Waiting for the Chop

When Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress agreed on January 1 to let a payroll tax cut expire and tax rates rise on the rich, they rolled the dice with the economy. They in effect bet that America’s recovery was solid enough to withstand higher taxes and spending cuts, including a “seques...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 28, 2013

Yahoo Boss to Employees: Get Back to Work!

Friday will be Employee Appreciation Day.  It was established as an annual event in 1995 by Recognition Professionals International, in collaboration with Workman Publishing. To celebrate the day, RPI suggests that employers ask employees to “write down six ways you’d like to be rewarded,” while ...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 27, 2013

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

Asset-Based Loans: Not Your Father’s Pawn Shop

A Canadian businessman had a chance to buy a franchise. To raise cash, he borrowed from friends and relatives, and invested a chunk of his own savings. That covered his initial costs, but to get the business running the way he wanted it to, he needed to invest another $50,000–$100,000. That money...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 26, 2013

CFOs Can Help Themselves by Helping Sales Improve Forecasts

Many chief sales officers are notorious for making pie-in-the-sky forecasts that can lead their company to overspend. CFOs who provide sales forecasting modeling — and train the sales leader on how to use it — can save their company from financial calamities. They can also save their chief exe...

By Robert Sher • Feb. 20, 2013

PE’s Big Worry: Values Already Too High

Debt is cheap, abundant, and free of stiff covenants. But private-equity executives say that if an M&A boom develops, it won’t be financial sponsors that are gorging on companies and piling debt on targets’ balance sheets as they did in 2005 to 2007.At Columbia University Business School’s Pr...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 20, 2013

Big Data Getting Smaller, Cheaper

This is why they call Big Data big: IDC, a research firm, predicts that the Big Data market — including technology and services — will grow at a 31.7% compound annual rate through 2016, becoming a $23.7 billion market by 2016.IDC also says the digital universe — all the data stored in the world’s...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 14, 2013

Would Minimum Wage Hike Hurt Small Biz?

President Barack Obama called for Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour from the current $7.25 in Tuesday’s State of the Union address as one way to address income inequality. A 2011 study by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the “distribution of after-tax househol...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 13, 2013

Self-Insured Health Plans: Good for Small Companies?

As recently as 2009, only 13% of companies with fewer than 100 employees offered health insurance through self-insured plans, the Department of Health and Human Services says. The longstanding perception was that the smaller the company, the smaller the risk pool across which to dilute any catast...

By Tim Doherty • Feb. 12, 2013

CFOs: An IPO’s “Adult Supervision”

Zenprise, a mobile-device management firm, was acquired for a reported $355 million last month by multinational cloud-services provider Citrix. That made Zenprise’s investors very happy and enabled its CFO, Steve Valenzuela, to chalk up another success.Valenzuela has a long history of helping com...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 11, 2013

Eyes on the Price: How to Value Mergers

If Silver Lake Partners and Michael Dell pull off their leveraged buyout of Dell Inc. at a 25% premium, they’ll be getting a bargain if their price sticks: at least as merger and acquisition premiums go. In merger deals involving U.S. nonfinancial companies in 2012, the average premium paid was n...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 8, 2013

Don’t Forget about Forex Risk

For companies that do business in other countries, the best way to mitigate the risk of fluctuating currency rates is to lock in contracts and work with foreign-exchange experts rather than try to become one.John Brittain, managing director at Accordion Partners, a corporate financial-services fi...

By Caroline McDonald • Feb. 7, 2013

Slow and Unsteady

The U.S. CFO Optimism Index dropped yet again in the latest Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey, to 51 out of 100. Down from 52 last fall and 59 at the beginning of 2012, optimism levels among senior finance executives dipped late last year in part because of mounting conc...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Feb. 7, 2013

A New Breed of Salesperson

Nothing is immune to change, not even one of the world’s oldest professions — sales. According to a 2009 survey of more than 400,000 U.S. companies by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and South Korea’s SKK University, sales may be shifting toward an inside sales model. The survey predict...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 7, 2013

The Collaboration Conundrum

A remote workforce, distributed teams, and the use of contract labor are facts of operational life for almost all small and midsize businesses today. In order to collaborate, these far-flung teams are using a variety of free and paid services (for example, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others) both ...

