For the Dutch version, click here. As External Affairs, Celine is responsible for liaising with current and prospective partners of Asset | Accounting & Finance. In addition, she coordinates the Accounting Expedition Committee and the Orientation Committee. She is also responsible for organizing the Master Experience Days Accountancy and Finance and for the FinanceDay. In this article, Celine talks about what her position entails and how she experienced a year as External Affairs of Asset | Accounting & Finance. Who am I? My name is Celine van Es and I am 23 years old. I have lived in Tilburg all my life and did my bachelor’s degree in Business Economics here at Tilburg University. In my last year of my bachelor I decided to become active at Asset | Accounting & Finance where I was an active member of the Orientation Committee for my board year. This is one of the two committees that I now also coordinate! Why did I choose to do a board year? Before I became an active member of Asset, I never had a good idea of what a board year at a student union exactly entailed and therefore had never really considered it. When I became an active member of Asset | Accounting & Finance in my final year of my bachelor I quickly got to know a lot of nice people and found out what kind of cool events we organize besides all the informal activities we do. My master’s choice was getting closer and closer and since I wasn’t sure which master’s I wanted to do, I started to consider the idea of a board year. This would be the ultimate opportunity for me to find out which master’s degree suits me, to develop myself both personally and professionally and to boost my CV. What exactly does the position of External Affairs entail? As External Affairs, you are responsible for all business contact and therefore also deal with everything that concerns the partners of Asset | Accounting & Finance. A big part of this is acquiring partners for events and exposure opportunities. When you start your board year as External Affairs, you will visit with your predecessor over the summer to visit all the partners to discuss partnership opportunities for the coming year. This is a fun way to get to know the partners you will be working with that year and to get a good idea of their expectations and goals. At the end of your board year, you and your successor visit all the partners again in the summer and you can reflect together and look back on the cooperation. Besides the company contact you are responsible for keeping the Career Platform Tilburg up to date, where partners can post a vacancy or company profile. In addition, throughout the year you are often asked for advice or help by companies, which sometimes requires some creativity but allows you to actually mean something to companies. This also gives a lot of space for your own interpretation of this function. Point of contact for companies, what else? Besides maintaining good contact with all partners, you also keep yourself busy with other tasks. As External Affairs, you also coordinate several committees and in my case they were the Accounting Expedition Committee and Orientation Committee. The Accounting Expedition Committee organizes a two-day corporate event and the Orientation Committee deals with informal activities and actions within the association. So they are two very different committees, which also makes coordinating them very fun and varied! Besides the Accounting Expedition, you also organize the FinanceDay with a fellow board member. Because you are responsible for the organization, you learn a lot in terms of planning and communication. You also learn how much it takes to organize a great event. In the end, one of the best things about my job is to be able to look back on a successful event where both companies and students were enthusiastic. During such events you also get many opportunities to network with companies and of course you often speak to your own partners. Furthermore, once a week you will also participate in the Acquisition Meeting with all other externals from Asset’s departments. Here you will discuss all external matters of Asset such as the acquisition of new partners or things about the Career Platform Tilburg. Each external also has one or more task forces within the Acquisition Meeting. Mine is General Revenues/New Business Model, where we look at all ways to make money for Asset Tilburg. Here you make sure the brochure is updated, but you also brainstorm on new events and opportunities. What are the main points of development as External Affairs? During a board year you will learn a lot on a personal as well as a professional level. You will definitely face certain challenges where you have to learn not to let stress take over in situations and to keep an overview. You will also learn what it is like to work intensively with a group of people and how important it is to communicate well with each other. We keep each other informed about what we are doing and what we are up against. This way you can keep each other on your toes and help each other out. You also learn that it is important to indicate your limits in time when it becomes too much and to dare to ask for help. As External Affairs I also had to step out of my comfort zone at times because it is a job where you often have to defend certain positions and as External Affairs you are of course in contact with everyone. If you set certain goals for yourself at the beginning of your board year, you can achieve a lot! What I would like to give my successors In the beginning a board year can be quite hectic and you will have to find your bearings. Don’t worry about this. In the
