What is an "outside accounting firm"?

Our home association bylaws mandate that an "outside accounting firm" be employed to do our accounting. Members of the Board maintain that that would not preclude a resident of the home association being contracted as our accountant so long as he or she is not an employee; being paid a salary, payroll deductions; etc.h, but not an employee of the association. Those on our newly formed ethics committee maintain that the intention of the authors of the bylaws was to preclude the use of a resident as accountant in that he or she would have a personal interest as a member of the homes association, and therefore, would be considered as an "inside accounting firm," not an "outside accounting firm." That "outside accounting firm" is meant that the firm is outside the physical residences of the Homes Association. We need to have an opinion from an ethics organization to support our position to ask for the release of this one-person resident accountant and hire the services of a firm outside the premises of our homes association. Please help.

Reviewed and Approved!

Recently we've seen quite a few emails from advertisers wondering how and why their ads were disapproved - and even more importantly - how this can be avoided in the future. Good questions!

The short story is that new and edited ads are reviewed after you submit them in order to ensure that they comply with the AdWords Editorial Guidelines.

It probably goes without saying that it's a good thing to have your ads approved the very first time you submit them; it saves you time and energy, and puts your ads in front of your potential customers without interruption.

Perhaps the best way to ensure that your ads will be approved the first time is to simply be familiar with the Editorial Guidelines before writing your ads. After all, these are the standards that your ads must meet, so it just makes sense!

You'll be happy you spent the time familiarizing yourself with these guidelines when your ads sail right through review!

And by the way, if any of your ads are disapproved, you can always use the Disapproved Ads Tool to find out when and why they were disapproved and edit them for re-review.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Update - 5/20/05

Another regular feature of this blog is, of course, keeping you up to date with all the changes being made to AdWords. Here are a couple of features we launched this week:

• My Client Center dashboard enhancements
• Account Performance Suggestions email preferences

My Client Center dashboard enhancements
We've made some updates to the My Client Center dashboard so you can now easily sort accounts by start or end date, view daily budgets for online accounts, view yesterday's account spend (in addition to this month, or the last 7, 30, or 90 days), and find out when client accounts were linked to My Client Center.

Account Performance Suggestions email preferences
You can now change your preference for receiving account performance suggestions emails in the User Preferences section of the "My Account" tab.

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

Well, the "send us an email" link seems to be working!

We've gotten a few emails asking for a clarification of our previous post, and we're happy to oblige:

Please rest assured that your account will continue to run as normal during the short downtime. Your ads will continue to appear, and statistics will be compiled as normal. It's business as usual, except that you won't be able to access your account for that short period of time.

If you're completely at a loss for things to do during that time, may we suggest a new movie? We've been hearing a lot about the latest Star Wars!

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Plan Ahead

Straight from our tech team:

On May 20, 2005, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 9 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. PDT (US) due to system maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Posted by Jon, Inside AdWords crew