Long Time Gone

The budget deal that Republicans and Democrats cobbled together in December left several pieces of business unfinished. Among them was the fate of extended unemployment-insurance (UI) benefits. First passed in 2008 and extended several times since, these provide workers with up to 47 weeks of fed...

By Economist Staff • Jan. 6, 2014

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Jan. 2

At Britain’s second-largest department-store group, Debenhams, finance director Simon Herrick quit two days after the company issued a sharp profit warning due to poor Christmas trading. Herrick, who had held the role for two years, was already under fire after he asked suppliers for a discount a...

By Joan Urdang • Jan. 3, 2014

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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

Ten Steps to End the Dash for Cash

Companies often make a dash for cash at the end of the fiscal year to produce a cash-flow statement suitable for framing. It generally works … at first. Delaying payments to suppliers, reducing stock levels and increasing collections all make working capital look better for a little while. Unfort...

By Dan Ginsberg • Dec. 30, 2013

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Dec. 27

Peter Klein has been named finance chief of media and entertainment firm William Morris Endeavor Entertainment. Klein held the top finance spot at Microsoft from November 2009 until June 2013.Network-security company Fortinet has selected Andrew Del Matto to head finance. He comes to the company ...

By Joan Urdang • Dec. 27, 2013

How to Engender a Performance Culture

New Year’s resolutions aren’t just for people trying to drop a few pounds or organize their closets. With 2014 fast approaching, corporations, too, are thinking about what they might do differently in the year ahead. Unfortunately, like the millions of Americans who will fail to stick to their Ne...

By Rutger von Post, Deniz Caglar, and Matt Mani • Dec. 27, 2013

Fair Value Nuances in Fresh-Start Accounting

Richard Law Organizations filing for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code are subject to Accounting Standards Codification (ASC), Reorganizations (ASC 852). Under this guidance, certain companies emerging from bankruptcy are required to adopt “fresh-start” accounting, which cal...

By Richard Law • Dec. 23, 2013

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Dec. 20

Dan Ammann, who leads the finance function at General Motors, has been named president. Ammann, who has been at GM since 2010, will keep his CFO responsibilities through the company’s filing of its fourth-quarter and year-2013 financial results in February.Edwards Lifesciences has appointed Scott...

By Joan Urdang • Dec. 20, 2013

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Dec. 13

CFO Susan Story will become CEO and president of American Water Works in May, upon the retirement of Jeff Sterba. The company plans to appoint a new CFO by that time.CTS Corp. has promoted Ashish Agrawal to the top finance spot. He takes over from Tom Kroll, who will retire in March. Previously, ...

By Joan Urdang • Dec. 13, 2013

Robust Auditor Reports Lure Investors: PCAOB Audit Chief

While CFOs have opposed proposals to make auditor reports more than pass-fail check-offs of company financials, adding information to the report could attract capital markets investment, the chief auditor of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board contends.Speaking at the eighth annual audi...

By David Katz • Dec. 12, 2013

Tax Cops Zero in on Multinationals’ Service Charges

Multinational enterprises increasingly face the issue of taxing authorities zeroing in on charges for services exchanged among the entities the enterprises control.  Most MNEs have for years dealt with transfer pricing on “intercompany” goods flows, and many have conducted planning involving thei...

By Kirk Hesser and Michiko Hamada Haney • Dec. 11, 2013

CFO Likes Having Few Finance Staffers Who “Do Lots”

It’s not hard to find CFOs who profess a people-first view of what creates value for their companies. But Chris Lynch seems to walk the talk a bit more than most.It’s not that Lynch is so taken with people that he wants more of them. On the contrary, staying lean is a core component of his strate...

By David McCann • Dec. 10, 2013

Buy Equipment Before Tax Breaks End, Adviser Says

With two lucrative federal tax incentives on course to expire by the end of this year, CFOs of companies both large and small might do well to buy needed equipment now, a corporate-tax expert advises.Perhaps the most important tax 2013 “extender” — what mavens call expiring temporary tax provisio...

By David Katz • Dec. 10, 2013

Mobilizing the C-Suite for Big-Data Analytics

Over the past 30 years, most companies have added new C-level roles in response to changing business environments. The chief financial officer role, which didn’t exist at a majority of companies in the mid-1980s, rose to prominence as pressures for value management and more transparent investor r...