A board year as Treasurer of Asset | Accounting & Finance – Daan van den Elzen
For the Dutch version, click here. As Treasurer, you are responsible for the financial affairs of Asset | Accounting & Finance. In addition, you coordinate the Activities, Sports, Lustrum and Investment Night committees. In this article, I describe my experiences as Treasurer of Asset | Accounting & Finance and why I chose it. Why did I choose a board year at Asset | Accounting & Finance? After spending my first semester just studying, I wanted to do something in addition to my studies. In the second semester, I decided to do a committee at Asset | IB&M because I thought it would be really fun to organize something with other students and get to know a new set of people. After a year there, I went to Asset | Accounting & Finance, because I already knew I wanted to go in one of those two directions, and because I already knew a few people there. I had a great time here for a year and a half doing committees when I finished my bachelor’s degree. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to spend a full gap year doing something completely different from studying, and after Corona I did need a fun year. During this year I can also focus on what I want to do later and have the chance to get in touch with all kinds of companies. What are you actually doing all day? Treasurer is a pretty internal job, which means that most people don’t see the immediate results of what you spend all day doing. One of the main tasks is creating and keeping track of the budget. You do this right at the beginning of the year and in doing so, you set a lot for the rest of the year. This budget is constantly updated, so you know whether there is still room for a spontaneous drink or a beer bike, for example. You are also responsible for the general bookkeeping of A&F, which you keep up to date. I do this with our accounting program Twinfield. Especially at the beginning of the year I regularly had to call my predecessor to get me through the maze. But soon I had learned this. Everything costs money, so you also know a lot about what is going on within the association. Besides the financial part, you are also the coordinator of A&F’s four most fun committees: The Activities, Sports, Investment Night and Lustrum Committee. Throughout the week, you’ll be busy putting on all kinds of events with these committees. From the Meals on Wheels, to the Mario Kart Tournament, to a fat symposium. The many informal committees are also a nice contrast to the fairly formal work you do on a daily basis as Treasurer. Together, it’s a super fun combination to fill the week! It is a unique experience that you can experience in very few places. Once a quarter the cash control takes place. Then the treasurers of the last three years come together to review my accounts and give advice for the coming period. Then I can ask all the questions I have. It’s also fun to compare what everyone ran into in their year and what is still the same now or what is going differently. In addition, A&F is part of Asset Tilburg, so we work together a lot. This year I am the vice treasurer of all of Asset, which means that I am involved a lot in the financial decisions of the association. Every week we also meet with all the treasurers of the departments to discuss matters within Asset. Of course, it is also nice to catch up with the other treasurers once a week. What are the highlights so far of your board year? It’s hard to pinpoint one moment because so many different things happen in a year like this. Some of the best are the first activity with the members, which this year was the Activities Committee’s Meals on Wheels. The Department Members Meeting was also a special moment, because that’s when you reflect on the past six months and also say goodbye to the Winter Enlightenment. But even smaller moments are still fun to think back on, such as when the Investment Night Committee brought in its first speaker, and the announcement of the new Winter Board. The year is really made up of an awful lot of little moments that together make it a wonderful year! Would you recommend a board year to anyone else? Absolutely!!! It is a unique experience that you can experience in very few places. You basically run a small company with five other people while still being a student. You have a lot of responsibility, but also a lot of freedom to set up this year and organize fun events and activities. Because of the combination of the formal and informal activities, you actually never get bored. You also get to know many new people from other associations and experience many fun things. Of course, you’ll also be at plenty of get-togethers and parties to fill your evenings. All in all, it’s a fantastic experience and definitely worth doing. I’ve never doubted my choice to apply. You get the chance to meet lots of people, experience fat things and still be able to catch plenty of parties. All while still being a student. I can only recommend this year.
A board year as Secretary at Asset | Accounting & Finance – Lars van Maris
For the Dutch version, click here. As secretary, my responsibilities include taking minutes at meetings, the association’s incoming and outgoing communications and annual planning. In addition, I have organized the Audit Activity and coordinate the StudyTour and Faces Online committees. In this article I share how I have experienced my year as secretary of Asset | Accounting & Finance so far, what challenges I still see for my final months and why I made the decision to do a board year last year! Who am I? I am Lars van Maris, 21 years old and currently a 4th year Bachelor Economics & Business Economics student. In my free time I like to play field hockey, or sit outside somewhere quiet to read. After I finished my VWO in Eindhoven, Tilburg seemed like a nice city to study, and when I found a room in Tilburg 2 weeks before TOP-week I started to build my own place. My choice for Asset | Accounting & Finance During TOP week, like many before me, I walked past the tables of Asset and then joined them. Unlike others in my TOP group, I did not then become active in a department. I did join Vidar then, and it is here that I met someone who later told me about the Accounting & Finance Department. Besides planning to study Finance myself after my bachelor’s, the activities and events I heard about also seemed very nice to me, so then I contacted the then Vice-Chairman to become active. The reason I finally decided to put myself in as secretary for a year When I started college, I already knew that I would not or did not want to run nominally with my studies. Your student time is a period in your life where you can learn so much that I knew very quickly that I wanted to make the most of it. Besides, it also looks very good on your resume if you have done some things besides your studies. So from year one I became active at Vidar and SHOT, and about two years later also at Asset | Accounting & Finance. Within Vidar and SHOT I had already come into contact with people who did or had done a year in those associations, and after talking to them about this I thought it would be a very valuable addition to my time as a student. As I learned more about what each position does within A&F and talked to then directors about serving on boards in general, it quickly became clear to me that the secretary position would suit me best. This is where my orderliness really comes into its own and where I can learn the most from everyone else. “What do you do as Secretary on the Board and why are you always so busy?” As Secretary, of course you have the classic tasks such as taking minutes of the meetings and managing incoming and outgoing communication via email, for example. In addition, as Secretary I am responsible for 2 committees, namely the StudyTour committee and the Faces Online Committee. Also, together with our Vice-chairman Julia, I am currently responsible for maintaining our website and the events and activities we have on it. Other than that, I don’t really have very big tasks anymore, but so this does mean that I have the time to take on some more of the smaller tasks that are left between us from time to time. I also continue to play field hockey actively at SHOT during my board year and I still have to work quite often on the weekends. This all together ensures that I generally have a nice full schedule. “So what kind of ‘smaller’ tasks do you have?” One of the most common smaller tasks on the board in designing promotion and social media. For this we generally use the design programs Indesign or Canva. Throughout the year, I have used these to create promotional materials for such events as the StudyTour, Faces Online, and several other events and activities. I also occasionally take over other small tasks from other board members when they don’t have time for this, such as drafting a message for our group app or an email. I also sometimes went with the externs to the meetings with our partners during the summer to support them here and take notes of the discussions. Picking up all these small tasks gave me the opportunity to learn a lot of new things and to be able to watch and learn from many different aspects of our board. “I wouldn’t have missed this for anything and I have absolutely no regrets about my choice.” Faces Online was in the beginning a task I often spent all morning with on Wednesdays but over the months I have learned to handle this much faster and more agile and learned a lot about and from this. As Secretary, I am also responsible for the StudyTour, and although this is one of the busiest and largest committees in all of A&F, I am very happy that it falls under my position. The committee is great to work with and the satisfaction that will soon be there when we have successfully put on and completed this event is something that makes all that effort more than worth it. In addition, I have had the opportunity to attend events and activities that you can hardly find anywhere else and partly through the events and activities I have been able to greatly expand my network. “What moments will you never forget from your board year?” The first moments that will stay with me forever are the night I was told who I was going to form a board with, and the first board weekend we all went to. On both occasions I got to know the rest of my board better than the entire time before that in which I already knew them. On the weekend we
Is there any perspective on the housing market?
