Future I S Consulting

Random sender addresses

2009-10-30T12:32:00.005Z

I'm getting really fed up with the practice that some companies have adopted, of setting a new sender address for every e-mail newsletter.

For example, IThound, an Incisive Media publication, sent something with the sender address

mail.ctjkgqetqgbvegquskn@incisive-media.msgfocus.com

This is presumably so that they can route any replies to the originator of the offer that the newsletter covers.

That's not a trusted address so the message is marked as [Spam] and placed in the Junk Mail folder. If I click 'Mark As Wanted' in the AVG toolbar, the message is moved back to the Inbox but no Outlook rules are applied to it. I have to file it manually. A new entry is added to the AVG whitelist, and any further messages from the same sender should be filed according to my Outlook rules settings. In all likelihood, there won't be any further messages with the same random sender address, so all that happens is that my whitelist is stuffed with rubbish like this.

Streetcards, one of my occasional suppliers, who have great products, change the domain name on their outgoing e-mails and the same thing happens.

I actually want to read some of the material that I'm sent. That's why I signed up in the first place. I don't want to unsubscribe, but I don't want to have to waste time either. Hang your heads in shame:

Incisive Media
Novatech
Internet World
Insurance Times
Euromoney plc
Streetcards

Affordability checks for UK mortgage lenders - not so new

2009-10-19T12:33:00.004+01:00

The UK Government and the FSA are making a great play of their plans to introduce affordability checks for mortgage borrowers. The FSA's reform proposals are here.

This really should be nothing new for the banks, which already have responsibilities under the FSA's Treating Customers Fairly initiative. The FSA Treating Customers Fairly pages include six consumer outcomes, including:

Outcome 4: Where consumers receive advice, the advice is suitable and takes account of their circumstances.

Drilling down further into the examples, these include a specific example of the need for the mortgage sales process to check affordability.

Affordability will often have been an issue in some types of loan, but these - self-certification, sub-prime and high Loan To Value mortgages - have pretty much disappeared from the market.

Best practice sales processes for lending already include the checks, but of course these are only as good as the information available to them, and some may be circumvented by inaccurate statements or disclosure by potential borrowers. If the proposals include harsh penalties for selling unaffordable loans, lenders will have a problem. Inevitably though, they will find ways to manage and mitigate the risks, even if that means a reduction in the availability of loans.

More later when I've gone through the 118-page FSA document.

XBRL filing for all UK companies?

2009-08-25T13:23:00.006+01:00

The Computing newspaper and its sister publication Accountancy Age are highlighting the change in Corporation Tax filing regulations that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is introducing with effect from 01 April 2011. I've bookmarked some relevant articles here on delicious.com.

The new regulations will affect all firms, and those that file using reporting or accounting package software will need to update and maintain their software to produce returns in the required XML and iXBRL formats.

Most small companies and organisations will be able to use the free HMRC Corporation Tax Online Service to file a Company Tax Return. This can be used by companies or organisations that file a Company Tax Return form (CT600), supporting documentation, and (if necessary) any of these supplementary pages:

CT600A (Loans to participators by close companies)

CT600C (Group and consortium) - parts one and two

CT600J (Disclosure of tax avoidance schemes supplementary pages)

Supporting documents can be supplied in Acrobat (PDF) format.

You can see a demonstration here on the HMRC site.

However, it's not clear from the information on the HMRC site whether PDF format can be used by companies that have to submit the other CT600 supplementary pages:

CT600B - Controlled Foreign Companies (an interest of 25% or more in a foreign company controlled from the UK)

CT600D (2006) - Insurance: company involved in overseas life assurance business (OLAB)

CT600E - Charity and Community Amateur Sports Clubs (CASCs)

CT600F - Tonnage Tax

CT600G - Corporate Venturing Scheme

CT600I - Supplementary charge in respect of ring fence trades

There's clearly a cost of change in all of this. The HMRC online filing service looks clear and straightforward, and it should present little problem either for small businesses or for small accounting firms that submit returns on behalf of their clients. However, new methods will have to be learnt, registrations made, and experience gained, in order for this to work efficiently. Larger companies, or small companies with complex affairs, may well face more serious change costs, including the updating of accounting or reporting software packages, and the introduction of new processes and accounting treatments.

