Accounting in Profession: Anil Melwani

Anil Melwani

Anil Melwani is the current Special Projects Director of Alvarez Technology Group. His primary role at the company is to ensure that the implementation and management of complex technical projects are meticulously executed by his ATG customers. Melwani strongly believes that developing appropriate tax policies is essential to minimizing future and current tax liability. Based on this philosophy, Melwani has developed innovative and practical tax planning support solutions that put business needs first. He believes in adopting fair tax policies for any business is a key component of the business's success. For that reason, he specializes in providing proper taxation policies to businesses.

Doug Cohen

Doug Cohen is a certified public account and a member of the Florida and American institute of certified public accountants. He has got a background in public accounting, served as a CFO and is also an owner of a private business. He likes targeting small and medium size businesses to see them prosper through developing proper accounting strategies. Cohen believes that it is imperative to allocate the overall purchase price between building and land in computing depreciation while purchasing estate property. He believes that proper assessments of the real taxes is a good way of measuring the overall value of assets.

Comparison of the two accountants' profiles

Both Melwani and Cohen strongly believe that it is imperative for businesses to properly compute their taxes and adopt a proper policy to minimize risk. However, there are some differences in the way the two accountants specialize. For instance, Melwani is a specialist in huge businesses yet Cohen specializes in small and medium enterprises. Furthermore, Cohen has strong association with computation of depreciation associated with purchase of real estate and other assets yet Melwani specializes in liabilities.

Furthermore, having served as a CFO, Cohen seems to have more exposure in dealing with large scale accounting/taxation problems than Melwani.

Critique of personal brand

I strongly believe that the best method of keeping the money valuable is by investing in assets like land or building, developing them then selling them. When money is kept in such assets, it will lose value less often. However, the major problem with my personal brand is that I do not believe that depreciation can easily be accounted at resellers. I believe that depreciation costs are simply an estimate of the actual costs and that it is impossible to compute them accurately.

How to improve my brand

In order to improve my brand, I need to further interact with already established business persons so that I get to know better ways of investing funds. For instance, businesses that have low calculated risk yet higher returns in a short time may be better than investing in land and other assets that may take long to increase value. Furthermore, getting and in-depth study of the theories associated with depreciation in accounting, it will be possible to understand that all items including assets may have some form of depreciation after some time through the rate varies.

Lessons from CPA boot Australia camp

From the boot camp, I learnt that developing proper accounting procedures is key to maintaining a business as it can help in identifying the profits and losses easily. From the experts that I interacted with while at the camp, I learnt that accounts are born and education just develops skills in them. When an individual goes to study accounting to even attaining the highest CPA or ACCA accolades without a natural skill, he will just be a professional accountant but cannot think beyond his books.

Lastly, I learnt that accounting is more than simply keeping track of receivables and payables. It may also involve an estimation of future behavior of a business which may involve making educated guesses coupled with accounting knowledge.