Jun 23 2008 |
Accountancy and animation are two words rarely seen in the same sentence. But a company has come up with a way of showing the accountants a thing or two about presenting financial information.
“Spreadsheets and balance tables have been swept away and replaced with something looking remarkably similar to an online game. Instead of scoring points, the aim of the Business Flight Simulator, launched with support of the BCS at the Royal Society for Arts, London, is to keep the business afloat.
Once you have mastered that, then you can think about extracting profit. The main mechanism for keeping it all ticking over is watching cash flow. While keeping an eye on how cash runs through a business is not exactly new, this simulation shows the actual links between getting money from the bank, creditors, debtors, as well as dealing with payment periods, capital spend, fixed assets, dividends and stock, all in an animated, interactive, diagram.
For the first five minutes you are up and running you feel fantastic, you can literally see how the money flows through your business - itself an unnerving experience - and you feel that millionaire status is within your grasp. But then you realise that your creditors need paying and you've used up all the cash to buy stock (which isn't selling because it's overpriced).
Once the 28-day period is up, things start to get distinctly ugly, with lots of the boxes representing different aspects of your business filling up with red - as you begin to owe people money. And the quicker you run the simulation, the quicker it fills up, and, before you know it, you are filing for virtual bankruptcy. The lesson of the programme, which really doesn't need to be spelled out after you've gone bust on the screen: running a business is more difficult than it looks.
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Apr 29 2008 |
The concept of flight simulators is a common one. The idea is that users can learn how a system works in a realistic, yet risk free, environment. With this in mind Metapraxis has launched what it calls its Business Flight Simulator with the support of the BCS.
BCS News, April 29 2008
“Just as pilots learn to fly commercial jet aircraft after training on flight simulators, with this system business people can get to grips with how their company works without any risk.
'A lot of people are uncomfortable about money and things like cash management. The simulator was set up to help people get an intuitive idea about how a business runs. They can see onscreen what is happening,' said Robert Bittlestone, chairman of Metapraxis.
The idea with the Business Flight Simulator is that everyone in the business can understand very quickly what the business is about. When you work in a company it's hard to see the whole picture and how everything fits together. With the simulator the idea is that you get to see this.
'We want it to be just like riding a bike so that people have it as second nature. We want them to get the feeling of the business.'
David Clarke, CEO of BCS said, 'We need more IT people to understand business and the application of IT to business. The Business Flight Simulator is a great way to get people to understand how business really works in a fun way.'"
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Apr 12 2008 |
A new facility which enables users to get a grip on the financial dynamics of a business has been launched on-line by Metapraxis, the business consultancy and software group. The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and the British Computer Society were also behind the development and launch.
Financial Times, April 12 2008
“The visual technology that powers aircraft flight simulators has been applied to company finances, making it possible to develop an immediate and intuitive understanding of financial cause and effect. The new Business Flight Simulator and the accompanying Amplifying Intuition online booklet are available free of charge to individual users during its launch phase at http://www.amplifying-intuition.com. It enables users to create a company from scratch and, if it goes bankrupt, to learn from that mistake and start again within ten minutes."
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Apr 01 2008 |
Consultancy Metapraxis has introduced an online Business Flight Simulator to make understanding and analysing business financial processes more intuitive.
John Stokdyk, Accounting Web 1 Apr 2008
 “Launched with support from CIMA, the simulator is based on the visual representation of graphical "pipes" through which cash flows and totals accumulate in tanks that represent account balances. The system is controlled by entering figures into financial accounts tables on the right hand side of the screen to prime the system. Accelerator controls allow the user to play with different scenarios and see the consequences of business decisions or financial constraints.
Graphical sliders can be used to play with the volume of transactions and payments through the system to give visual feedback on what happens, for example to the ratio of debtors to sales as payment delays are increased. "Once you have experimented with this simple model for a few minutes, its dynamics become completely intuitive. And it is your intuition that matters the most," said the system's inventor, Robert Bittlestone."
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Mar 26 2008 |
Visualisation techniques will help accountants and non-financial staff to develop an intuitive understanding of the essentials of business
Robert Bruce, Financial Director 26 Mar 2008
 “Having fun and learning the fundamental principles of accountancy are rarely concepts which appear in the same sentence. Certainly my early days at the tutors were far from fun. Exasperation on both sides was the norm. The only fun came when one tutor taught an entire hour of tax law while impersonating WC Fields, the misanthropic Hollywood comedian of the 1930s. That tutor went on to become chairman of the Conservative party.
Part of the problem in those early days was that we were off and running with much more interesting things like corporate fraud or detecting stock irregularities long before we had got the hang of the underlying accounting by which a company stands or falls.
As Robert Bittlestone, chairman of consultants Metapraxis, was telling us the other day, it is rather like learning to ride a bicycle. When a child first looks at a bicycle and thinks about the theory of riding it the whole concept seems impossible. But once the skill has been gained not a single further thought is given as to how it is done. If only, thought Bittlestone, a similar liberating step could be made in accounting, then business life would become much more fulfilling and less fraught with dangers. If the underlying principles could be learned through some visualisation process then the leap could be made. And from then on in, with an instinctive understanding of the accounting essentials of business in their minds, accountants could simply concentrate on strategy rather than lurching from one frantic burst of fire-fighting to another.
Bittlestone and Metapraxis are experts in the field of visualisation and so they set about producing a solution. And at the end of February, in conjunction with management accountancy body CIMA and the British Computer Society, they launched the idea onto an audience of sceptical journalists, grizzled old businessmen, and bright young trainees. The system is known as the Business Flight Simulator...The real change would come if enough people across a business understood the fundamentals of accounting in an intuitive way. It would create a revolution where everyone understood the nuts and bolts and could spend their entire business lives looking to the horizons rather than constantly stumbling over the details at their feet.
But in the meantime have a go yourself. As we discovered at the launch, it is a lot of fun."
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