Finance & Equity

Small business owners who want to keep abreast of technological disruptions should make the move to cloud accounting. Not only will they save money and office space, they will be able to turn spare moments into productive minutes. Cloud accounting is ideal for small businesses, because it allows business owners to work from anywhere, at any time, as long as they have an internet connection.

The BEE scorecard encourages businesses to push for economic growth, specifically focusing on people of colour in South Africa. It is based on the concept of offering incentives through additional business. Economic growth begins with skills development involving training and hands on development through employment equity and the development of new business.

Most businesses are by now already at one or another stage of the enterprise cloud transformation journey and a staggering 93 percent of business executives who participated in Deloitte’s 2018 global outsourcing survey, confirmed that their organisations were adopting - or at least considering adopting - cloud.

When boards of directors gather to discuss the top risks of an organisation, it may entail matters such as structurally high unemployment, labour unrest, exchange rate volatility, political uncertainty, unmanageable fraud and corruption, threats of new market entrants or even product stagnation. Whilst there are indeed many more topical risks that may be relevant to the nature of the organisation’s business and immediate environment, it is not common for a board to include the threat of their innovation and intellectual property (IP) being marginalised or lost.

Both the South African government and its citizens are forced to allocate more of their resources towards debt rather than to education or housing. This creates a challenge to maintain healthy finances, leading to empty pockets and frustration.

In its quest to empower and grow the number of Black people in the chartered accountancy profession and empower them meaningfully to participate and sustain the growth of the economy, the Department of Trade and Industry, has gazetted the revised Chartered Accountancy Profession Sector Code (CA Charter) for public comment.

According to QuickBooks, there are already more than 700 apps that are assisting accountants to automate processes and reduce their workload. Gone are the days where accountants can be mere number crunchers, who collate and check data and allocate it to the correct cost centre. The future accountant will have transformed her/himself into a financial advisor, adding value to businesses by offering strategic advice, consulting and financial planning.

When faced with legislation that requires parties to take certain steps or prevents them from implementing a particular course of action, the questions often asked include 'what are the consequences and who will be liable to pay?' For a long time been uncertainty about the penalty firms would face if they fail to notify a merger and/or implement a merger without the requisite approval of the competition authorities.

One of the respects in which the National Credit Act (the NCA) has created confusion relates to the obligation to register as a credit provider. Section 40(1) of the NCA provides that a person must apply to be registered as a credit provider if the total principal debt owed to that credit provider under all outstanding credit agreements exceeds the prescribed threshold - which has been nil since 11 May 2016, and prior to that was R500,000. 

Focused on meeting the financial needs of the most vulnerable citizens in society, financial inclusion is recognised across the globe as a critical component to economic development and advancement.