How to Tell When Your Accountant Has Attention to Detail
Charmaine Yoest, Ph.D. (?) What is a good way to learn if your accountant is getting all those numbers to add up right?
He spells your name right.
When Your Business Blogger was in the army way back in the days of the horse cavalry, I had a boss, Captain Akroyd, who once gave me a memorable ‘corrective interview.’ The West Pointer said I needed to concentrate on my Attention to Detail.
And, in lacking that quality (back then!), I am, of course, very quick to criticize the same lack in others (today).
I often see this lack in the spelling of our names: Charmaine has an unusual first name that is often misspelled, or misidentified. Yoest, a Flemish name, is often misspelled.
The cliche goes: There is no bad PR, as long as they spell your name right.
So it was memorable that my name would be misspelled and insulted in the same article. Very bad.
A two-fer.
Dennis Howlett on innovation for professional accountants who blogs at AccMan gets my name wrong and uses bad language.
Sounding like, well, a blogger:
My new best friend, Dennis Howlett might be right half the time. But these would not be the odds one would take.
From an accountant.
New tag line:
Dennis Howlett on innovation for professional accountants — We’re Right Half the Time! We’re British!
We May Have Lost the Empire, But We Won’t Lose Your Money!
Thank you (foot)notes: I do hope Dennis Howlett is not disqualified for the AcountancyAge Awards 2006 coming up on 15 November. His ciphering is no doubt more accurate than his spelling. More at the jump.
Management Training Tip: Get the name right; both sight and sound, for the eye and ear, spelling and pronunciation.
This year Accountancy Age hosts the 12th annual Awards for Excellence to celebrate success and achievement across the entire industry, from accountants in business, to practice and public sector. In this, our 37th year of publishing, we expect the awards to be more spectacular than ever.
[“Spectacular” and “Accountancy” in the same ‘graph!]
The Awards are undoubtedly an important recognition of achievement in accountancy and finance and the quantity of entries received each year indicates that the accolades are valued highly by the profession.
An independent panel of highly respected financial and business leaders judge many of the awards. In addition we reflect the views of the industry by inviting readers to vote. The eventual finalists and winners enjoy extensive recognition for their success.
Wonderful post Jack! Ya have to love it…I see spelling errors all the time on the media. Yesterday on Fox they actually had the title vote for the 2003 elections, and it stayed up for at least 30 seconds before they switched it to 2006…it made me laugh.
But spelling ones name wrong always annoys me…and with my name it is constantly spelled wrong.
In fact, one day one of my reviewers kept emailing me and spelling my name wrong – Stacey…so I added an e to their name in my response, and deleted the e in my name. They didn’t catch it.
They responded back with my name spelled wrong again and oblivious to the e I added in their name. So I responded again and put 2 e’s in their name…again, they were oblivious to the e’s…and then I actually told them they spelled my name wrong…and even after that, they ignored it. 🙂
So….ya gotta roll with the punches, but I can tell you this, if I was grading papers my students would get knocked down a few points if there were any spelling errors. 🙂
My all-time classic in this area: http://www.tommcmahon.net/2006/03/the_infamous_in.html