Converting From Atheism but to What?

I have been an Atheist my entire life.  I was raised that way.  Later in life my mother went back to religion and for a long time my father pretended to be Catholic.  My father has gone back to being Atheist.  Even though I knew he was never truly Catholic he tried to get me to become Catholic for a long time.  I think it was to impress his second wife, not sure, she didn't even believe he was Catholic.

Like anyone else I question the world around me and I decided that there is a/are god/gods. I did ask for the some signs and I felt I go them.  I wouldn't say anything miraculous happened but to me it was clear.  Now my issue is that I don't have faith and I don't think I should just pick a religion.  Faith isn't a feeling I understand. I am simply not familiar with having faith.  So I am stuck.

Logically, I live in America where the most common religion is Christianity so that is probably the religion I should pursue but it is very important to get this decision correct.  The other issue I have is that my wife is somewhat Buddhist.  She is not a strong believer but her family is more devout.  She also describe her interactions with Christian people as manipulative and fake.  Apparently, she has had a lot of people in the Chinese community approach her with then intent of converting her and when she didn't reciprocate interest they stopped hanging out with her.  To her it was like they were trying to score brownie points with members of their church by using her.

Then you get to Judaism.  This would be appealing to me because it is really where religion began.  Of the three monotheistic religions this was the first.  Then there's Islam.  The appeal is that the book has never changed, which is the reason behind the existence of the religion.  There is undoubtedly influences of man in both the Torah and the Bible.  Than again there are a lot of contradictory information in the Koran but I don't know how much of this information is bias.  I can also admit because of the probable propaganda I have been subjected to I am biased against being Muslim even thought  I know the least about this religion of the free.

Then there are sects of religions such as Scientology and Latter Day Saints that seem like horse crap to me but I think it important that I remain open to these religions as well.  I have very specific issues with these religions but I don't want to be more insulting that I already I have.   To defend myself a bit I think it important that my audience understands my perspective good and bad.  Please, understand that I do my best to be open minded and I appreciate your patience every time you look past an insulting comment I've made.  I believe that find faith will be a battle and may not be overcome by discussing this with other people.  I simply hope discussion will keep me on a spiritual path to finding specific faith.

At the end of the day I am looking for guidance.  I have tried to be as honest as possible and hope to receive your support in the comment section.

Excel: Don't Use Merge and Center

I hate title creators in Excel who use "Merge & Center".  Yeah, I know you can insert columns and rows now but there are still too many issues.  The sad thing is that this is just the lazy man's option.

There is a much better solution to centering your titles.  Simply select the group of cells you would like your title to be and then right click selecting the format cells option.  Click the "Alignment" tab then in the "Horizontal:" drop down box select "Center Across Selection".  If you have a bunch of titles that need to be centered use F4 after you have gone through the process once.  F4 repeats your last action..  You can also use "Paste Special" and select "Formats".

So if you follow these simple step you will no longer annoy me when you design templates and report in Excel.

SQL for Accountants

My objective here is not to teach you how to write SQL queries.  Instead I am going to draw some comparisons between every accountants favorite tool, Excel, and SQL commands.  My hope is that the analogies I make will help improve your understanding of SQL.

So to get started lets look at an Excel workbook as the database and the individual worksheets as files within the database.  For this exercise we will limit worksheets to information sets only or tables.  Think of the objective of SQL in terms of pulling relevant and related information into a new worksheet.

The first command I would like to cover is the From command.  In Excel this would be equivalent to referencing a worksheet in a formula.  It directs your formula to which worksheet you would like to pull information.

The next command is the Select statement.  This is going to reference the header information contained in each the worksheet.   Much like using an index function.

The where command is like using a filter.  You will specifically designate the information in the Select statements fields that you would like to retrieve.  This is your criteria.

Next is the Join statement this is where things get a little complicated.  I like to think of this statement as though it is a vlookup.  The only difference is that this information doesn't have to be to the far left or do you have to reference columns.  (If you are an advanced Excel use Index(range,match(field)) may be a better explanation).  Here what is important is that information matches from both tables and you can reference the information against each other.   Joins define the relationship between the tables (worksheets to use our Excel terminology).  Note that you would join using the field names.

Let's cover the OrderBy command next to take a break.  This is the same as using Sort.

