Predictive Analytics: How Clear Is the ROI?

One of the hottest trends in business intelligence is predictive analytics — tools that sift through a company’s data to identify patterns, risks, and opportunities. Mueller Inc. was so sure predictive analytics could help it solve business problems that when the company bought IBM’s popular SPSS...

By David McCann • July 3, 2014

In a Shift, CFOs Trail Their Bosses in Pay Hikes

After three straight years in which CFO compensation rose more than CEO pay, finance chiefs saw that trend reversed in 2013.Median total direct compensation, including salary, annual bonus and the grant-date value of long-term incentives, was up 5.2% for chief executives last year, compared to ju...

By David McCann • July 3, 2014

Explore the Trendline➔

Top 5 stories from CFO.com

From CPA licensure changes to undergoing a digital transformation, these are the most popular stories CFOs are reading. 

By CFO.com staff

Reinventing Innovation

Even with economic activity rustling back to life, few companies are eager to make big bets. A thin layer of growth hardly forms a solid enough foundation for businesses to pour money into hunting down breakthrough discoveries or conceiving cutting-edge technologies.Not that it’s a bad time for i...

By Josh Hyatt • July 2, 2014

The Sterner, Stricter SEC

As Mary Jo White sees it, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s job is to patrol Wall Street and Main Street and catch financial fraudsters. Since becoming the agency’s chair in April 2013, White, a former federal prosecutor and defense attorney, has repeatedly stressed that the agency will ge...

By Marielle Segarra and Edward Teach • July 2, 2014

Once Again, an Autodesk CFO Joins Salesforce.com

Like the United States and the United Kingdom, Salesforce.com and Autodesk could be said to have a “special relationship” — especially when it comes to finance chiefs. Yesterday, when the San Francisco-based software firms both announced that Autodesk CFO Mark Hawkins was leaving to fill that spo...

By David Katz • July 1, 2014

Finance Principles Apply to CEO Succession

John Boudreau The CFO at a company that needs to hire a new CEO doesn’t get to make the decision, of course. But it would make sense for the board to get the finance chief’s input on succession planning for that role. Leadership decisions are not unlike investment decisions, in that they incorpor...

By John Boudreau • July 1, 2014

Nothing If Not Critical

Recently, Gaylen Hansen recalled how he started out in the auditing profession with a Big Eight accounting firm in Los Angeles, working in a two-story brick building “without a single window.” The lack of a view embodied the firm’s commitment to confidentiality, Hansen was told. Although the sett...

By David Katz • July 1, 2014

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending June 27

Ted Niedermayer Ratings agency Fitch Group has named Theodore Niedermayer to the top finance spot, succeeding the retiring Bernard de Lattre. A consultant to the firm since earlier this year, Niedermayer was formerly senior managing director of finance and chief operating officer at H/2 Capital P...

By Joan Urdang • June 27, 2014

A Formula for Self-Insurance

Most companies evaluate the purchase of insurance and other risk-transfer solutions one risk at a time. The amount of risk to be retained by the company is most often weighed against the premium or other savings for assuming each risk. It is less common to find companies that make risk transfer-r...

By Rich Michel • June 26, 2014

FASB Turning Back Clock on Global Accounting, IASB Leader Says

The Financial Accounting Standards Board is advocating an approach to international accounting that has been a “miserable failure” for 25 years, Ian Mackintosh, the vice chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, said earlier this week.Rather than continuing to pursue the goal of a...

By David Katz • June 25, 2014

How High a Deductible Should Your Company Take?

Deciding the right level of a company’s insurance deductibles depends largely on the organization’s risk appetite and its financial strength — definitely territory for the CFO.Risk appetite and financial strength must be considered when companies pit which risks should be transferred to an insura...

By Kristina Narvaez and John Bugalla • June 24, 2014

Auditors Favor Curbs on Changes to the Audit Report

Rather than divulge every worry that kept them up at night during an audit, some auditors feel that they should limit their reporting of “critical audit matters” to the anxieties they’ve reported to the audit committee, according to an analysis of a field test of the Public Company Accounting Ove...