For the Dutch version, click here. Buying a home, that sounds like Chinese to many students. It sounds like an impossible task, and more than 80% of students think the housing market is doing very poorly. Is the housing market really that bad, or are there opportunities after all? In this article, we will take a look at the housing market situation for recent graduates. Impact Duo First, student debt plays a role in monthly costs. This has an impact on the maximum mortgage you can get. When student debt is accumulated under the current loan system, mortgage lenders assume a weighting factor of 0.35%. This means that 0.35% of the study debt is assumed to be repaid monthly. In concrete terms, this means that if you borrow €1000 per month for 4 years, and thus have accumulated a total student debt of €48,000, your monthly costs for the student debt will be €168 per month. So this cannot then be spent on living expenses, and will be deducted from the maximum mortgage you can get. If you fall under the old pre-2015 system and received a basic scholarship, a weighting factor of 0.65% is used because the study debt must be repaid in 15 years instead of 40 years. Students who fall under both systems can choose which repayment period they take, and depending on that, the weighting factor is determined. However, during the initial phase of repaying student debt, mortgage lenders default to the 15-year repayment term for this group, resulting in a lower maximum mortgage. Duo does indicate for this that a statement can be submitted confirming the choice of repayment term in state, which should remedy this problem. The average student debt is around €16,500 for all students. The debt for people between the ages of 25 and 30 averages €20,300. Income Another essential factor for the maximum mortgage amount is income. The average starting salary after completing a WO master’s degree is around €2,500-€3000 gross per month. One year after completing the Master Finance, the average salary is €3,166. for the Master Accountancy, the average salary one year after graduation is €2,770. Mortgage Take the scenario that you complete the Master’s in Finance. After one year, you earn the average salary and have a permanent contract. You have a study debt of €20,300 under the new system, and you have no other outstanding debts. As a single person, you apply for a mortgage. The maximum mortgage you can get with these details is around €150,000. This is a 30-year annuity mortgage with 4.02% interest with a 20-year fixed-rate period. You will then pay €535 per month. The current housing market Is it possible to buy a starter home if you can borrow a maximum of €150,000? If you would like to buy a house in or around Tilburg, the cheapest houses start at prices around two tons. So without a personal contribution, it is already impossible to buy a house in this situation. A minimum contribution of €50,000 is needed, excluding the buyer’s costs. Housing market development Is there perhaps more perspective in the near future? The Nederlandsche Bank and ABN AMRO expect house prices to fall by 6% in 2023. Rabobank and ING expect a 3% decline on average. A further decline is also expected in 2024. The causes are mainly high mortgage interest rates and lower disposable income due to inflation. A rise in mortgage interest rates obviously also affects the affordability of owner-occupied homes. A further increase in mortgage interest rates will reduce house prices, but this is due to lower affordability from the demand side. Adding to this are ongoing problems in the construction industry, which means that new home construction continues to lag behind demand. There is no imminent improvement in this area. So in the short term, the housing market does not seem to be developing more positively, especially for first-time buyers. Conclusion So it is quite a job for the average recent graduate to secure a house to buy. With only a mortgage, this is virtually impossible. Nor is this going to get much better in the short term. That the majority of students think the housing market is doing badly is justified. Without accumulated wealth, or wealthy parents willing to step in, it looks like a mission impossible.