Now let's cover the GroupBy command.  This is like using PivotTables.  The main thing to remember here is that this is going to summarize the data by the fields you chose to group.  Now the trick is that every field in the Select statement needs to be included in the group by statement unless it is a calculation or aggregate of the other data.

For now I am going to leave this post as is, I may add and revise some information later.  My head hurts.

Political Flexibility

For a long time we have wanted our political leaders to be rigid by viewing everything from a black and white perspective.  Barack Obama, George Bush and all the presidents during my life time have been rigid in their views.  To demonstrate let's look at the current gay marriage debate.

I am going to move past the gay by nature verse choice debate.  Even if being gay is a choice people should have the freedom to make that choice.  That type of thinking is stupid and a waste of time.

Some people discuss allowing civil unions and others don't want it allow gay marriage at all.  The counterpoint is that neither of these represent equality.  Allowing one group of people to get married and not another is clearly unequal.  Allowing one group civil unions and the other to be married is consider seperate but equal and is viewed as an unacceptable by advocates of gay marriage.  Clearly, the big issue is religion.  In this country religious freedom is very important and most religions are clear that homosexual relationships are sinful.  That is just the way it is and religious freedom is much more important in my opinion than sexual freedom.

Does this mean that both can't exist.  I personally would prefer a world where gay unions are allowed by the government.  Not allowing gay marriage is oppressive.  However, I don't think it right to force institutions to marry a couple they believe to be in a sinful relationship.  The simple solution is for the government to focus on civil unions and allow religious institutions to determine whether they will unite a couple in marriage.  This way one group is not oppressed for the sake of another.

The solution is simple once politics are placed aside and mediation between two competing interests are considered.  A win win solution presents itself in this scenario.  To close off remember that other do not have to accept your lifestyle and that is okay.  That closing comment is intended both ways.

Content and Compensation: Forums Driving Valuable Content

The internet definitely has a value system.  For now I am turning my attention towards forums. 
Contributors to forums used to be able to earn income by making valuable contributions to the forums and adding links to product and blogs.  A lot of contributors began making valueless posts to spam their links all over the place. Many forums turned to a system where they tried to manage cotnributors by developing systems to allowing benefits such as links.  This hasn't worked out really well either.  The recent trend is to not compensate for content.  I personally don't see this working out very well.  There will be a few knowledgeable idiots who will offer up services but this going to lead to many forums becoming very one note. 

It is definitely appropriate to compensate contributors and it is the right thing to do.  Expecting free content for subscribers is not a good way to get the content your subscribers are going to want to read.  The question is how to best get quality content?  The conundrum is that paying people for content attracts opporunists but not paying them doesn't attract content.  Another challenge is that subscribers don't normally don't pay a subscription fee and are often anonymous. 

Often forums treat contributors and subscribers equally but they really do not play the same role on a forum.  Managing the different relationships is something forums can do to improve the content being posted.  This relationship should be distinguisahble to all participants of the blog.  Most subscribers do not participate by posting.  Often the answer to a question has been previously provided if the forum has been able to build content.  The great thing about subscribers is that they want instant gratification.  They don't ask a question if they can get right to the answer right away.

By recognizing this we realize that the job of managing the forum is greatly reduced.  By placing the focus on managing content authors the task becomes plausible.  Content authors should be compensated through sharing ad revenues.  When implementing revenue sharing system tracking becomes very important.when sharing ad revenue with content authors.  Revnue from all advertising must be associated with the author that has attracted the traffic through posting responses to subscriber questions.  This way subscriber get value because their issues have been resolved.  Authors the content providers are compensated for providing valuable information.   Forum developers are compensated by providing the property and are best enabled to manage content.

All issues haven't been discussed so leave a comment to expand on the topic.

Excel GETPIVOTDATA Formula verse SUMIFS Formula

Alright, I am going to expose my immediate bias.  I definitely prefer the GETPIVOTDATA function to the SUMIFS function.

I will discuss the benefits of each formula briefly.  I think that the main benefit of the SUMIFS function is that they are easier to understand and little easier to right.  They are also less likely to return an error result.  For this reason the GETPIVOTDATA function should be nested in an IF function and an ISERROR function.

Example: IF(ISERROR(GETPIVOTDATA(X,X,X,X)),0,ISERROR(GETPIVOTDATA(X,X,X,X))

This basically returns a zero if the GETPIVOTDATA function result is an error or the result if it is not.

This makes writing these formulas a little more difficult.

