The White House Supports Raising the Minimum Wage

 

Read the White House's initiative to raise the minimum wage in their official website: https://www.whitehouse.gov/raise-the-wage And answer the following questions:

Quiz 4:

Minimum Wage

Listen to the audio and answer the following questions. Try to listen to it three times before you read the transcript

Transcript:

Quiz 2: 

Quiz 3:
 Do you think the minimum wage should be a living wage? Would you pay a higher price for a product if you knew the employees were earning a better salary? Please record your answer

Hard Close vs Soft Close

 

What's a soft close?

A soft close is defined as closing the books using an abbreviated closing procedure. By using a soft close, the accounting department can issue financial statements very quickly and then return to its normal day-to-day activities.

This enhanced closing speed comes at a cost, for the accuracy of the financial statements is reduced by the various revenue and expense accruals that are normally included in a more comprehensive close. This means that the results reported through a soft close can be materially inaccurate. Or, they may have more variable results from month to month because accruals are not being used to smooth out reported results over multiple periods.

The reduced accuracy level makes the soft close impractical for reviewed or audited financial statements that are read by outsiders. However, it may be perfectly acceptable to use the soft close for internal management reporting, where total accuracy is not entirely necessary. Thus, a reasonable compromise is to use a more thorough closing process whenever a complete set of financial statements is needed for the use of outsiders (such as at year-end), and the soft close for all other months.

The financial statements of a publicly-held company are the most rigorously examined, with reviews at the end of three quarters and a full audit at the end of the year. This means that a soft close can still be used for the other eight months of the year. Thus, even a public company can take advantage of a soft close two-thirds of the time.
Steps that are commonly skipped during a soft close include:

• Revenue accruals
• Expense accruals
• Intercompany eliminations
• Overhead allocations
• Physical inventory counts
• Account reconciliations
• Reserve account updates

The key remaining steps still needed for a soft close are:

• Customer billings
• Commission accruals
• Investigating inventory irregularities (if the inventory balance is large)
• Error-checking the financial statements

If the results of a business are particularly susceptible to any item that has been removed from the soft close checklist, then by all means add it back in. For example, if the wage accrual is a large one, consider calculating and accruing it every month, irrespective of the type of close that the organization uses. Doing so requires more time, but results in more accurate financial statements.

Now, please do Quiz 1: