View from Asia

General Electric Corp. has done well in India: in 2004 it sold a majority stake in its pioneering business-process-outsourcing subsidiary for almost half a billion dollars. Yet GE’s CFO, Keith Sherin, told CFO Asia late last year that he finds India frustrating. “You get excited and nothing happe...

By Tom Leander • April 1, 2006

As the Cycle Turns

Anxiety rippled through Corporate America last February when the U.S. Department of Commerce issued its latest report card on the economy — a mere 1.6 percent GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2005. That was the slowest growth in three years. But economists generally remained optimistic, predi...

By Edward Teach • April 1, 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

Capitol Hill Tackles Complexity

What would make financial reporting simpler? A host of regulators, business groups, and investor advisory firms converged on Capitol Hill yesterday to debate that question. The hearings are the latest in what appears to be an organized push — led by the Financial Accounting Standards Board — to t...

By Tim Reason • March 30, 2006

How Green Was My Balance Sheet?

Calling them tree-huggers wouldn’t be wrong. In fact, the Wall Street Journal called the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) “the most effective environmental agitators in the business.” And the group’s mission is to save trees by halting destructive deforestation and its attendant climate-change and...

By Marie Leone • March 23, 2006

Putting People First

Performance management is one of the hottest topics among senior finance executives and the analysts and vendors who serve them. Simply put, it’s a set of processes, metrics, methodologies, and software tools that allow an organization to forecast, measure, and react to various business drivers a...

By 10Rule • March 20, 2006

The Best Advice

You wouldn’t hire the next guy who walks in your office and can talk business to be your company treasurer. If you did, you might wind up with a delivery boy instead of an executive.Likewise, you almost certainly didn’t get your job without competition, a rigorous screening process, and probing i...

By Chuck Jaffe • March 15, 2006

UPS Warns of Bribery Violations

United Parcel Service Inc. is the latest company to run afoul of a U.S. law prohibiting bribery overseas, announcing that it is investigating possible violations within its Supply Chain Solutions subsidiary.In a regulatory filing, the Atlanta-based shipping company disclosed that the possible vio...

By Stephen Taub • March 15, 2006

View from China: Stakeholder Capitalism

Karan Bhatia, the deputy U.S. trade representative, urged China in late January to become a “responsible stakeholder” in its trading relationships with the United States. Here in Shanghai, her remarks created a frenzy as people strove in vain to find a translation for the word stakeholder. That’s...

By Wu Chen • March 15, 2006

Days of Delinquency

The metric known as “days sales outstanding” (DSO), a gauge of credit-collection efficiency, is at a 10-year low for U.S. corporations—and that’s good news. To many, a low DSO means that a company is collecting its outstanding receivables quickly, and a downward trend suggests that the credit-col...

By Marie Leone • March 13, 2006

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

Small Businesses Hit by Budget Cuts

Three-quarters of the 100 federal programs designed to help small businesses have been targeted for cuts or elimination in President Bush’s fiscal 2007 budget request, according to the House Small Business Committee.Cutbacks on small-business initiatives have increased 200 percent during the past...

By Stephen Taub • 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

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

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

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, 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