Even business owners and employers give unexpected thumbs ups for ground-breaking programme

Ms Goh Fang Min, Chief Financial Officer of the Strategic and Financial Management (SFM) Group of the Singapore Sports Council (SSC), has encouraged her finance team to attend the BAR Programme.

Ms Goh has undergone through the BAR training in 2007, and when doing her project work required for BAR certification, she chose to base her project on the operations of a public sports facility that SSC manages - the swimming complexes.

"In the past, due to the complexity of operations and the sheer size of managing all our public sports facilities, we would generate such reports only once a year, to monitor financial cost-effectiveness. Now, we are able to take less than 30 minutes to get an updated performance report, and on a monthly basis!"

"With the skill-set attained after the BAR Programme, it has really helped a lot to identify weak areas and key areas of concerns which we could focus on... am very impressed with the Excel spreadsheet that the BAR techniques has enabled us to come up with." "I showed it to my boss, and he was very happy with it too."

As a strong advocate of the BAR programme, Ms Goh feels that it is a "must-have skill that every accountant should have".

"Such skills and techniques are essential, and there are very good tools in Microsoft Excel that we can develop and explore in our course of work... indeed, it is so easy now to change figures in the reports whenever necessary or required, so much more flexible!"

As a BAR alumni herself, Ms Goh also seeks employees who have such skills-sets. In hiring new staff, she holds those who are BAR-certified in high regard and appreciation.

"I see the potential of having such skills; how it value-adds to the work that we do."