IQ Matters: Boosting Information Quality

A majority of business decision makers don’t have readyaccess to high-quality, reliable, useful information on operatingand financial performance at their companies — so say seniorfinance and IT executives in this global study of informationquality (IQ). As a result of this IQ shortcoming, decisi...

By Randy Myers • March 6, 2006

Not So Small, Still Beautiful

For GoldenGate Software, a privately held software company based in San Francisco, its first formal occasion came in 2004 upon the arrival of chief executive officer Ali Kutay.“Formal,” in this case, had nothing to do with a black-tie affair. Senior executives at the nine-year-old company thought...

By Helen Shaw • March 3, 2006

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

Heinz Fundamentals Are Strong: CEO

H.J. Heinz Co. chief executive officer William Johnson has gone on the offensive against activist investor Nelson Peltz.According to the Financial Times, Johnson acknowledged that shareholder returns have faltered at the food giant, but he asserted that prospects look much more promising. “Rest a...

By Stephen Taub • March 1, 2006

Growing Option: Financing from Within

As interest rates continued to edge higher in the fourth quarter, many private companies chose not to seek new bank financing, according to a new survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers.PwC received responses from chief executive officers at 339 privately held companies with $5 to 150 million in annual ...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 27, 2006

Hard Choices

2006 will likely be a year of painful human-capital decisions. At many companies, human-capital management is in transition. Finance executives are deciding whether or not to outsource HR functions, improve technology, or make changes to their benefit plans.We asked 249 senior finance executives ...

By Don Durfee • Feb. 23, 2006

Better Performance Reporting and Analysis

A forward-looking and analytical view — the ability to conduct what-if analyses, for example — goes to the heart of much of what finance and business unit managers need to manage their companies amid increasing competition, regulatory oversight, and higher investor and board expectations. Executi...

By 10Rule • Feb. 21, 2006

Measuring Performance in Services

Faced with stiffening competition, increasingly demanding customers, high labor costs, and, in some markets, slowing growth, service businesses around the world are trying to boost their productivity. But whereas manufacturing businesses can raise it by monitoring and reducing waste and variance ...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Feb. 15, 2006

The New Human-Capital Metrics

The human-resources department is in survival mode. As outsourcing the function becomes a more-prevalent option for companies, HR managers know that if they are going to endure, they have to deliver strategic value, and that value has to be measurable.With that in mind, many companies are forging...

By Craig Schneider • Feb. 15, 2006

WTO Denies U.S. Appeal on Tax Breaks

Look for trade tensions to rise once again between the United States and the European Union.On Monday, the World Trade Organization rejected a U.S. appeal and ruled that Washington has granted illegal tax breaks to certain exporters. As a result, the EU is expected to retaliate by imposing sancti...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 13, 2006

First-Half Forecast Eyes Stronger Growth

The first half of 2006 are shaping up a little better, according to a quarterly survey of about 50 private-sector economists conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.The economists now project first-quarter growth at an annualized rate of 4.4 percent, up significantly from their esti...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 13, 2006

First, Forget What Works

Genius, said Thomas Edison, is composed of 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Yet treatises on innovation often dwell on the 1 percent, offering ways to spark corporate creativity. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, professors at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and...

By Edward Teach • Feb. 13, 2006

VCs Look for Payday in London

It’s no secret that the end-game for venture capitalists is to enjoy a big payday when they take public the companies in which they invest.However, VCs have been having trouble completing initial public offerings, in large part because compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has sharply driven up ...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 3, 2006

Focus on Private GAAP

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Financial Accounting Standards Board expect to issue a joint proposal to create a “resource” that will focus on how generally accepted accounting principles might differ at private companies.“We are trying to come up with some mechani...

By Helen Shaw • Feb. 1, 2006

View from Europe: Of Bulls and Bears

On November 28, the DJ Euro Stoxx 50 — the most actively traded barometer of big European companies — reached its highest level since its record low in early 2003. The major national indices in London, Frankfurt, Paris, and Amsterdam were all posting similar gains of about 20 percent on the year,...

By Janet Kersnar • Feb. 1, 2006

Mixed Picture on Earnings

Although a number of high-profile companies such as General Electric, Yahoo, Alcoa, and Intel have missed Wall Street earnings estimates, the fourth quarter of 2005is shaping up as a pleasant surprise by analyst standards.Of the 241 Standard & Poor’s 500 companies that had reported earnings a...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 30, 2006

Small Companies Note Pricing Pressures

The biggest concern among small-company senior executives is the difficulty of passing on rising costs to customers, according to a new survey by Merrill Lynch.Merrill polled CEOs, CFOs, and COOs at 168 companies with market capitalizations between $88 million and $2.4 billion (as of December 200...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 26, 2006

The Joy of Text

Randy Collica is a modern-day treasure hunter. As a senior business analyst in Palo Alto–based Hewlett-Packard Co.’s customer data and knowledge services department, his job is to mine data in search of insight that can help marketers better understand various customer segments. He stumbled upon ...

By Yasmin Ghahremani • Jan. 24, 2006

It’s In Here Somewhere

Anyone who has ever prepared a tax return knows the feeling: somewhere in that vast pile of bank statements, canceled checks, credit-card receipts, W-2s, checklists, worksheets, and sundry other paperwork lies the one piece of data you need right now to complete line 37b. But where in the name of...

By John Edwards • Jan. 24, 2006

Pay-disclosure Break for Foreign Issuers

Foreign companies listed on U.S. exchanges may not be required to comply with all of the newly proposed rules regarding of executive compensation.Looming large in last week’s proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission is the requirement that U.S. companies must disclose annual compensatio...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 23, 2006

New Jobless Claims at Six-year Low

New jobless claims sank to a six-year low last week, according to the Department of Labor. The number of U.S. workers filing for first-time unemployment benefits fell to 271,000 from a revised 307,000 the prior week.This was the largest one-week drop since late September, according to Reuters. As...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 19, 2006

What’s My Metric? Electric-power CFOs

It seemed like a good idea at the time. In 2000, eager to capitalize on Enron’s recent success in electric-power trading, executives at Allegheny Energy Inc. launched their own trading business.Before that, the Greenburg, Pennsylvania-based company operated in a regulated market; it sold its elec...

By Marie Leone • Jan. 18, 2006

China-U.S. Trade Imbalance Surges

The global love affair with goods made in low-cost China has resulted in a tripling of that country’s trade surplus with the rest of the world, to a record $102 billion, according to published accounts of a Chinese government report.China reported total foreign trade exceeding $1.4 billion, accor...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 12, 2006

U.S. GAAP Won’t Fly North of the Border

Canada’s Accounting Standards Board (AcSB) has decided to scrap the standards known as Canadian GAAP, but not in favor of the U.S version.Instead, reported the Toronto Globe and Mail, during the next five years or so, Canada will align its accounting rules with international financial reporting s...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 11, 2006

Bayes Rules

Science, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was born in 1702 and died in 1761. His ideas about the prediction of future events from one or two e...

By Economist Staff • Jan. 5, 2006

Small Companies Woo Finance Staffers

Competition for financial executives may be heating up in 2006. That’s good news for job candidates, but it will pose some challenges for smaller businesses.“About 80 percent of small to midsized companies believe they will invest in hiring in 2006, not just to replace, but to add staff,” says Mi...

By Helen Shaw • Jan. 4, 2006