Alex shares his perspective on how audit and accounting theory, technology and professional ethics interrelate to create forward thinking profitable firms and to challenge conventional thinking on what it means to be a CPA. Alex draws from his knowledge and experience as an auditor and from his current work as a consultant with ProfitCents, a developer of accounting software.
Open source solutions like Linux have promised to provide businesses with reliable computing platforms without the high cost of ownership that comes with standard software licensing agreements. However, many businesses have been fearful of adopting open source solutions because of concerns regarding compatibility and the learning curve of picking up a new operating system. It seems like with the growing trends in cloud computing, that many of the fears of open source computing may finally be laid to rest. If you are accessing your applications through the web, what does it matter if it’s from a PC running Windows, Mac or Linux. There will still be those applications that only run on certain operating systems that will require organizations to maintain desktops dedicated to those applications but with the prevalence of remote desktop options available this hardly seems to be a barrier.
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CNN Money has added a http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html" target="_blank">cost of living calculator to their website where you can do comparisons of how far your current income would stretch in other US cities. This is a great tool for identifying potential location-based business opportunities (geoarbitrage). I ran my info through and it looks like I am clearly better off being permanently located where I am in North Carolina, based on cost of living elsewhere in the nation. On average a dollar will stretch 3 times as far in NC as compared to Manhattan (no surprise there). But it was interesting to find that dollars in NC would go 1.25 times as far as they would in Maine or Oregon.
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Last week I wrote about some of my personal experiments with sleep cycles and ways to get more effective sleep. It appears a fellow blogger had similar thoughts and wrote a post on polyphasic sleep patterns. Although the sleep patterns discussed here range from relatively minor changes to the extreme ‘uberman’ it is definitely worth a read if you are interested in finding a way to cut 6 hours out of your normal sleep schedule without suffering from any sleep deprivation symptoms (or at least that’s the claim if done right). Could come in pretty handy next busy season when sleep is already at a premium.
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In many cases the hardest thing about leveraging a geoarbitrage a strategy is finding the actual opportunities. Arbitrage requires that you locate discrepancies between two separate locations or geographies. So naturally your first question should be ‘where do I start looking?’ The answer is look for the extremes or the outliers. If I want to earn the highest amount per job possible I should seek the locations where those jobs are at a premium. A premium may exist if there is a lack of qualified candidates for that role or it could be because there is an overall higher COLA in the location or geography where the job is available.
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When it comes to getting sleep, most of us just don’t get enough or at least as much as we want. I recently welcomed my first child into the world and needless to say my sleeping patterns have been altered. The science of sleeping has been studied and researched intensively and many aspects of our sleep cycles are still a mystery. Even given some of the unknown aspects of sleep, certain patterns are well documented and here are a few things that can help synchronize your sleep pattern with your body’s natural rhythms. When it comes to sleep normally quantity is the main driver, however, there are some factors aside from the number of hours of sleep that play a role in how effective your sleep is. The following is based largely on empirical observations of my own sleep patterns so a lot of potential variability will exist between my own and readers sleep patterns.
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Alex shares his perspective on how audit and accounting theory, technology and professional ethics interrelate to create forward thinking profitable firms and to challenge conventional thinking on what it means to be a CPA. Alex draws from his knowledge and experience as an auditor and from his current work as a consultant with 