All in all - if you're not sure, the time to consult your accountant has come!

(Disclaimer: I'm not an accountant, but a small business owner with an interest in technology.)

Using AVG 8.5 (paid for) with iTunes 8.2

2009-07-13T23:20:00.006+01:00

I couldn't find any way to update podcasts using iTunes 8.2.0.23 on a Windows XP laptop with AVG 8.5.387 (paid for). I kept receiving the message "there was a problem downloading (podcast). The network connection could not be established"

The problem lay in the firewall settings: iTunes was set to 'Allow for safe'. When I changed the setting to 'Allow for All', the problem went away.

UK Euro watch - June 2009

2009-07-07T09:24:00.004+01:00

This is our monthly round-up of BBC content touching the possibility of the UK entering EMU and adopting the Euro.

UK Euro adoption was briefly a hot topic in the first half June, largely due to reports of Peter Mandelson's opinions. After that, all went quiet. He may have slipped this in to divert attention from the Government's shocking results in the Euro elections and the ongoing furore over MPs' expenses, but these continued to command much of the available air time.

10th June: Peter Mandelson commented on BBC1's Andrew Marr show (transcript here) "I personally think that our future, economic future will be more secure in the Euro zone with that currency. But I've always accepted that the economic conditions have to be right." Jonathan Oliver wrote in The Times on 14 June that "His confidence is such that on a trip to Berlin last week, Mandelson effectively rewrote Britain’s policy on the euro, declaring that we were “obviously” heading for entry into the single currency."

Mobile phone chargers - one size fits all (The Times)

2009-06-30T12:55:00.005+01:00

At last, some sanity is to be imposed on mobile phone chargers. For years, I've specified Nokia phones for business use. This was convenient for all sorts of reasons, including similar menu/navigation structure and chargers that were all compatible. That started to go wrong a few years ago, and now we have a spread of different plug sizes, power ratings, and shapes. So here's some applause for the GSMA, the trade association for the mobile phone industry. Most phones should use the new chargers by 2012.

UK Euro watch: May 2009

2009-05-31T23:59:00.000+01:00

This is our monthly round-up of BBC content touching the possibility of the UK entering EMU and adopting the Euro.

Most activity during May was concerned with candidates and parties setting out their positions in advance of the European Parliament elections on 4th June. These have been well understood for years - no exciting news here.

For example, on 25 May in Belfast, the Conservatives and Ulster Unionists launched a joint manifesto, opposing UK membership of the euro.

Local initiatives continue to be reported. On 03 May, BBC Sussex reported Euro paying off for resort town that Rye has been accepting Euros since 2002.

Apart from that, there was very little reportage or commentary on the possibility or probability of UK adoption. There was much more activity in June - particularly after Lord Mandelson's opinions were reported. But that's coming later.

UK Euro watch: April 2009

2009-04-30T03:54:00.000+01:00

This is our monthly round-up of BBC content touching the possibility of the UK entering EMU and adopting the Euro. Little happened during the month at a political level to move this forward.

17 April: Shops to accept euro for two days: the initiative in Bewdley, Worcestershire on the weekend 18-19 April was part of events marking the 20th anniversary of its twinning agreement with German town Vellmar.

22 April: BBC World Service: In its Global Business series, The Edge of Europe (part 2), Peter Day looked at the edges of Europe and asked whether joining the Euro, or in the case of Iceland wanting to, was worth it?

23 April: Radio 1 Newsbeat reported in Seaside town allows euro payments that some businesses in Poole (and Bournemouth) now accept the euro. It mentioned 'Dunster in Somerset became the first UK town to accept euros', which may surprise businesses in Northern Ireland, in particular Newry, which have been doing this ever since the notes and coins were first circulated.

26 April: In The Westminster Hour, At the Heart of Europe examines how Labour's policy on Europe evolved over three terms in government.

28 April: UK keeps EU working week opt-out, maintaining another key policy difference to the Eurozone

Goodbye Norton 360

2009-04-16T20:24:00.010+01:00

I've used Norton Antivirus and related products exclusively for the PCs that I control for the last 10 years. Laptops arrived with Norton products pre-installed, and these did the job adequately.