By Neil Jain and Singu Srinivas • Feb. 6, 2013

The Truth about Technology Costs

The next time your IT staff comes to you with a purchase order for a server or storage and says, “The price is $2.1 million,” do your best Jack Nicholson impersonation from A Few Good Men and growl, “Is that the truth? I don’t think so. You can’t handle the truth.”The truth is the cost of that ha...

By Timothy Chou • Feb. 6, 2013

How to Sex Up Your Small-Biz Website

Caitlin Jewell, co-founder and creative director of Silverscape, a digital marketing agency, is also co-owner and marketing director of craft brewer Somerville Brewing, which makes Slumbrew beer. Given that Jewell runs a business that designs websites and helps companies market themselves online,...

By David Rosenbaum • Jan. 31, 2013

Crying Out for Dollars

The Industrial Canal Lock in New Orleans connects two of America’s highest-tonnage waterways: the Mississippi River — which handles more than 6,000 ocean vessels, 150,000 barges and 500 million tons of cargo each year, as well as much of its grain, corn and soyabean production — and the Gulf Intr...

By Economist Staff • Jan. 31, 2013

How CFOs Can Prevent Board Blowups

Few missteps can erode a CEO’s credibility faster than a board meeting in which directors shoot big holes in a sketchy growth proposal. The CFO can play a powerful role in gaining board support for a CEO’s growth concept.  Too often CEOs fall in love with their ideas, and then present them to the...

By Robert Sher • Jan. 29, 2013

The Top Corporate Finance Trends of 2013

What are the trends in 2013 that will define corporate finance?Any decent editor must frequently try to answer questions like that—or at least carry around in his or her brain a constantly updating ranking of the topics readers most want to know about at any given moment. We make our decisions ab...

By David Katz • Jan. 22, 2013

Five Warning Signs That You’ve Cut a Bad Deal

As a finance executive responsible for signing off on large purchases for goods and services, you will inevitably ask, “Did we get a good deal?” And the response will usually be, “Yes.” But the follow-up question — “How do we know?” — may elicit a less confident reply.In fast-growing companies, y...

By Scott Drobes • Jan. 16, 2013

How to Create a Net-Zero Office

For homebuilders, the latest iteration of the green building movement are net-zero homes. These structures generate as much energy as they consume and have very small carbon footprints. Improvements in technology have now made net-zero homes a viable option for many homeowners.But the success of ...

By Brent Hardy • Jan. 14, 2013

While Corporates Fiddle, SEPA Compliance Looms

This could be the year of SEPA — whether treasury departments like it or not — because companies will have to accelerate efforts to make their European operations compliant with the new 32-nation single European payments area.A recent survey reveals that many companies still have a long way to go...

By Andrew Sawers • Jan. 9, 2013

Developing Markets: Growing . . . and Dangerous

This year will mark a milestone in the history of economic development, for 2013 will be when emerging-market economies become, in aggregate, bigger than those of the developed world. Just to be clear: measured in terms of purchasing-power parity (PPP), emerging economies will make up more than h...

By Andrew Sawers • Jan. 9, 2013

Gloom Pervades CFOs’ Capex, Hiring Outlook: Survey

Before the nation’s journey over the fiscal cliff was at least temporarily averted, the looming possibility that draconian tax hikes and spending cuts could severely damage the economy topped CFOs’ list of most worrisome risks in the fourth quarter and dampened their outlook, according to the res...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Jan. 8, 2013

Amazon’s Coming after Your Customers

If you were to get a glimpse of my inbox during the past month, you might think I’m close friends with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com. I get e-mails from Jeff, on behalf of Amazon, almost daily, with recommendations on what I might like to buy.Aside from aggressively pursuing the retail market, Am...

By Shawn Casemore • Jan. 7, 2013