• 15 Jan 2024, 9:39 p.m.

    You laugh but we do sometimes still use them when we are doing control accounts.

    A couple of old clients even still do handwritten ETB's

  • 16 Jan 2024, 12:29 a.m.

    I am currently working with our dev team to build an internal system based on double entry principles… many T-accounts are being drawn and it is incredibly helpful for them.

    Yesterday I genuinely saw faces light up as pennies dropped and various what/why/how questions resolved themselves.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 6:55 a.m.

    I am taking this as a compliment.

    Glad to have another evening of AccountantChat (TM) to wade through this morning, what a time to be alive.

    Any update on Man City's case?

  • 16 Jan 2024, 8:17 a.m.

    Interesting that Shelvey and Wood are now Giraldi's fault again, according to the Times, Guardian and Telegraph. When they needed an explanation for Cooper's departure, they were his fault.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 8:34 a.m.

    There are plenty of individual signings that could be run through, but the issue is the lack of overarching plan that joins them all together. You are never going to get all the signings right, but we carried an awful lot of unnecessary weight last season at considerable expense. It's not individual decisions that are the problem, but the leadership of the decision making process.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 8:48 a.m.

    Yeah, I don't think there's much point in nit-picking individual signings, however eye-watering some of them appear to be. My point on Shelvey/Wood was more about the change in the leaked responsibilty. Percy will probably reveal they were Ross Wilson's fault all along when he's sacked around Easter.

    General discussion about our mental squad-building doesn't really have to go much deeper than:
    1. We signed 30 players last season, despite the fact that we could only name a squad of 25.
    2. Our current 25 man squad has 4 right backs and seven central defenders.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 9:14 a.m.

    Although even with 7 centre halves I don't think we can put out a premiership standard pairing currently.

    Which really validates the points in the last few posts.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 9:26 a.m.

    Sounds like some unfinished business for Mr Megson? Tools are there, just saying...

  • 16 Jan 2024, 9:31 a.m.

    Have to say, I don't think the club deserves much sympathy over the Brennan sale. There are deadlines, you have to stick to them if you don't want to be punished. Ok, we made £17.5m by holding onto him until the end of the transfer window but we played him three times in that time - what was our plan if he'd broken his leg?

    How many points is that £17.5m worth?

  • 16 Jan 2024, 9:55 a.m.

    If the Prem said "I'm sure it'll be fine" then that's one thing.
    If we said "we're gonna do it regardless" then that's quite another.

    In hindsight, it looks like Brentford might have been playing a blinder, and tried to pick up Brennan on the cheap because they realised we actually needed to make the sale.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 10:02 a.m.

    I can't find what the club was quoted as saying but I remember at the thinking it was heavy on what we'd told the league and absent on what the league had said in response, which seems telling.

    Here's the other thing I forgot to say on the Brennan money. We are effectively say we want to include £30m (or something) in our accounts for 22/23 to get them in the limits. But, if the rules stay unchanged, we think the club will only take £17.5m of that fee into account in 23/24 or will they want to use the whole £47.5m?

  • 16 Jan 2024, 10:08 a.m.

    It's not like Brennan was our only financial lever. We knowingly overspent and didn't recover it in the time period, that's basic rule breaking (even if the rules are rubbish). The only reason we might have had to consider taking a smaller fee for Brennan in June was because we had knowingly broken the rules beforehand. The remarkable thing is that lawyers are going to make a fortune arguing about such a simple and silly argument.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 10:16 a.m.

    I'm not sure it's an impossible argument as mitigation.

    Things like this happen frequently in business, loan defaults, breaches of covenants (rules) etc that don't always lead straight to the sanctions permitted by those rules.

    This is different, but there are parallels.

    I'm not sure I'm that hopeful that the arguments will fly, but worth a go I guess.

    Changing tack, the general lack of a bad word against the owner and his idiot son by the general fanbase is I assume driven by fear that they may just walk away and leave us worse off.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 10:27 a.m.

    If the intent behind the Brennan argument is to reduce the punishment to a suspended points deduction and/or fine, I guess that's a possibility and the best possible case. But if, as it appears, we've broken the rules, there needs to be a punishment and, more importantly, EM needs to learn lessons.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 10:30 a.m.

    If Florist's intel is correct he has learnt that he can't build a competitive team in EPL the way he thought he could so he's trying to cash out.

  • 16 Jan 2024, 10:45 a.m.

    I thought that about Brentford too.