Norton 360 was included with the Toshiba Tecra (Vista) laptop that I bought about 15 months ago. Though I didn't like it very much, I renewed the subscription before the 90 days' trial was complete. Now that 12 months' renewal has expired and guess what! All protection seems to have stopped - the product doesn't carry on checking for viruses, firewall, intrusion protection, e-mail scanning, virus and spyware scan. The whole lot seems to have been switched off (if I understand the messages correctly) now that the date has been reached. Other Norton products carry on protecting with the versions of the virus signatures up to the date of the renewal. This doesn't; it's abdicated completely.

Goodbye Norton 360. I won't accept such a business policy. It's AVG for me.

UK Euro watch: March 2009

2009-03-31T10:54:00.000+01:00

There was little to be found in BBC content in March regarding the possibility of the UK entering EMU and adopting the Euro. Gordon Brown addressed the European Parliament on 24th March, and two speeches in response called on him to show European commitment by joining the single currency. That seems to be the sum total.

These speeches were all outshadowed by Dan Hannan's scathing response. Mark Mardell, Europe Editor, defended himself for failing to comment on the latter.

Stories about other countries:

13 March: Will euro save Eastern Europe? by Konstantin Rozhnov, Business reporter, BBC News

23 March: Could Greece laser the euro? Mark Mardell, referring to the Centre for European Reform blog What if the Euro broke up?

Articles from other publications:
12 March: In EuropeanVoice.com, Hilary Heuler gives a profile of Jacek Rostowski, Poland's finance minister, and his euro ambitions: The euro enthusiast

15 March: The Sunday Times, not famous for its euro-enthusiasm, Cracks in the euro, by Iain Dey and David Smith

31 March: Charles Grant, of the Centre for European Reform (see above), writing in The Times Ten years on, the eurozone must beware of Greeks bearing debts

UK Euro watch: February 2009

2009-02-28T18:18:00.000Z

After the flurry of Euro comments in December and January, there was less visible activity in the media in February. Still available to watch at the time of writing:

28 Feb: on the BBC Parliament channel, Mark D'Arcy talked to author David Marsh about his book The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency. Programme available on BBC iPlayer until 7th March

You can order the book from Amazon here: The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency

UK Euro watch - January 2009

2009-01-31T09:21:00.000Z

The BBC had several stories in the first half of January regarding possible UK entry to European Economic and Monetary Union, and then went strangely quiet on the subject.

The most significant contributions came on 15 Jan in a document containing 31 essays, one from Prof. Willem Buiter, of the LSE, ex Monetary Policy Committee member, reported here by Bloomberg: Buiter Joins Drive to Persuade U.K. to Adopt the Euro Currency.

The full document can be downloaded from the LSE site: 10 Years of the Euro: New Perspectives for Britain

Here are some of those stories from the BBC in January:

01 Jan: Most Britons 'still oppose euro' BBC poll reveals that just 23% would vote 'Yes'

01 Jan: Discussion on Today programme Slovakia joins the euro today, will the UK join any time soon? Ruth Lee, economic adviser to the Arbuthnot Banking Group, and Mark Leonard, executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations

02 Jan: Should Britain join euro? The public comments on the BBC's poll

03 Jan: Beyond Westminster on Radio 4. Elinor Goodman discovers what membership of the euro might mean for jobs and prices in the UK. The panel included views from all parts of the debating spectrum.

03 Jan: Village offers euro for the pound to attract tourists, a hotel and some other business in Dunster accept euros with one-for-one price conversion

04 Jan: Salmond in call for euro rethink Scottish First Minister claimed there was a strong argument in favour of the euro, particularly as sterling declined.

11 Jan: The Westminster Hour Norman Smith interviews the deputy leader of Labour's MEPs Richard Corbett and the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan.

12 Jan: The next enlargement - Iceland? Mark Mardell's Euroblog - Iceland has eurosceptics just like the UK

15 Jan: Renewed calls for UK to join euro Former EU commissioner Peter Sutherland says everyone else is clammering to join the euro and Britain should follow suit.

