(Posted by Patrick Lee on 10 August 2017 at a different location, but migrated here on 05 Feb 2018).
You may not know that Excel 2016 added some useful new charts for analysing data. I particularly like the Treemap, Box & Whisker and Pareto charts. (The images below are taken from this Microsoft post, please see that link for more detail on these and other charts).
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(Posted by Patrick Lee on 8 August 2017 at a different location, but migrated here on 05 Feb 2018).
I have long thought it would be useful for there to be a standard format for exchange of data files for DB (Defined Benefit, i.e. final salary or career average revalued) pension plans, at least in the UK initially.
This would make it easier for pension plans to share information (with actuarial consultants, but also other advisers e.g. buyout companies, investment analysts), not just in mergers and acquisitions, but also in risk transfers (longevity, or pensions buyouts) and would improve the comparability of analysis across companies by investors etc. It should also reduce costs for trustees and plan sponsors, and may increase the quality of the data held.
Read More “A (UK) Pensions Data Format Standard – let’s make it happen!”
(Posted by Patrick Lee on 1 August 2017 at a different location, but migrated here on 05 Feb 2018).
It would clearly make a difference whether a company’s pension liabilities were £475m, £500m or £525m …
The value of an organisation’s defined benefit (final salary or CARE – career average revalued) pension plan promises normally depends on many uncertainties, including:
(Posted by Patrick Lee on 6 May 2017 at a different location, but migrated here on 05 Feb 2018).
We are delighted to announce the release earlier this week of WebPocketMoney.com, our cloud based app that enables parents and their children to track and manage pocket money online.
This web app has been designed to help parents and children manage pocket money in a user-friendly way that encourages saving. It uses notional accounts rather than physical accounts (which are often difficult to create for children) and this has the advantage that you can offer your children much higher interest rates (e.g. 5% or 10% per month) than are commonly available in the real world, in order to encourage them to save.
(Posted by Patrick Lee on 22 Apr 2016 at a different location, but migrated here on 05 Feb 2018).
I thought I’d share a few thoughts from our experience of moving from Windows servers on which both our corporate and client websites and email were stored to the cloud, specifically Office 365 and Microsoft Azure.
The process itself was relatively painless (particularly for migrating email to Office 365). The only problems we experienced were in migrating some older websites, and some web-based software which, for reasons best known to its manufacturer (whose blushes I will spare by not naming here), needed to be installed as a desktop program (albeit one with a web interface). Both of these needed to be installed on a virtual machine (a windows server within the cloud) rather than as stand alone web apps (or app services as they are now known) in Azure. We also had a few teething problems moving some databases from SQL Server 2012 or 2014 to SQLAzure, but found solutions to these after a bit of experimentation.
Read More “Migrating to the cloud (Microsoft Azure and Office 365)”