By Paul Willmott, Brad Brown, and David Court • Dec. 10, 2013

Not Fully Inflated

Talk of bubbles is in the air again. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit an all-time high. A loss-making technology firm (Twitter) has floated its shares on a flood of investor demand. Private-equity groups are buying companies using amounts of debt not seen since 2008. A record price (more ...

By Economist Staff • Dec. 9, 2013

How to Communicate with R&D: Video

Courtesy of Flickr user hozn. CC BY-SA Have you ever heard of the “Knock Out Rose”? Unless you’re a gardening enthusiast, probably not. But if you live in the United States, you have almost certainly seen one. Star Roses and Plants, a horticultural innovator, developed the Knock Out Rose in 2000 ...

By Marielle Segarra • Dec. 9, 2013

Lean Growth Ahead

With a steady stream of near-catastrophes in the U.S. economy and a slowly recovering but still shaky global economy, there’s a lot happening that might give companies pause about their growth prospects.But at least for now, a relative sense of optimism reigns. In a recent CFO survey of 125 senio...

By Marielle Segarra • Dec. 6, 2013

Special Report: CFO Outlook 2014

What’s past is prologue, as the saying goes, and it holds true for the issues we explore in CFO Outlook 2014. The top concerns for finance chiefs in the New Year will not be unfamiliar, but there will be plenty of new developments and challenges ahead. For this special feature, we surveyed 148 se...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Dec. 6, 2013

Seven Hot Topics for Boards in 2014

Performing the duties of a CFO demands a strong awareness of the board of directors’ priorities. The law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, for which advising boards is a major practice area, on Wednesday released its list of the top topics for directors in 2014. Here are seven of them:1...

By David McCann • Dec. 6, 2013

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Dec. 6

Stephen Hare has been named to the top finance spot at Office Depot. He succeeds co-CFO Mike Newman, who has retired, and interim co-CFO Deb O’Connor, who has returned to her post as co–chief accounting officer and senior vice president, finance. Most recently, Hare headed finance at The Wendy’s ...

By Joan Urdang • Dec. 6, 2013

Private Companies Gain GAAP Exceptions

There’s good news for private companies. For more than two decades, they have have been required to comply with the same financial reporting standards as publicly held companies. However,  the private-company framework, designed to augment existing financial reporting rules and overseen by the Fi...

By Daniel F. Morrill • Dec. 5, 2013

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Nov. 29

Troubled mobile technology company Blackberry has replaced its CFO, along with its chief operating officer and chief marketing officer, under new CEO John Chen. Outgoing finance chief Brian Bidulka will stay on through the end of Blackberry’s current fiscal year an adviser to his replacement, Jam...

By David McCann • Nov. 27, 2013

The Upside of ERM

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, when risk managers on Wall Street watched helplessly as their businesses melted down, increasing attention has been paid to enterprise risk management. Many companies have since launched new ERM programs or poured more resources into existing ones, prodded...

By Edward Teach • Nov. 26, 2013

Let’s Operate 401(k) Plans as True Retirement Plans

The long-term trend away from traditional defined benefit pension plans in favor of 401(k) and other defined contribution (DC) retirement plans has succeeded in its mission: improving companies’ financial standing. It has also resulted in massive numbers of workers who are facing a retirement of ...

By Anna Rappaport and Steve Vernon • Nov. 26, 2013

Detroit Tries Another CFO

After bringing in a hard-nosed corporate finance expert to rescue it from possible financial Armageddon, only to see the new CFO implode with ill-advised alleged comments, the city of Detroit has found an alternative. This time it’s reached out to someone with municipal finance experience: John H...

By David McCann • Nov. 25, 2013

Weather Report

Name: Peter KuipersPosition: CFO of The Weather Company, which owns The Weather Channel, weather.com, and Weather UndergroundPrevious positions: VP Finance for Americas region at Yahoo; VP Finance, global products division at Yahoo; VP finance, international regions at Yahoo; Senior finance direc...

By Vincent Ryan • Nov. 21, 2013