Another euro story on the Today programme of 15 Jan: ECB to lower interest rates Neil McKinnon, chief economist at ECU Group, discusses the problems of fitting one interest rate to 16 countries (especially the PIGS countries: Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain). Will Greece have to leave EMU?

Mark Mardell reported on Greek protests on 29 Jan, and commented about the relevance of these to UK membership: Euro blamed for recession. He also had interesting things to say on the BBC's The Reporters blog site: The euro - safety net or straitjacket? (30 Jan)

UK Euro watch - December 2008

2008-12-31T23:59:00.000Z

Here are some of the stories regarding possible UK entry to European Economic and Monetary Union from the BBC in December:

01 Dec: Strange times as eurozone woos UK Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the EU Commission, says that the UK is reappraising the euro because of the credit crunch

03 Dec: Mandelson rejects euro talk claim Lord Mandelson denies telling Mr Barroso

04 Dec: Pound hits new low against euro £1 equivalent to EUR 1.148 after the Bank of England cut its official bank rate to 2%

14 Dec: Pound 'buying less than a Euro' Bureau de change offering EUR197.13 for £200

22 Dec: 'Euro tourists' crossing border Northern Ireland shopkeepers enjoying a boom; some offering direct 1.00 EUR = £1 price conversion

and from November:

27 Nov: Are Danes warming to the euro? Prime Minister Rasmussen thinks it's a good idea

Implementing 15% VAT

2008-11-24T17:13:00.007Z

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced that a new standard VAT rate of 15% will apply from Monday 01 December 2008 to the end of 2009 - and then it will revert to 17.5% from 01 January 2010.

HM Revenue and Customs has made a set of information available on its web site at the Pre-Budget Report 2008 - VAT Rate Changes page including

A summary guide for businesses

A technical guide for businesses

Question and Answers for Businesses

Question and Answers for Consumers

PBRN26 - Changes to the Standard Rate of VAT

This won't affect my prices which are quoted ex VAT, but it will be important to account for both 17.5% and 15% rates during the current VAT reporting period.

My personal service company has Quickbooks 8.0 as its book-keeping tool. The number of current sales and purchase items is small, a handful at any one time, so it will be messy but possible to cope with this change without acquiring a new software solution.

Method:

Set up a new standard VAT code (S1) with a rate of 15% and description Standard 1

From 01 Dec 2008 to 31 Dec 2009, for sales items, apply the S1 rate for all invoices, instead of the S rate. This can be done by working through the Item List (Lists/Items) and changing the default rate for active items to S1.

It will be important to check each invoice received after 01 Dec 2008 to make sure which rate it carries. Initially there will be a mixture of old and new, and so when entering a vendor bill, you'll need to check carefully which rate is used, and adjust the code if necessary. Of course, if you use a rate that doesn't match the invoice, the amounts will/should fail to balance, preventing mistaken data entry on purchases.

Soon it will make sense to work through the purchased items in the Item List and change the default VAT code to S1, but after doing this it will still be necessary to take care

With the above approach, the VAT 100 and other VAT reports seem to work fine. It's not sophisticated but it works. Obviously for companies that sell direct to the public, or that have a large number of sales and purchase items, this will become very time consuming and unwieldy. Big companies using sophisticated ERP software such as SAP will be able to implement these changes with timed data, but smaller companies won't have this luxury. And of course, the whole thing will have to be reversed in 13 months' time.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 beta 2

2008-10-01T10:16:00.010+01:00

This beta version is installed on my Vista Business laptop - the one I don't use for mainstream work because it's Vista, and XP Pro is my company standard. Like IE7, it offers multi-tabbed browsing and RSS feeds - powerful reasons to move from IE6 if you haven't already done so. Some of the changes in IE8 are quite good

1) separate safety tools

2) Reopen last browsing session - so if you closed a multi-tabbed page, it will bring them back

3) developer tools let you look at the structure of the page in HTML, CSS and script, and offer a good bunch of tools

4) colour-coded tabs - if you Open in New Tab then the parent and child are coloured the same

and so far the following funnies showed up:

5) the Stockchart widget on iGoogle doesn't display properly. This seems to be a positioning issue because if you drag the widget slightly, the whole graph will reappear while you keep hold of the widget. When you let go, it's all a bit random

6) an Amazon a-store widget in a Blogger page isn't positioned properly in its frame - it's a few pixels to the right and down from where it should be. Very obvious as the design has a black background and so there's a white top and left border where there shouldn't be

Both of these were fixed using IE8's Compatibility mode setting which can be reached either through the Tools or the Page drop-downs(!)

