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: They must be aware of the duty of others entrepreneurs. But they also face volatile costs and prices, as well as changing yields due to weather conditions. 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 as SMEs.
2. Much of the information provided to the supervisory board and business journalists was about the cash flow statement. This construct, developed by accounting boards, counts the inflow from new loans as part of the total cash flow. 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 harder to find because results from operations will be more visible to readers. This restructuring will cause confusion.

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

Early in his career, the author was involved in coding 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's first software program, Zins Intern, dealt with financial mathematics. This DOS program was designed to calculate the exact effective interest rate of products offered by financial institutions, even at the most complex levels. Unfortunately, this program is no longer compatible with MS Windows.