IMAGINE this: You lost your job and your ex-boss paid you only a month's salary in compensation. But you are not going to let this crush you. So, you and your friends team up and start a new food business.
You were all thrilled because there were plenty of orders coming in, even on the first day. All of you were busy cooking and delivering from morning to night, every day.
However, at the end of the month, there was no extra money in the bank. Whatever your new business earned was only enough for you to buy the ingredients for next week's orders.
Although your business was thriving, yet, there was no profit to share between you and your partners. So how are all of you going to survive?
Enter the accountant who only needed a few hours to figure out why is your new business failing and it is because:
• Your initial capital expenditure is too high and it will take some time to depreciate, thus affecting your cash flow
• Your selling prices are insufficient to compensate the expenses on premium ingredients you used, thus eating into your bottom-line
• You are spending too much on social media advertising but the conversions into sales are too low.
The launching of the world’s first dual accounting diploma programme.
"Every business needs an accountant. We need someone who looks deeply into concrete data and sees what is really happening. In fact, many start-up companies fail not because they do not have a good business idea but poor financial management," said UOW Malaysia KDU School of Business head Assoc Prof Dr Brian Wong.
An accountant, Assoc Prof Dr Wong described deals in reality and never speculates.
"They make assessments based on what is in front of them. They are highly disciplined in maintaining a strict regimen when it comes to keeping track of figures, analysing them, and making it meaningful to the business," he explained.
Assoc Prof Dr Wong went on to comment on an historic revolution in accounting studies taking place at UOW Malaysia KDU.
Those pursuing a Diploma in Accounting at UOW Malaysia KDU, will be the first students globally to be able to experience the fast-track route of obtaining the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants (ACCA) professional Diploma in Accounting and Business (DIAB).
Participants include UOW Malaysia KDU management and staff and ACCA Malaysia country head Edward Ling and other ACCA Malaysia representatives.
It is the world's first dual accounting diploma programme with ACCA and on Feb 4, UOW Malaysia KDU and ACCA held a virtual agreement signing ceremony to celebrate this break-through.
“Accounting graduates are required to obtain an accounting professional qualification, such as ACCA, and three years of relevant work experience to be a certified public accountant. This dual diploma programme in partnership with ACCA provides UOW Malaysia KDU students an advantage by nurturing accounting students towards a professional qualification as early as during their diploma studies.
"With a dual accounting diploma, you will be in a much better position to land an accounting job in a more established firm where you will get precious real-world experience," he stressed.
But there’s more.
Those who hold ACCA's Diploma in Accounting and Business are exempted from taking the first three papers of ACCA's Foundation level professional certification. The journey of someone aiming to be a certified public accountant under ACCA involves passing a total of nine Foundation and four Professional papers, and those with a DIAB would have already dealt with a chunk of that.
Assoc Prof Dr Wong said the educational experience of this dual accounting diploma programme is deepened through the pairing of two globally esteemed institutions.
UOW Malaysia KDU is part of Australia's University of Wollongong, which is ranked in the top one percent of the world’s universities.
ACCA, in turn, is one of the world’s leading professional accounting bodies with almost 230,000 fully qualified members and over half a million future members worldwide.
If you love problem-solving and quantitative analytics, then you may well benefit from a dual accounting diploma.
For more details, visit http://uowmkdu.edu.my
