F R E Q U E N T L Y A S K E D Q U E S T I O N S
"Learn What You've Been Missing"
What level should students be at for the Intermediate ABL Auditing class? We prefer students to be have at least 6 months of real audit experience or account
officer experience. Skill levels for each course are also stated in our marketing
materials. We don't offer a beginner's course that is taught publicly, but we do
offer an introductory examination school that can be taught at your location for newer
hires with less experience.
What is your schedule for next Spring / Fall
/ Winter? There is a link on the Home Page for the PDF brochure. "We send course schedules out in the January and September of each year.
In some cases, when courses are sold-out or new courses are offered, we add extra
classes and do additional mailings. Just
for information.
Do I need a computer for the classes? It depends on the course. For Intermediate / Advanced ABL Auditing you'll need
a computer for day one for the DATA analysis portion. After that, only a
calculator. The Intermediate Course uses instructor led
discussions and case studies. The DATA Course
(now day one of Intermediate ABL) and the Cash Flow
courses require a Pentium class PC and Excel.
Can the courses be taught at our location? Absolutely, we routinely teach at major lending institutions.
How small are the classes? We never want to teach classes as large as some of the other national providers.
We stress quality and not quantity. To promote individual attention and class
participation, the classes are limited to 15 students, less than half of what other
courses allow. One seminar promoter is using the words "small classes," in
their literature, they mean 35-40 people (please ask them).
Do the courses qualify for CPE?
Some states require pre-registration. We qualify in all but six states, please call
for eligibility
What makes Intermediate ABL different than a beginners course? There are dozens of key differences, but here are a few: Our course is
intermediate to advanced. Beginners are learning the business and learning the
language of the business. Can those basic skills and tests find fraud and problems?
Sometimes yes and sometimes no, but I wouldn't trust a new deal for $25,000M to a
new hire, unless I could afford the hit. Intermediate ABL helps students to gain the
skills to assess when more testing is needed and how to document findings to prove or
disprove a hypothesis on the existence of a collateral or credit threat. The so
called "industry standard" ABL procedures for turnover, dilution,
reconciliations, etc. are designed to catalogue business trends, but an assessment is
usually done by the Senior Auditors, Audit Manager and Credit Officers. We know (and
you probably do too) that it takes 2-3 years to become expert enough to get AR stats done
quickly. We show people how to get the numbers faster, read the numbers, get numbers
summarized into analysis more quickly and
make sense out of the trends to diagnose situations that don't make sense. Our
students are smart and have common sense; we show them what makes sense and that makes it
easier to spot fraud and other situations that are threatening from a collateral or
business standpoint. We discourage beginners from taking Intermediate ABL because
the "industry standards" are learned in the first 6 months and beginners need to
develop the hands-on street smart accounting and technical skills to move to the
diagnostic phase. Joe has a saying: "It's like rock and roll, you can
read about it, but you've got to hear it to understand it." Intermediate and
Senior examiners often handle new business, work-outs and complex deals that require
experience and skills to master, we accelerate that process. Intermediate ABL
Auditing also includes other areas such as dealing with computers on the road,
professional skills, legal concerns, work-out situations, hidden offsets, and skills that
are needed to step through to more senior levels of the ABL profession. Finally, the
course is updated after each class for new ideas, emerging issues, better examples, etc.
and because it is taught so frequently, it is constantly improving with age.
What other course are you working on?
We rewrite our courses continuously and pages are added and dropped after each
class based on feedback from students and emerging issues. For the 2001
courses, the Intermediate course was tweaked by removing 105 pages, adding back
9 more and trimming the number of sections from 13 to 10. We are always
working on something new, but don't disclose that information until the release
of the course. We introduced the DATA course in 2000 to deal with
downloads and then made that material part of Intermediate ABL in 2005. For 2009, we updated the slides and
got the entire course down to three days, while lowering the price per student.
We hear great things about Intermediate ABL Auditing, who's the instructor? Joe Caplan started in ABL in 1985 and has been in the
ABL business as an auditor, back-office administrator, software developer and seminar
instructor (all ABL related!) ever since. He has been noted as one of the leading
authorities on ABL auditing techniques and computer based reports, often writing and
speaking on the two subjects. Up until 2003, her routinely handled 25-30 field examinations per
year, helping him to stay current and he has personally completed over 550 ABL
Examinations. He still gets into the field a few times per year. As a CPA and the Managing Director of FinSoft, LLC, his deep knowledge
of ABL auditing and hands-on computer programming skills have helped to develop the most
complete ABL auditing package ever created. Don't take our word for it, hear
what students are saying about the class.
