Mergers under a Microscope?

Antitrust lawyers at the Department of Justice had a busy year in 2011. In late August, the department filed a lawsuit to block AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile, the third deal it has opposed this year, along with H&R Block/Tax Act and a deal involving a small poultry-processing company. In...

By Marielle Segarra • Dec. 1, 2011

The True Cost of Going Public

Most studies of the costs associated with initial public offerings focus on the dollars needed to comply with everyone’s favorite bugbear, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. According to conventional wisdom, it’s those compliance costs that are holding back companies from going public and choking the capita...

By Alix Stuart • Dec. 1, 2011

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

Putting a Price on Patents

When Marc Linden was CFO at Mirapoint, an e-mail security provider, the firm regarded a patent that it held on an e-mail storage system as a competitive advantage. But as time passed, the patent started to lose its luster as the entire industry moved to more-advanced systems. Mirapoint — and Lind...

By Marielle Segarra • Dec. 1, 2011

When Relocating Employees, Send Them Here

CFOs don’t have to worry too much about sending employees to Vienna, but they might want to budget for extra compensation for those being sent to Baghdad, according to a newly released study by Mercer. The 2011 Quality of Living survey ranks more than 200 cities according to their quality of life...

By Marielle Segarra • Dec. 1, 2011

Rebuilding, Slowly

Mortgage-backed securities. Collateralized debt obligations. NINJA mortgages. Neg-am loans. What was once arcane real-estate jargon became the language of the Great Recession, as the bursting of the housing bubble sent the economy downhill faster than a mortgage broker could say “Approved!”Over t...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Dec. 1, 2011

On the Fast Track: High Street Partners

Two years ago, High Street Partners (HSP), an international business-services firm that helps companies expand globally, was a fast-growing company with about 80 employees and 200 clients. Today it’s an even faster growing company, with double the number of customers and double the number of empl...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 29, 2011

The Top and Bottom 25: EVA Momentum Ranking of Large Companies

Large companies — those with annual revenues north of $5 billion — make up 21% of the companies in the CFO/EVA Dimensions profitability performance ranking of all nonfinancial companies in the Russell 3000 with revenues above $100 million. Interestingly, the biggest companies are underrepresented...

By Al Ehrbar • Nov. 22, 2011

M&A’s Preholiday Upswing

A spurt of merger and acquisition deals last week and a couple of large transactions earlier this week could portend a bright opening to 2012, but don’t count on it. M&A bankers are reporting that their conversations with corporate clients are “aspirational” rather than transaction-specific. ...

By Vincent Ryan • Nov. 22, 2011

Commercial Insurance Prices Going Up

A near decade of declining rates for three out of four commercial lines of insurance seems to have ended. A recent benchmarking survey shows a slight uptick for general liability, property, and workers’ compensation.   In the third quarter, the average renewal premium rose 1.2% for general liabil...

By Sarah Johnson • Nov. 17, 2011

401(k)s: Watch Out For Speed Bumps

The headlines about 401(k) plans vaunt the perils of employers offering employees too few investment choices, or too risky ones, or ones with fees that are too high. But none of those are Chris Beck’s problem. Instead, Beck, CFO of BirdDog Solutions, a private-equity-backed logistics provider, is...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 15, 2011

The Right Time and Space for a CFO

Having the instinct to take the right job and the luck to find it at the right time are easily as important to an executive’s career growth as having the right skills to do the job well, and probably more so. Take Tom Fitzpatrick, CFO of Iridium Communications. He is not a job hopper. He spent mo...

By David McCann • Nov. 8, 2011

SBICs Sizzle, Offering Alternative to Bank Loans

The U.S. government has tried many ways to get money into the hands of private companies, not all of them successful. The most recent effort, the Treasury Department’s Small Business Lending Fund, ended up disbursing to banks a slim fraction of the money it started with; the effect on bank loans ...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 4, 2011

The 20 Most-Profitable Industries

Sageworks Inc., a financial-information company, analyzed financial statements from thousands of privately held companies to find out which industries have been the most profitable in the past 12 months. On a pretax basis, the most profitable were primarily services-based businesses. And if you’r...