By David Katz • June 20, 2014

Benefiting from the Disruption in Data Mining Software

While recent innovations in the software sector have significantly boosted capabilities for most software products, free open-source software solutions have made an even bigger splash. More than half of all data mining tasks are now conducted using open-source software, displacing the purchase of...

By Dale Schmidt • June 18, 2014

How to Get to Be CFO of a Fortune 100 Company

In speaking with the chief human resources officer (CHRO) of a large company concerning his thinking about the succession plan for his own role, he described an interaction with a former colleague that I thought was pretty telling. The CHRO spoke with the colleague about possibly returning to the...

By John Touey • June 18, 2014

How to Detect When IRS Overlooks Underpayments, Refunds

The Internal Revenue Service often makes errors when it comes to calculating underpayment interest, refund interest and penalties charged to businesses. As a result, many taxpayers are unknowingly walking away from overpayments that are rightfully owed to them. Regardless of a company’s size, or ...

By Todd Simmens and Cathy Stopyra • June 16, 2014

Keeping Big Data Small

In 1973, the British economist E.F. Schumacher published a popular book whose title became a rallying cry for those who thought the overuse of technology was destroying the earth’s resources: Small is Beautiful. With much of corporate America on the verge of plunging into projects involving “big ...

By Keith Button • June 13, 2014

How Big Data Brought Good Decisions to Life

For Merchant Cash and Capital of New York, an alternative financing company for small merchants, the initial goals for its first Big Data project were pretty straightforward, says its CFO, Jeffrey Beckwith: lower the company’s underwriting cost per deal and improve the underwriting decisions.The ...

By Keith Button • June 12, 2014

Who Will Be the Data Keepers?

Some years ago, around 2000, when I was running a research program on the then rapidly growing digital economy, I had a team working on estimating how much of the total of human experience was being captured and stored digitally. There were about 6 billion people in the world at the time, with ma...

By John Parkinson • June 12, 2014

Special Report: Tech Spending Spotlight

Has your company, in the course of doing something else entirely, amassed a cache of valuable data? If so, what should you do with it? Use it to understand your customer base more deeply? Meld it with broader databases to assess the risk of deadbeat buyers? Mine it to unearth the gold of a new pr...

By David Katz • June 12, 2014

New Hope for Health-Care Costs: Cash Pricing

Most employers are already implementing a variety of strategies to contain health-care costs, such as restructuring benefits, establishing coverage tiers and opting for value-based purchasing or private health-insurance exchanges. CFOs should also, however, look at market-based solutions.Peter Bo...

By Peter Boland • June 11, 2014

PCAOB Cracks Down on Fraud

Citing “decades of financial reporting frauds,” the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board yesterday issued new rules aimed at tightening auditor scrutiny of corporate related-party deals, “significant unusual transactions,” and executive compensation.“The Board has concluded that its existing...

By David Katz • June 11, 2014

Former SEC Chair Cox Declares IFRS “Bereft of Life”

In 2008, addressing an audience of accountants who were worried that the United States would adopt global accounting standards too fast, Christopher Cox said the end of U.S. GAAP and the full-scale adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards wouldn’t happen for “many, many years.”Now ...

By Vincent Ryan • June 10, 2014

Offshore Corporate Profits Pose Hidden Risks

Undistributed foreign earnings (UFE) — foreign profits earned by overseas subsidiaries that have not, at least not yet, been remitted back to the U.S. parent — are a good deal for U.S. multinationals. Too good, says Fitch Ratings in a report released Thursday, because investors are forgetting abo...

By Vincent Ryan • June 6, 2014

Did Hertz CFO Leave Because of Accounting Flubs?

After Hertz, the big car rental company, announced last year that it would move its global headquarters from New Jersey to Florida, CFO Elyse Douglas was the lone member of the senior executive team to resign. She said that for personal reasons she couldn’t move, as the company had asked CEO Mark...

By David McCann • June 6, 2014

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending June 6

James Young has been selected to lead the finance function at Broadridge Financial Solutions, effective June 23. He takes over from Dan Sheldon, who headed finance from 2007 until he left the firm in April. Young has been at Visa since 2006, most recently as senior vice president, finance.IT rese...

By Joan Urdang • June 6, 2014