ORION  Website

The new website has been incredibly popular since being launched in March. There have been 1176 web page visits, 50,000 hits and constant data searching from search engines globally. International search engines account for 15% of the traffic and over half the visits have been from overseas. A total of 44 hours has been spent on www.orionco.net. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for items in the Resource Centre. Please email us on consult@orionco.net            or phone 1300 767 466

National Training

David has now joined the national CPA Australia training team, and will soon be conducting training on programs such as ‘Reporting on a Page’, Balanced Scorecard, Performance Management and KPI’s.

The first event will be ‘Reporting on a Page’ in Brisbane on 11 August.

Accounting Standards

Australia is now committed to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), (Previously called the International Accounting Standards) from 2005. This will result in the amendment of many existing Australian Accounting Standards and issuing some new standards.
Also, the Australian Accounting Standards (AAS) are being replaced with AASB Standards. The new AASB standards also apply to the public sector.

Annual Reporting

With the end of financial year fast approaching, it will soon be time to prepare your annual report. David Spearritt, Director ORION, was a member of an Annual Report Awards adjudication panel representing CPA Australia for three years. He is now assisting organisations review their annual reports to incorporate world best practices.

By David Spearritt Director ORION

Modernising the Finance Function

Gone are the days when the finance function can just focus on transaction processing, internal control and statutory reporting. It is now required to play a key role in managing the organisation and provide rapid decision support information to management. Yet worldwide trends show that this is happening within an overall reduction in the cost of the finance function, by making better use of systems and technology. ORION jointly prepared a best-practice report on simplified internal and external reporting which incorporated essential components of the finance function which are needed to achieve this improved level of decision support. (see http://www.orionco.net/pdf/report.pdf ) 748k for details. ORION is currently assisting organisations in improving the capability of their finance functions.