By Mary Ellen Biery • Oct. 28, 2011

Seven Principles for Avoiding Bankruptcy

Companies today are trying to navigate in turbulent, troubled times — and many can’t stay on course. Between 2006 and 2010, more than 208,000 companies filed for bankruptcy, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The annual rate of bankruptcies nearly tripled during this period, with no ...

By Chuck Benjamin • Oct. 27, 2011

Three Tips for Creating a Reliable Demand Forecast

The devastating events in Fukushima earlier this year demonstrated once again the powerful impact of supply-chain disruptions. Couple these types of unplanned disruptions with fluctuating customer demand, and the ability to effectively manage becomes a seemingly futile pursuit. Regardless of the ...

By Shawn Casemore • Oct. 26, 2011

Good Ways to Handle Bad News

If you have bad news, don’t keep it to yourself. That was the message from a panel of turnaround experts earlier this week at the CFO Rising West conference in San Diego. While CFOs are more often than not the Cassandras of their companies, spotting crises from afar while the rest of their collea...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 20, 2011

Hiring Temp Tax Workers: Open Your Eyes!

The midsize companies that typically hire temporary tax accountants as tax season approaches should get past a couple of common delusions, suggests an executive at a prominent finance and accounting staffing firm. First, companies chronically underestimate the availability of such workers, conten...

By David McCann • Oct. 20, 2011

Finance Training for Mere Mortals

Not every finance department has the size and scale to, say, promise staffers a new job with more responsibilities in varied geographic locations every one to two years, as the famous finance rotation programs at General Electric, Ford Motor, PepsiCo, and other so-called academy companies do. But...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 18, 2011

Shared Services: The New Old Thing

In 2010, Mike Holmes was lured out of retirement by his last employer. His charge was to run the company’s shared-services center in Malaysia until he could find someone who could take his place, train that person, and then return to his happy retirement. Why did the company reach out to its for...

By David Rosenbaum • Oct. 13, 2011

More, Better, Faster — But How?

The fact that productivity, or output per employee, has shot up since the beginning of the recession is no secret. One measure, profit per worker, increased by more than 50% between 2009 and 2011. It now stands at a 10-year (at least) high of $15,278, according to recent data from Sageworks, whic...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 12, 2011

A New Era Dawns for Tatum

It’s been a dizzying couple of years for Tatum, the large CFO-outsourcing firm. In early 2010, the company was purchased by SFN Group, a provider of temporary staffing, recruiting, and permanent job-placement services. Shortly thereafter, longtime president Rich D’Amaro left the firm.D’Amaro was ...

By David McCann • Oct. 11, 2011

M&A Recovery Stumbles

While mergers and acquisitions have outpaced 2010 in the first nine months of this year, the recently ended third quarter was a slog. A notable slide in M&A activity worldwide and in the United States occurred, says mergermarket, continuing a trend started in the second quarter.After a robust...

By Vincent Ryan • Oct. 4, 2011

Just Call Me Angel

When finance executive Ane Ohm joined Harqen, an early-stage company that makes tools to index and analyze recorded phone conversations, one of her reasons for taking the job was, in a sense, lofty: she hoped to meet angels. While the ones she was targeting are not quite as rare as the heavenly v...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 1, 2011

CFO Optimism Takes a Hit

Optimism among chief financial officers plummeted in this quarter’s Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey, from an index of 57 out of 100 last quarter to 49 in early September. As weak demand and economic uncertainty continued to worry them, finance chiefs who had grown more...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Oct. 1, 2011

New Patent Law Highlights the Need for Speed

After years of discussion and debate, patent reform is now imminent. The America Invents Act passed Congress and was signed by President Obama last month. Among a number of notable changes are a shift from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system, and a provision that allows businesses to pay ...

By Marielle Segarra • Oct. 1, 2011