7) Suggested Sites is a bit of a pest (keeps asking)

8) if you have multiple home page tabs under IE7, these don't open individually under IE8 from the side drop-down on the Home button (nothing happens). The whole group opens if you click the main part of the Home button.

9) the Personalise link seems to be broken

But all in all, it's a very good browser and I'll probably install it on my main laptop as soon as the Release version arrives.

Work to do:
List of popular sites that need the Compatibility mode setting. So far these include
Google
Ecademy
Blogspot
Guido Fawkes, political blogger

Microsoft Accounting Express 2008

2008-02-02T08:27:00.003Z

Microsoft Accounting Professional is a possible replacement for Quickbooks, which I've used for years. I had a look at the (free) Express version of MS Office Accounting and the conclusions is yes, it's certainly a viable alternative. At £149.95, it's competitive. I need to investigate further on the update policies. Presumably I have to buy a new version each year to receive the Payroll tax updates?

Here are my impressions so far:

It's a 278 MByte download, and requires a whopping 1 GByte to install

The usual verbose Microsoft agreement

Sample company, try entering a quote: how the hell do I identify the job? Help says: this feature is only availabled in the Pro version

Forms are Excel-like with resizable columns - fine

The sample company has features that only work in the Pro version

A new Window is opened for each form - this can start to get messy

Not as operationally neat as Quickbooks; for example, instead of a simple Credit Card Charge form, you use a generalised New Cash Purchase form and have to find the credit card account (each time) on a drop down

Foreign currency handling in the Pro version

Payroll in the Pro version - though you can maintain Employees and timesheets in Express

P&L report looks OK but adverts on the Express version - relevant as this one was for BACS - are intrusive

Includes a BACS-linked e-payments service from Albany Software, though there is no clear indication of the costs of set-up and transactions; I'd want a clear indication of these before deciding to use this feature (or whether this feature is a goodreason to buy the product)

Invoices can include a status 'watermark'. To turn this off, click through Actions/Manage Word Templates and uncheck the option box

Templates can be edited in Word - very flexible xml integration

Bank account reconciliation OK, but the form opened the first time with the final balance column too narrow; this happened with the Quotes form too, and is irritating

PayPal integration - include a PayPal button in an e-invoice!

Other functions that are only available in the Pro version include

Sales Order

Purchase Order

Stock tracking

Budgets

Recurring documents - so this seems like the only way to enter a standing order or regular monthly payment; it's disappointing that this is only in Pro as it seems a vital feature

Unsolicited calls

2007-06-22T17:27:00.000+01:00

Two unsolicited calls today on my home phone, which is registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). One caller identifies himself as working for 'various financial companies', the other for 'different financial companies'. They pronounce the 'various' and the 'different' very indistinctly to try and cover up the fact that they haven't introduced themselves properly. They want to make an offer regarding mortgage interest rates. Both are using a very low quality connection and refuse to state who they represent. They won't say who asked or told them to call me.

A UK regulated financial services company should not be making unsolicited outbound calls. It knows that this carries penalties, and increasingly will ask customers to sign up to receive a regular call from an adviser or an account manager. Product design may include a provision for calls from time to time. So a company may sometimes make a mistake, but it will try hard to avoid repeating it. If you don't want to be bothered, just tell them clearly that you don't want to hear from them again.

An unregulated company based abroad has few constraints apart from penalties that may arise if any misuse of the telephone system is proven. The best thing to do is to tell these people to get lost - and don't call again.

