At the end of the first quarter, I posted an entry to my blog titled Done With Quarterly Reports; How About You? I discussed how I inherited a laborious quarterly report process that involved a lot of manual entry of captive account data and ended with reports generated one-by-one.
We’re now using ByAllAccounts to streamline data reconciliation and are generating batch reports from dbCAMS. So I bragged about it in April on FPPad.
I’m going to be out of the office for the remainder of July. First, I’ll be out the remainder of this week preparing for the CFP® Certification Examination held on Friday and Saturday. I feel well prepared after the Ken Zahn Live Review course I took at the end of June. I hope to post additional details about the review course and associated materials in August.
Following the exam, I’ll be away will be attending the upcoming FPA NexGen 2008 conference in St. Cloud, MN July 25-27. If you’ll be at the conference too, make sure to find me and say hi. I’ll be one of the few with a red goatee in the audience (check out my LinkedIn profile for a picture).
If you’re at all involved in operations and client security reporting, you likely need to identify all of your clients that hold Indymac Bank products.
Over the weekend, Indymac Bank was taken over by federal regulators and control was transferred over the the FDIC. Click here for the CNN Money story.
I was flipping through the July 2008 issue of Financial Advisor magazine today, and what do I find on page 69?
It’s the Twitter whale! I wonder if the image was used with permission…
I have Angie Herbers’ blog, The Fast Track, linked over in my blog roll in the left sidebar (it’s also in my Google Reader subscription). I know Angie and appreciate her insight on the myriad of practice management issues that most maturing firms encounter during various stages of growth.
Today she posted an update to her blog about the state of events affecting the CFP Board that resonates with me. As most know through my post about attending Ken Zahn’s Live Review course, I am preparing for this July’s CFP® Certification Exam, so it is very important that the integrity and awareness of the certification be held in a positive light (I shouldn’t even be blogging, I should be studying! But I digress).
Updates to my blog are going to be a bit more sporadic over the next few weeks. Tomorrow I’m headed to Los Angeles to attend Ken Zahn’s live review course for the CFP® Certification Exam.
I’ll be there through Monday the 30th and then spend a short week managing the end of the second quarter quarterly reports. Hopefully the quarterly reports will go as smoothly as they did last quarter.
I imagine lots of my time will be spent studying leading up to the exam on July 18th and 19th. Until then, I imagine I’ll find time to post quick updates on Twitter.
See you on the other side.
Year after year more taxpayers potentially become subject to the separate tax system otherwise known as the Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT.
It wasn’t until late in 2007 that Congress passed the Tax Increase Prevention Act of 2007 as a one-year patch to AMT. This bill caused many headaches in the IRS due to its late approval and effect on many IRS tax forms (blogged about here and here).
Previously I wrote about creating a desktop shortcut icon to open an Outlook email window to avoid opening the entire Outlook program. My instructions included a switch option ( /c ipm.note ) to invoke the message window.
The /c switch is just one of many command line options when running Outlook. I found a nice concise list of the various command line switch options to perform specific tasks using Outlook.
While most are not nearly as useful as the new message window switch, I like having a reference to this kind of information just in case I need it in the future.
Click here for the list of Outlook command line switch options (opens in new window)
In my previous post today I blogged about only accessing Outlook three times during my day to reduce distractions. Then I realized that even though I want to keep the program closed, I want to be able to send messages to clients and coworkers.
On a side note, let me say that I try to keep the messages I send to others concise and relevant for the recipients. Nevertheless, my role and responsibilities require that I send out confirmations and notifications on internal matters such as security transactions, fund receipts and disbursements, and the occasional status update.
Today begins a new personal experiment. As I posted on Twitter, I will attempt to only access my Outlook email just three times throughout the day today.
The impetus is an evolution of my reading over the last few weeks and the discovery of “email bankruptcy” on Tim Ferriss’ blog. If you have 7-10 minutes available, view the related video and read the New York Times article about the subject.
So I will update periodically on my Outlook habits and determine whether or not the decision to reduce its use increases my productivity through the day. You might want to give the experiment a try as well.