Working at HLB Witlox Van den Boomen – by Floortje Schroeder
For the Dutch version, click here. Started as a Junior Assistant Accountant at HLB Witlox Van den Boomen in 2016 and never left. How did I end up at HLB Witlox Van den Boomen and what is the reason I stayed after my internship? I am happy to tell you all about it in my story ‘Working At HLB Witlox Van den Boomen’. Who is Floortje Schroeder? First of all, let me introduce myself to you. My name is Floortje Schroeder and I am 25 years old. I was born in Tilburg but have been living in ‘s-Hertogenbosch for 13 years now. I remember very well that during high school I had a guest lecture by an accountant. This caught my attention so after high school I started the HBO course Business Economics/Accountancy at the Avans Hogeschool in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. I completed this course in 2018. I was born and raised in Tilburg, which is why I wanted to study in the city I come from. I then chose to take the pre-master’s degree in Accountancy at Tilburg University. After obtaining the pre-master’s I started the master’s in Accountancy and as of September 2020 I started the post-master’s in Accountancy at Tilburg University. I am now in the third and final year of the post-master Accountancy. My path to HLB Witlox Van den Boomen My path to HLB Witlox Van den Boomen started in 2016. In that year, I signed myself up for the practical route that was offered at Avans University of Applied Sciences at the time. The practice route is a route that gives students the opportunity to get acquainted with practice for 1.5 years. When participating in this practical route, students must choose an accounting firm where the choices included a Big4 firm and HLB Witlox Van den Boomen. My preference went to HLB Witlox Van den Boomen and my choice at the time was substantiated by the fact that I considered myself to fit better within a ‘smaller’ organization where the lines of communication are short, there are sufficient career opportunities, there is close (multidisciplinary) cooperation, an informal atmosphere and a client portfolio that is very diverse. The practical route brought me to HLB Witlox Van den Boomen in 2016 as a Junior Assistant Accountant where I could get acquainted with the practice for 1.5 years 4 days a week. Following the practical route at HLB Witlox Van den Boomen gave me the opportunity as a student to get an idea of how things work in practice and what activities an assistant accountant performs. Besides contributing to the expansion of my practical knowledge, this period has also contributed to my personal development and made it easier for me to make my choices regarding my follow-up studies. Practice versus theory I completed my HBO education in 2018 and after this I immediately started the pre-master and master Accountancy at Tilburg University. During this period, I returned to HLB Witlox Van den Boomen as an Audit work-study student. Because of my positive experiences during the practical work placement, I wanted to continue to expand my practical knowledge and also continue to develop myself during my studies at Tilburg University. As a work-study student you are part of the team just like all the other colleagues and you carry out activities that correspond to those of an assistant accountant. This work mainly involves performing audit assignments for various clients, where we gain insight into the client, processes and risks and, based on this, create our approach to the audit of the financial statements. The only difference between an assistant accountant and work-study student is that as a work-study student, you are likely to work fewer days. As a working student, you can decide how many days you want to work in addition to your studies and can reduce the number of days in busier periods and increase them in quieter periods. This gives you the opportunity to gain practical knowledge on a flexible basis, learn to apply the knowledge from school and go through personal development. After completing my master’s degree in Accountancy, I started working as an assistant accountant at HLB Witlox Van den Boomen. HLB Witlox Van den Boomen gave me the opportunity during both my HBO education and my master’s to gain practical experience and to develop myself personally. Because of this, my decision to start as an assistant accountant at HLB Witlox Van den Boomen was quickly made. Why did I never leave after my internship? Of course I thought about taking a look at another accounting firm. But working at HLB Witlox Van den Boomen gave me more and more feeling for the motto: ‘Never change a winning team’. I’ll explain why. Now that I have been working at HLB Witlox Van den Boomen for a number of years, I have come to realize that my considerations at the time of choosing an accounting organization for the practice route internship correspond with the practice. I was looking for a firm where the lines are short, there are sufficient opportunities for advancement, there is close (multidisciplinary) cooperation, an informal atmosphere and a client portfolio that is very diverse. My client portfolio is very diverse and ranges from Retail companies and manufacturing companies to property developers. This diversity ensures that I get to take a look behind the scenes at all types of companies. This keeps my work diverse and challenging. In addition, every year I have influence on my client portfolio because I can indicate which clients I like to work for the most! The advantage of working with our clients is that you often sit at the table with the entrepreneur himself and therefore the relevance of your work is immediately tangible. I work in Rosmalen and our audit department consists of about 30/35 colleagues. This ensures close cooperation on a daily basis, as well as sufficient room to take and receive responsibilities, and to grow and develop. Because of the close cooperation, there