TPS advice is as follows

Companies based abroad who call into the UK and who are making calls on behalf of a UK based company, must comply with UK regulations and screen their call lists against TPS before making an unsolicited sales and marketing call to a UK telephone number. We do make the file available to overseas based companies under licence for the purpose of suppression so they know whom not to telephone but many overseas companies who telephone the UK on their own account from overseas do so to avoid legal and self regulatory restrictions. We would advise caution in responding to unsolicited sales and marketing telephone calls from overseas especially if they are asking you to send them money or using a premium rate phone line (numbers beginning with 09). If you are receiving unsolicited sales and marketing calls from overseas you should contact the overseas company who is making the call.

Just ask - which company's products are you selling? If there's no straight answer, it's either a scam or a very stupid sales approach. In either case, you really want nothing to do with them.

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 survey

2007-06-12T19:04:00.000+01:00

Another poor online survey - this one by Adobe, who would like to know whether my company might or might not upgrade to Adobe Acrobat 8.0 at some time in the next year.

Amongst the horrors

Server errors when I first tried to respond - this makes a great impression

No Back button on each page to allow mistakes to be fixed; after a few uses of the browser's Back button, it got its knickers completely in a twist

Radio buttons with the instruction "please click all the reasons why..." - of course a radio button only allows you to click one

Inadequate list of business activities; although the Industry List includes Management Consulting, there's no selection in Principal Activities for consulting or project management, which is what I actually do

It didn't bother to ask if I recommend software for customers and if so, what the scale of this might be

Asking for a phone number for follow-up questions (no format indicated) and then refusing to accept a number in UK format or in +44 format

The people that put this survey together probably cost Adobe lots of dollars (or euros). It lookes to me as though a few dollars more, spent on proper design, review and testing, could have have given their marketing people some much more valuable results.

Dear Toshiba

2007-04-24T12:10:00.000+01:00

It's really annoying to be sent a customer satisfaction survey that doesn't work - it gives a server error when I press submit. Not very professional.

And the incentive - to be entered in a draw for a 1GB flashdrive with the rule that entries must be received by 31 Jan 2007 - not very professional either. And it makes you look like cheapskates too. A 1GB drive must be worth about £4. I bet each completed response costs you 5 - 10 times that.

The URL for the survey (www.c-f-1.com) resolves to Communicator Corp. Is Communicator Corp responsible for your malformed website alert messages too? These come as a string of html but aren't interpreted properly (MIME type needed?). Not even the hyperlinks work - they have to be cut and pasted into a browser.

The good news is that the equipment is much better than the marketing and customer satisfaction malarkey would suggest.

Report phishing attempts

2007-04-02T11:03:00.000+01:00

Fed up with phishermen? If you're a customer of a UK bank, and assuming you spotted the bogus e-mail before you clicked a link and compromised your bank accounts, there's a way to fight back. Give the banks the information they need to close the scams down! Some banks use an umbrella method such as BSO, others have their own arrangements. In either case, the sooner they hear from the public, the sooner action can be taken. The list below shows reporting contacts for fraudulent e-mail attempts.

BankSafe Online (operated by APACS*):	reports@banksafeonline.org.uk
Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG):	reportphishing@antiphishing.org
A&L	frauddepartment@alliance-leicester.co.uk
Barclays:	internetsecurity@barclays.co.uk
Halifax Bank/HBOS:	onlineemailinvestigations@hbosplc.com with the subject 'Report'
HSBC:	Gives links to APWG and BSO
Lloyds TSB:	EmailScams@lloydstsb.co.uk
Nationwide Building Society:	phishing@nationwide.co.uk
NatWest:	nwolb@natwest.com
Royal Bank of Scotland:	digitalbanking@rbs.co.uk
Abbey National:	E-Banking helpdesk on 0845 600 4388, open 7am-11pm, seven days a week
Clydesdale Bank:	links to APWG
Yorkshire Bank:	links to APWG
Northern Bank:	links to APWG

Forwarding your suspect email

Select the suspect email (don't double click to open it), right click and select the Forward action, and send it to the appropriate email address

Attaching the suspect email to a new email

Create a new email in your PC or Mac based email software, and drag and drop the suspect email from your inbox into the body section of the new email. Please note that this method will not work for web based email services e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail etc.

*APACS is the UK trade association for payments and for those institutions that deliver payment services to customers.