About the author

Experience in business management : 46 years

His professional life:
- Teacher of Business Management at technical schools and in master craftsman training programmes.
- Consultant to entrepreneurs and their families.
- Developer of business management software. His programmes for agriculture are used in some federal states of Germany.

Practical work with farmers has one important advantage: You must act in short times. This is why you will only find definitions in the simplest possible ways in my works.

Some author's works

His latest work was an analysis of the German BayWa Group. The group, which operates worldwide, is currently experiencing severe financial difficulties. The author's findings:
1. The term 'cash flow for self-financing of investments' (also known as cash flow 3) would have been helpful in avoiding illiquidity. It works as an early warning system! The author found the proof that staggered cash flows 1 to 3 are applicable to large companies - as well in a SME.
2. Much of the information provided to the supervisory board and business journalists was about 'cash flow statement'. This construct, developed by accounting boards, counts the inflow from new loans as part of the total cash flow, too. This meant that the supervisory board and business journalists could not see how critical the situation was.
While conducting this research, the author came across the upcoming IFRS 18, which divides results into "three activities". In both the 'income statement' and the 'cash flow statement', interest expenses are transferred from 'operating activities' to 'financing activities'. This means that, in future, interest expenses will be not published, anymore. This restructuring will cause additional confusion.

The author's research was published by EFRAG under the headline i Stop the 'Three Activities' in IFRS 18 (2024).

Early in his career, the author was involved in encoding business transactions. At that time, digital accounting systems had just been developed. In 2001, he led a team that revised a bookkeeping guide for future farmers. This material eliminated the "debit and credit" convention.

The author developed his first software programme in 1986, “Zins intern” (in German). It based on the core of mathematician Franz Wohak. The main goal was to calculate the effective annual interest rate for extremly complex bundled loans. This DOS program run on 32-bit computers.