being a published author with a page on Amazon and everything (in fact, the book is on sale at Amazon in several different territories and that makes me even prouder). Being a published author seemed an ambition I was very unlikely to achieve back when I was a local government worker. Indeed I'm sure it would never have happened because when I had a job there was always more tasks than I had time to do so I would have felt guilty spending even spending my spare time on a book when I felt I should be reading committee papers or something.

My book royalties are modest, not enough even for my cats to live on, but I want to do more writing and teaching and try to make as much of my living from them as I can. I wrote a novel a few years ago but gave up sending it to publishers after the first tranche of rejections. I want to revisit the manuscript and see if I can get it published. I also have ideas for other stories which I've not yet written.

I also want to carry on writing about public financial management. I think writing and selling a series of e-books on subjects like budgeting and contracting-out could fit in well with developing my business to be more focused on training and teaching.

It would have been really great if I was able today to announce the launch of my new business, with a nice new website and all that jazz, but I haven't done all of the detailed work yet. But it's good to have taken time, at least, to write this blogpost as a marker.