Furthermore, the importance of adopting forensic accounting in the universities' accounting curriculum is highlighted especially that the demand for it is increasing gradually. Such adoption has a huge potential to enhance students' skills and competencies and could be used as a veritable resource from which fraud could be mitigated. Fresh graduates can as well attain a diploma in Investigative & Forensic Accounting (DIFA) program that provides a broad range of knowledge and skills to carry out financial investigations.
The DIFA program focuses on knowledge and skills that can be best taught and examined in person: such as handling a face-to-face meeting with a client, interviewing skills, and testifying in court as an expert witness.
In thinking about the implementation of double entry, MS Money was not designed primarily for double entry. If it was, it would have some journal-like arrangement similar to dedicated double entry accounting software, whereby each transaction is associated in some way with the two accounts involved in the double entry. Then, via a key-click or later batch updating, the two individual postings would be made to the appropriate two accounts.
Traditionally, accounting for personal and home use has not made use of the principles of double entry; and the software packages that support home accounting are not usually geared up to properly support it. For this, they tended to only require setting up accounts for one or two areas, mainly related to bank accounts. The reason is partly because when people ventured into home accounting, they tended to start with activities such as reconciliation of checking accounts and simple budgeting. With this, as useful as it is, there is no concept of seeing the total picture, with the static and dynamic views of the financial state of affairs.
It should therefore logically, reside in a liability account. When you think about it, the amount of the domestic wealth represented by the assets less the debts is owed to the eventual beneficiaries of the household or individual's estate.
Well I gave much thought to this and over some years and developed a new focus with an associated approach and methods, based on what I eventually termed, Domestic Well-Being. What should the financial focus be for a home finances?
Income and Expense are the terms used in MS Money to relate to the accounting terms of debit and credit; Perhaps trying to be helpful to home accountants, MS Money has differing column headings for the increases and decreases across all the various types of accounts that can be created.
So I needed a way that could be used to classify increases and decreases as and when they occurred, as well as for presenting the figures in an appropriate way after they had been accumulated. It was therefore DWB that became the new focus for domestic accounting; and it could be identified in terms of a structure for both bookkeeping - capturing the transactions; and accounting - reporting, analysing and the subsequent decision making for future financial activity, implemented perhaps through budgeting. It had to be done in a way that could achieve this best balance across the competing priorities so as to maximise Domestic Well-Being. My solution was to come up with a structure that best presented the major areas of domestic finances about which decisions could be made on how best to allocate funds - those alternatives and their prioritisation. This presentation had to support the decision making that would be needed to best optimise future spending.
Over 30 business ratios slim down to few that most people have heard of, such as the different forms of margins and the ratios associated with profitability and liquidity; and of course virtually none of them relate to home finances!
In short, yes, homesteaders do want to increase their worth or value, but not usually for 'profits sake'. People want to increase their wealth to pay for things that tend to occur in a progression throughout a lifetime; like better homes, education perhaps, hobbies, luxuries and provision for those retirement and eventually, declining years when income is drastically reduced.
For your interest, I call these stages: My other experience was with life; now 68, I realised looking back on my lifetime of interest in home finances, I could distinguish six fairly distinct stages of financial life. By this, I mean that there was a significant enough change in some aspect of personal finances across the stages that might warrant some form of indicator or measurement being useful.
Let's imagine a situation where an individual starts up with