Change within European cyber laws: the approaching NIS-2 regulation and accountants’ unawareness
For the Dutch version, click here. A survey by SDU, a software innovation partner for the business community, and Lupasafe, an organization of cyber experts who focus on the financial and insurance world and previously performed ethical hacks for Achmea and Rabobank, shows that 90% of accountants are unfamiliar with the approaching NIS-2 regulation and 84% even have insufficient knowledge about cybersecurity. However, with the approaching mandatory application for these new European directives as of 2024, it is worrying that only a small minority is aware of these European cyber laws. Despite the very minimal knowledge, it appears that the implementation of NIS-2 still matters. The reasoning of the decision to change the current NIS-1 regulation and what this NIS-2 regulation entails will be discussed in this article. AEDs and DSPs Before discussing the NIS-2 regulation further, and as the name suggests, currently the NIS-1 regulation has been in operation since 2016. At the time of its introduction, it was the first European legislation specifically aimed at increasing cybersecurity across Europe. Remarkably, the NIS-1 regulation was flexibly drafted to enable national lawmakers to apply their own interpretation, and therefore it served primarily as an overarching design to motivate countries to tighten their cybersecurity regulations or sometimes create their own. The NIS-1 regulation consists of the following three main categories: security requirements, notification requirements and information sharing. There is also a crucial distinction between AED (Providers of Essential Services) and DSP (Digital Service Providers), where unlike DSP, AEDs can be designated by national lawmakers. AEDs include companies that provide services critical to critical social entities and rely heavily on digital information systems such as energy providers. DSPs, on the other hand, are providers of digital services such as marketplace.com or the online search engine yahoo.com. To qualify as a DSP, however, the following two requirements are active, at least 50 employees and an annual turnover of 10 million euros. In the case of the Netherlands, the application of the NIS-1 regulation takes place through the WBNI (Wet Beveiliging Netwerk- en Informatiesystemen). Here, AEDs and DSPs must apply various adequate security measures and should an incident nevertheless occur, they are required to report it to the Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT). New Rules However, a need has arisen within the European Parliament to extend the current NIS-1 regulation. The core reasoning behind this transition is the fact that cybercrime is growing tremendously in combination with increasing digitalization which means that smaller companies will also become more vulnerable to the threat of a possible cyber-attack in the future. Based on the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2020, cybercrime will even grow to become the second biggest risk for businesses within 10 years. To meet the new challenges, the NIS-1 regulation is being modified in five different aspects. First, significantly more sectors will be covered by the NIS-2 regulation that were previously considered too small to be at risk. Thus, medium-sized and large companies will be directly included in the NIS-2 regulation, and there is an option for individual member states to qualify smaller companies with a high security risk for the NIS-2 regulation as well. In addition, a mandatory minimum of basic security components will be introduced and the two different categories (AEDs and DSPs) will be abolished. Instead, there will be a qualification list where individual companies will be ranked according to their importance, resulting in different regimes being applied for each level. In addition, individual companies will also be expected to review their supply chains and supplier relationships and identify and address any security risks. And finally, the NIS-2 regulation will differ from NIS-1 since it will allow national authorities to impose stricter supervisory measures on companies. Conclusion Thus, the current NIS-1 regulation will be significantly broadened and strengthened. Especially the extension of the NIS-2 regulation compared to the NIS-1 regulation, among others accountants, will have to deal with this considerably more. And if a company is still not eligible for the NIS-2 regulation, there is a good chance it will be covered in the near future in the form of an NIS-3 regulation. With the increasing digitalization and associated cybercrime, it seems a matter of time until almost every company will have to deal with such a regulation, and the importance to delve into cyber security will only grow in the future.