Where do we stay if we're from out of town and is the Hotel expensive like some
other courses? Companies pay for the course, travel and the student's time, so we don't consider
our courses to be vacations. Most of our audit students stay in the same or lower
quality hotel chains when they audit. We use name brand hotels such as Radisson,
Doubletree, Sheraton, Holiday Inn, Marriott, Crown Plaza Suites, Wyndham, etc. We
try to teach on the outskirts of major cities to make the rooms more affordable and the
location more accessible to commuters.
Do you update ABL Help?
Yes we do. ABL-Help was updated 5 times in 1999 (its first year) and 5
times in 2000, 4 times in 2001, 3 times in 2002, 2 times in 2003, 2 timed in
2004 and 2 times in 2005, 3 times in 2006, 2 times in 2007, once in 2008 an once
in 2009. The file was renamed to ABL-Help
2000 on 12/15/99 and the name is updated for the current year, with a decimal
signifying the release number for that year. We have gotten lots of ideas and implement them as time
permits. Once we have your e-mail and general information for our mailing list, we
send out updates with our on-line newsletters.
Does Joe Caplan own and run FinSoft (AssetWriter and AssetReader)? Yes. However, for integrity, FinSoft's products are never
used, marketed or sold in the courses (except of course for the seminars on Using
AssetWriter or Using AssetReader, taught to new users of those
products). ABL course examples
may include spreadsheet examples, generally with Excel and simple workpaper examples
that illustrate complex concepts.
We hear that the Intermediate ABL Auditing class is "Hi-Tech," what's
that mean? We consider our courses to be state-of the art and the DATA course was
indeed ground breaking for the industry. The courses have been using
multimedia training concepts (projectors, animation, sound, etc.) since Windows 3.1 and
386 computers. We're on our 8th generation of training software, third projector,
fourth travel bag and fifth computer. Unfortunately for us, this has meant large
amounts of time and capital reinvestment for course development, course programming, instructor
training, and troubleshooting experience.
Fortunately we're connected with a bleeding edge technology company to bring it all
together and make it look easy on the road. Hi-tech, no (probably words from a
no-tech competitor).
Joe, What's the worst thing that ever happened to you on the road while
training? Two memorable moments: First Story: I had a class of 13 in Dallas and
I got delayed in Houston due to mechanical problems. I missed the flight to Dallas
and got to the Hotel at @1:00am. Got up at 4:00am to catch a 6:10am flight to
Dallas, leaving me with only 50 minutes to make the 8:00 am start. My cab driver was
familiar with the back streets and we "zoomed" to the Doubletree at Lincoln
Center. I left a message at the hotel. When I arrived, I was the second person
there because everyone else was stuck in traffic! Second story: Airport
security in Boston copped my projector cable at security by accident and I was teaching a
class the next day at Disneyworld in Florida. We simply followed the lesson plan
until FedEx delivered a new cable the next day by 10:00am ($130.00 with freight).
One more story: I was in Los Angeles to present a lunch speech on "Audit Technology" to the California Finance Association and my
hard drive went down. I was there a day early and had time to get a new hard drive:
I installed all 8 programs needed for the presentation (a real Boy Scout to have all
backups handy!) and stayed up until 4:00 am getting it to go. I arrived at the
luncheon site by 8:00 am and continued to get it going until 11:30 am. It went
flawlessly. "Don't worry" and "Stay Calm" are the motto's of the
trainer. We know of a lending training provider that had a sprinkler system go off
at a [high priced] hotel, but we know they responded professionally and continued with the
course.
Joe, what would or does your business screen saver say? "Get the Spectators off the Field!" This has always been my
favorite business saying.
"You can stand me up at the gates of hell -- but I won't back down" (Tom
Petty) This the attitude.
Since 9/11 "Enjoy what you have while you're striving for what you
want"
How often are the classes updated? See the How Current Page link
Why Asset Based Lending? "Because it's the Greatest Profession on Earth."
