This blog now has an Apple News channel

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apple-news-icon.jpg

I got approval today to my application for this blog to be a channel on Apple News. As an Apple nerd I'm really pleased. This perhaps means very little to most readers of this blog but if you have an iPhone or an iPad and you use the Apple News app you can read the entries from this blog inside the app. Choose the search icon at the bottom of the app's screen and search for managing public money and then check the heart shape that appears next to the channel name.

I don't know if Apple News has taken off as well as Apple wanted. I've begun to use it more once I figured out how to customise the stories to see ones I want and, more particularly, not see stories I don't want (there was a time I was seeing lots of articles about Meghan Markle and I'm just not interested).

Apple News includes analytics so I will be able to see how many people view my articles there versus direct on this site and versus Medium, where I will also post some of the articles. Let me know in the comments if you plan to read this in the Apple News app.

Can you sum up public financial management in two sentences?

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I mentioned that this website was built and is hosted on the Squarespace service. There are a number of site-wide settings to complete when setting up a new site and one of them is for search engine optimisation (SEO). Squarespace asks you for a couple of sentences to describe what the site is about. You want these sentences to have plenty of keywords in so that whensearch engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo (my favourite) display your site in search results the searcher can see what your site is about.
This turned out to be quite a challenge for me. At first I considered not writing sentences and simply listing the key words as a string. But then I decided to do it properly and below are the two sentences I came up with.

Public financial management is the fine art of managing public money to deliver vital services to the public. It involves budgeting, accounting, controlling, auditing, reporting, policy-making and decision-taking.

Do you think this sums up what managing public money is? Can you do it better? Let me know in the comments section. 

Online accounting training for one

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Online accounting training for one

I wrote previously about the work I do for Ibba Girls Boarding School in South Sudan and the trip I made to the school in February 2015 to recruit a new finance manager. The school is (almost entirely) funded by a UK charity, the Friends of Ibba Girls School (FIGS), and it is important to FIGS that the school has high standards of probity and governance to go with the high quality education. That’s why the school is willing to employ a finance manager whose primary job is to manage the school’s cash on a day to day basis.

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It's been ten years since my last permanent job

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It's been ten years since my last permanent job

Yesterday was my fiftieth birthday. Today is the tenth anniverary of my last day as the director of financial services at Doncaster Council. This seems a good day for reflection and for thinking about the future. For the last ten years I have been self-employed. At the time I left Doncaster Council I thought I was trading the security of a local government job with a pension, etc for greater variety. As it turned out ...

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