Better visualizations with Tableau Public

Spreadsheet-generated charts can be useful, but there too many times where better types of visualization are required. Fortunately, there are many options out there, but I find Tableau to be an excellent choice. Tableau Public is a great way to train yourself on its many possibilities.

Let's take some public data to analyze:

• Rankings of all secondary schools in my home region (Halton),
• that can be segregated by size of school enrolment and type of school board,
• mapped out geographically on a map,
• with identified trends for outcomes, as determined by the Fraser Institute, for 2014.

Here is a small demonstration of what can be done:

Learn About Tableau

I leave it to you to investigate this more, and be amazed at what options are available.

Is it time to exit Microsoft Office?

When I was over in China last March, I missed the big news that Microsoft would no longer support Office 2003 after 8 April 2014. As this version had been widely installed in most offices, and is still found in 28% of workplaces, the question is whether to migrate to newer versions or explore possible alternatives.

There is really only one reason to hang on to Office: Excel. There is a lot of development that has gone into add-ons that can really enhance its analysis capabilities, especially in the areas of:

• Monte Carlo simulation (either with hefty price tags with Oracle's Crystal Ball, or free with SimulAr, but others exist as well),
• heavy-duty mathematical analysis with R through RExcel, and
• visual presentation (such as through Fabrice Rimlinger's Sparklines for Excel).

If your work requires ease of use through integration of applications such as these, then you will need to upgrade. However, most users do not require the power of extensions such as these. In that case, there are quite reasonable (as in free) stable alternatives that work quite well that can import and export from Office formats.

Check out Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. While functionally the same,the latter currently has a slight edge with respect to import/export filters and a wider selection of extensions to enhance its capabilities, as well as a development roadmap that is slightly ahead of Apache's. They are both worth exploring, and many large organizations have already undertaken migration in that direction. There are also ways to use the analytical tools I have mentioned above as separate steps in the workflow (as opposed to full integration), but I have not been able to find a suitable sparkline alternative for this platform.

Try it. I'm sure you will be pleasantly surprised.

A history of Canadian accounting - the CA version

When anyone watches The Agenda weeknights on TV Ontario, it's nice to know that CPA Ontario is one of its main supporters. However, when they state that they've been leaders since 1879, the claim needs some explaining. In reality, accountants in Canada started to organize themselves only in November 1879, with the ones in Montreal beating those in Toronto by two weeks! The Montreal group then proceeded to procure an Act of the Quebec Legislature to form themselves into a professional body and to be conferred with the designation of "Chartered Accountant."



The Toronto group got off to a rockier start. Their original name was the Institute of Accountants and Adjusters of Ontario, and their campaign to receive similar sanction was rebuffed by the Ontario Legislature, which did not want to confer any type of exclusive professional status. They decided to deal with this in a political fashion by recruiting Samuel Bickerton Harman, a former Mayor of Toronto, to become its President, and it reorganized itself to become the Institute of Accountants of Ontario. Their inaugural meeting in May 1882 was a superb example of publicity. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography summarizes what happened next:

"In the space of a year he revamped the council to make it politically important, enlarged and to some extent inflated the membership, stage-managed a public meeting of Toronto’s business élite that demanded incorporation, lobbied Toronto’s MPPs and the appropriate cabinet ministers, and retained the best legal talent."

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario was officially recognized by statute in 1883.



The history becomes somewhat colourful for the rest of the 19th Century.In 1902, the Parliament of Canada passed a private Act incorporating the Dominion Association of Chartered Accountants, the predecessor of today's Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. It appears that a fair number of Ontario CAs jumped over from the ICAO to join in with what was originally an AAM initiative, as noted in a letter from 1905:

 "The Institute of Accountants in Ontario headquarters at Toronto has made the mistake in allowing bookkeepers and in fact clerks of almost any description enter their association. The consequence is the standing of their association is not what it should be. Their president, I believe is a secretary of a brewing company, and it was for these reasons that their best accountants left their association and were instrumental in the organization of the Dominion Association of Chartered Accountants, which like our Montreal association is composed solely of bona fide practicing accountants." 

 The ICAO did not take this lying down. It attempted to stack DACA elections through a proxy fight, but that was overruled. In 1908, it pushed through legislation in Ontario to reserve the CA title for its own members, but that was disallowed—twice—by Ottawa as being contrary to DACA's Federal Act. The showdown was called off after mediation had taken place, and the CA designation was reserved in 1911, with effect from December 1909.



That, in a nutshell, is how it began. I have not mentioned what happened in the other provinces, but the whole history is much more colourful than what has been admitted in the recent past!

