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Murray Johnstone Chief Executive Nicholas McAndrew plans to expand the company into different markets but will also keep it firmly based in Scotland. This will allow the company to: reduce its overheads; provide better service to its customers; and expand into different services. Murray Johnstone concentrates on several different areas of investment management including: investment trusts; venture capital investment funds; pension funds; property investments; and unit trusts. The company plans to increase its presence in the venture capital market and to expand into Europe to take advantage of the unified market in 1993.

Halfords has narrow margins and requires accurate costing. They have created a flexible accounting system in-house which supports its point-of-sale technology called Halfords OnLine (HALO). HALO connects individual branch stores using a network and IBM XT computers and generates detailed stock and accounting data in up to 400 varied report formats. The company plans to develop a more elaborate version of their program called 'Superhalo' by the end of 1989 which will have barcode reading and direct price look-up.

Companies will inflate their stockholders' equity unless they adopt the equity method in evaluating investments in subsidiary and associate companies. Current rules and regulations governing this area contain ambivalent language which may be a reason that the majority of UK companies are shying away from using the equity method. One possible compromise is to include footnotes to disclose the cumulative amount of overlaps on a holding company's balance sheets.

The Auditing Practices Committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales has surveyed accountants on the subject of fraud detection and reporting, and has published the results of its survey in the report 'The Auditor and Fraud'. Fifteen views which were held by a consensus of those responding to the survey are discussed. Chief among these opinions is the belief that auditors should not be responsible for uncovering and reporting fraud. The survey respondents disagreed with the general public in assigning responsibility for fraud detection and prevention. The public seems to believe that accountants and outside auditors should be responsible, whereas accountants feel that it is the duty of corporate executives to prevent fraud.

Turner Construction Company operates 20 offices throughout the United States. Prior to January 1985, the company's accounting was centralized, but its management was decentralized, which led to a great deal of duplication of financial records, and slowed down the consolidation and closing of Turner's financial records related to daily transactions. The company solved this problem by implementing a information system in which each office bypassed the company's mainframe and ran a trial balance on the office microcomputer. An accounting and communications program designed by IMRS, a Connecticut software firm, was implemented for the reporting and consolidation of financial data.

Just-in-time (JIT) inventory systems and automated factories will simplify inventory costing for financial reporting, but they will complicate unit costing for strategic decision making. JIT systems eliminate the need to separate the cost of manufactured goods into raw materials, work in progress, finished goods inventory, and cost of goods sold. Cost control in the future will be achieved by the direct control of cost-generating activities instead of standard cost systems. Recordkeeping complexity can be reduced by eliminating the use of work orders and detailed tracing of costs. Automation of production causes labor costs to be treated as variable overhead like other variable costs that are difficult to account on a unit basis. Flexible manufacturing causes unit costing to be replaced by the valuation and profitability of batches of products.