Finance Book

Human beings indulge into relationship to satisfy one or the other needs. With the growing competition this phenomenon stands true for the corporate world too. The success behind the growing popularity and trust among the people for a firm solely goes to the Public Relation team of that firm. It is good reputation and goodwill that stays and pays.

In terms of the corporate sector, Public relations stand for maintaining good relations with the public. Public for a firm constitute the firm’s employees, suppliers, customers, media persons as well as the shareholders. Maintaining good relations is advantageous to a firm in earning big profits and name in the market.

There are various means through which relationship with the public can be maintained, the need is to keep them informed and happy, so that they give the best in return. Though, it is tough to keep everyone happy but an initiative pays well. But nothing is impossible, as even the impossible says that “I am possible”. The need is to recognize what each one of them expects from you and give them that.

Recognizing employees for good work, paying dividends to the shareholders out of profits, arranging annual general meetings, memos and other initiative to keep the public informed are effective tools to maintain good relations with them.

PR also helps at the time of crisis. Good relationship with the media persons work wonders at the time of crisis. Crisis is a high time when the danger of misleading information getting spread resides but good relationship with public saves the reputation of the firm.

In case you have decided to appoint a Public Relation Officer, wait a second. There is one other alternative officer; you can put this work on the shoulder of a PR agency. Make sure to do research about PR agency’s clients and its past performances, this will help you in finding the best PR agency that suits perfectly with your needs.

It is true that the whole game is about name and fame. An efficient public relation officer with his team can work as a ladder that takes the firm to new heights of success.

By: Sally Thompson

A joint venture is a temporary business alliance between two parties that come together to take advantage of the others’ abilities to do something productive and earn profits from the business collectively. Since it is a temporary set up and lasts for a few weeks or months it does not require a permanent registration such as a partnership. The cumbersome process of making the alliance official is unnecessary and avoidable. However, in recent times a lot of construction work projects are being accomplished with the help of “long term” joint ventures which take relatively more time to complete than the usual joint ventures.

The two ways to maintain accounts in Joint Venture:

• Same set of books of account- Here both parties involved in the joint venture record their transactions in the same set of books of accounts. This is not very convenient.

• Separate set of books of accounts- Both parties maintain complete books of accounts based on their individual transactions which are compared at the end of the JV alliance to conclude the profits or losses (if any) between them.

The term joint venture is implicative enough to mean that each party involved assumes a specific task in the business to make things more convenient and prompt. Therefore, if one of the participating sides lives near the transportation area then that party assumes the responsibility of sending the products to other party. The other party receives the goods and take responsibility to sell it since it has an advantage over the market access.

In order to keep sufficient records of the transactions and actions taken by the two parties they should maintain proper books of accounts so that they can be tallied at the end of the venture.

Joint Venture with X
This is a special ledger account that should be maintained in a separate joint venture accounting book to make things easier. Each party involved in the venture needs to maintain this book so that in the end both books can be compared to understand the debit and credit transactions made by them.

Once this analysis is made a memorandum statement for joint venture is made to understand which party owes what amount to whom. This memorandum is taken as the guide to prepare the final joint venture account separately in the book of each venturer to see how the profit or loss has turned out.

If all transactions were recorded accurately from the beginning till end then the find account should reflect equal balances in both the venturers’ accounts, except on opposite sides of the ledger to show who owes who money from the venture.

The memorandum for joint venture that is created is just for the sake of convenience to make the final accounts. Therefore, it cannot be categorized under any specific books of accounts or accounting treatment as such. It is mainly to record the debit and credit balances of both joint venturers. The balance on this memorandum (debit or credit) explains who owes who money.

By: Christopher J Freville

I have been a fan of Jim Cramer for quite some time. I have read all of his books and have been very impressed with how easy they are to follow and, more importantly, learn from. My favorite Jim Cramer book is Real Money. It’s a book I would recommend for anybody who is trying to learn about the basics of the stock market.

One of the first ideas he talks about is the idea of stock ownership. While many of us think that we actually own a piece of a company when we own stock, Cramer takes exception to this idea.

While you have a fractional interest in the company, technically, you hold no real rights. If every stockholder were actually an owner that would mean that we also have a debt obligation should the company operate in debt. In theory, if we actually owned a piece of the company, stocks would be able to have a negative valuation. More than buying a piece of the company, we are loaning the company money in exchange for an interest.

From there, this Jim Cramer book talks about buy and homework. The traditional buy and hold mentality, where we buy a stock and put it in our dresser for a decade or more is replaced by Cramer’s buy and homework. He believes that when we buy a stock we have to take an active role in the management of it. Each week we should be spending at least one hour per week researching every stock that we own.

Of course he goes on to tell us what that research is: reading the news articles, looking at the balance sheets, listening to conference calls, and studying the charts. All of this is pivotal to knowing when it’s time to buy or sell.

This Jim Cramer book continues with more easy to understand advice that every investor must read. More of his personal trading rules are talked about as well as which stocks to buy depending on where the economy is.

If you don’t have the time or don’t feel confident that you can make the best investment choices, consider subscribing to a service like Action Alerts Plus where an expert like Jim Cramer is doing your research for you and all you have to do is buy and sell when they tell you to execute the trade. My secret is that I don’t have enough time to do all of my research so I let Action Alert Plus do it for me.

By: Tim Parker