Road to the CPA: the CMA route

Now that Ontario has secured three-way agreement for the Chartered Professional Accountant designation to go ahead, maybe it's time to reflect on the history of the various legacy designations that led to it. I'm afraid the story is rather incomplete: the history of the Canadian accounting profession is rather opaque, with few scholars having investigated it, the few published histories that do exist are of the corporate variety, and many source materials are still relatively unavailable on the Web.

Let's start with the designation of which I am most familiar: mine. The Society of Management Accountants of Canada (touting itself these days as CMA Canada), has actually been around since 1920:


It's interesting to see that it started out being sponsored by the CICA's predecessor, the Dominion Association of Chartered Accountants, and the first mention of its existence appeared in the Canadian Chartered Accountant in 1920:



Of special importance is who was qualified to join the Society, as expressed in By-Law 1:

 "Any person resident in Canada, being a member in good standing of any public body of accountants incorporated under the authority of the Legislature of any Province of Canada, and any other person, resident in Canada, being of the full age of twenty-one years, and certified by his employer or two other reputable persons to be occupied in an accounting capacity, may, upon application to the Board, be admitted a member of the Society."

Now that is something I never knew: chartered accountants were our first members, and they occupied all the positions of the first Board. It has been mentioned elsewhere that, in reality, this was a move by the CAs to occupy the field of cost accounting before the CGAs had a chance to step in.

Although incorporated in May 1920, the inaugural meeting did not occur until mid-September that year:



The Society started holding examinations for those studying cost accounting in 1927, but it was not until 1941 that it started to confer the designation "Registered Industrial and Cost Accountant" (or "RIA"), and that only after provincial societies were formed in Ontario and Quebec:



The designation was not consistently applied across the country. In Alberta, for example, it was "Registered Industrial Accountant" as early as 1944. Ontario would not follow until 1967:



The designation later became "Certified Management Accountant" (or "CMA") , to reflect our broader role. In Ontario, approval was received in 1981 for this, but implementation was withheld until all other provinces came on board, which was not until July 1985.



Fast forward to today: consolidation occurred in Quebec in May 2012, New Brunswick will see it happen at the beginning of September, and Saskatchewan has enabling legislation ready to be proclaimed once the organizational bylaws are ready to be brought into effect. It appears that consolidation of the various professional accounting bodies in  the rest of the provinces will come about this fall. However, from our point of view, CMAs are returning to the fold.

A first look at the Ontario 2014 results

It will be a while before the detailed votes by riding are published, but here is how the province-wide vote turned out:




It's plain to see that it turned out to be a Conservative rout. Theirs was the only party to lose in percentage of support, with all the others rising in turn.

This is only a first view. There were some strong regional differences going on, and the NDP was the only party to both gain and lose seats. In addition, the Liberals have now become the "hole in the doughnut", holding almost all their seats in the GTA, with the only significant outliers being Thunder Bay, the lower Ottawa Valley and the Kitchener/Brantford/Dundas triangle. The NDP are strong in Windsor, London, Hamilton/Niagara and the North, but they lost seats in Toronto. Now that requires some explanation!

A more detail regional breakdown is required to make sense of what is going on. Elections Ontario is relatively slow in releasing results, but they will be worth further examination.

Some thoughts on improving human capital

It's good to see that organizations of all sizes are having problems coping with tight budgets, skills shortages, morale issues and the like. This report from the US Government Accountability Office discusses these, plus others, and makes some very astute recommendations. Although many might point out that the large sizes of the organizations involved would make a difference, I would say the issues are the same, and arise in organizations of all sizes:

• the fragmented way in which personnel policies and initiatives are informed and executed in ways that are not aligned with overall strategy;
• the inadequate use of enterprise solutions to address shared challenges; and
• the need for more agile talent management.

There are some great ideas that can be taken from what is discussed here.

The Ontario election - what happened in 2011

The big day is tomorrow. Let's consider what went down the last time around. Being of an analytical frame of mind, I am naturally interested  in how the numbers played out.

I came across a rather interesting spreadsheet a while back from a British source, which allocates vote splits in a multi-party setting from one election to the next. When applied to the 2011 election, this is basically what happened:


The big winner then was the NDP, gaining by six points with about equal shares of the swing coming from the Liberals and the Greens.The Tories also gained as well with a gain of almost four points, with a similar pickup from Greens and Grits. That is what created the Liberal minority we have been going through these last three years.

How will the current situation translate into votes and seats? I will publish a similar analysis for Thursday's result, once all the votes are in.