Now for the reasons I prefer the GETPIVOTDATA function.  The most appealing reason is that it is easier to control the frequency of calculations when working with large tables in a worksheet.  The PivotTable needs to be refreshed before these formulas preced with calculations.  So if you have to modify data  or import new data frequently these don't bog the worksheet down with endless calculation  updates.  You control when the PivotTable is refreshed.  Working from PivotTable's also makes data easier to extract and analyze.  If you spot an issue in a group of data that is being pulled you can simply refer to the PivotTable and double click the number to pull the portion of the table making up your result.

Another advantage is that the GETPIVOTDATA are easier to test and use in templates.  When modifying templates it looks to the PivotTable not to the huge data set.  This makes it easier for these funtions to cacluclate a result.  Now for the secret you don't usually have to do a lot of work to write these  formulas .  Use = then click on a cell from the PivotTable.  Then make it dynamic by changing where the criteria being pulled is a cell referencce.

I think I have made my case.  If I think of any other benefits or contasts I will update this post.

Automating Accounting Process

With increasing need to expedite the delivery of the financial package to upper management accounting managers are becoming increasingly challenged. Delivering accurate accruals in a timely manner can be very challenging. From rebates and commissions to employee benefits and inter-company consolidations automation is the best alternative rather than manpower.

To automate a process look at the rules involved in determining the calculation. Then look at the sources of the data. The number of systems used to provide information. Then look at extracting the information into one data source. I still find that Excel is an excellent way to automate tasks. Too often managers look to have an expensive third party to provide information related to automating a process. Ask yourself what steps they might use to make a calculation. For instance populating daily foreign exchange rates into your system. Doesn't yahoo.com offer this information for free. Isn't using your IT department to setup a quick import from this data source an excellent solution. It's free and shouldn't take internal staff more than two hours.

Something I have automated and incorporated into close are commissions. The accounting department needed the commission calculation for the commission accrual and the sales managers needed the information to pay third party sales agents. In our company the commission calculation is a part of the accounting departments responsibilities (I know you probably thinking the sales department should have this responsibility I'll answer controls). Unfortunately our ERP system in not able to support our commissions process due to a complex system of rules. I incorporated a data download and a pivot table to feed the information automatically into a worksheet containing the rules. Sometimes from multiple pivot tables. The way this is done is buy using "getpivottable" formulas with "if(iserror" functions. The "if(ieserror" is important because if a company or product class did not receive sales then an error is returned by the formula, and I would prefer a zero. (Contact me for an example.) Well it is important to test the automation and adapt it in case information being imported is changed. To do this compare the totals provided by the pivot table and incorporate the report into the task which might be a conglomeration of used and unused information. I setup my cack report to provide a balanced number. Doing this will make it easy to pin point out of place, missing and conflicting information. Finally, I track information using a running table and another pivot table providing month over month and year over year information. This is useful when manaagers are reviewing the information and is really an added bonus. I do this by copying the formulas renaming a month range then copying and pasting the previous month information as values. This used to be a two to three day process and it took four days to automate. Now the download takes 1 minute, refreshing the pivot tables takes 30 seconds, reviewing the check sheets and PivotTables takes 2 minutes and ironing out the rare error takes 3 minutes. The commission process once took from 16 - 24 hours and was highly susceptible to errors and quarterly exceptions added more time every three months and took the manpower of three people. Now the quarterly exceptions are incorporated into the monthly reports, there are far less errors and the whole thing takes less than five minutes.

Another extremely cumbersome task was the inter-company eliminations. I developed a process that only excludes the inter-company profit elimination on inventory. Our company had multiple level of eliminations. The process to eliminate all accounts took three people three days to complete and incorporating new accounts and companies often took months to complete. The eliminations were not accurate and were the most time consuming part of close. Due to restrictions with the ERP sysetm and the fact we had eight reporting levels I looked to define accounts with tags and account numbers that could be picked up using internal reports that eventually automated entries. This project almost got me fired but I completed it just before a hard cut throat deadline. Once, the process was completed it took the inter-company profit from 144 man hours to five minutes. It literally takes ten minutes to complete and thirty minutes to check. The point is that I looked to the systems internal reports and methods by which I could distinguish the accounts from each other to define the accounts and direct the reports to the appropriate selections at the appropriate levels. All together the automation took me approximately 200 hours to complete plus 100 hours of overtime I didn't get compensated for but helped me keep my job.