Are Sales Set to Explode in 2010?

Do you trust your sales-team leaders to make accurate forecasts of future business? If so, you won’t be surprised if you find a pot of gold just around the corner.Among the many signs that the recession may be starting to lift, 83% of 129 sales executives surveyed by Watson Wyatt projected revenu...

By David McCann • Sept. 15, 2009

Hard Lessons

When Anthony Dombrowik was promoted from controller to CFO of the Red Lion Hotel Group in 2008, he knew the role would be challenging. What he didn’t know was that his first year would essentially be a trial by fire, requiring him to navigate through some of the most daunting times ever faced by ...

By Alix Stuart • Sept. 1, 2009

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

For Intel, the Future Is Now

Editor’s note: Intel CFO Stacy Smith is a featured speaker at the CFO Rising West conference September 21-23, 2009 in Las Vegas. For more information, click here.Also, this article has been updated to correct an erroneous reference to Intel’s next generation of processing technology. The company ...

By David McCann • Aug. 25, 2009

Legally Blind

CFOs are leaving no stone unturned these days when it comes to saving money. In fact, many finance chiefs are systematic about asking vendors for discounts and better terms. That process, however, begets the need to know exactly how much a company is spending on a given product or service, knowle...

By Alix Stuart • Aug. 19, 2009

Feds Oil Up Their Antibribery Machine

Driven by the mass globalization of business, the U.S. government is continuing to speed up its enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Besides the greater compliance and legal risks to companies that the increased FCPA activity represents, it also presents the likelihood that CFOs will...

By David McCann • July 29, 2009

CFOs Not on the Recovery Bandwagon Yet

As financial markets embrace the idea that economic recovery is drawing near, CFOs are not as infused with optimism — indeed, many are downright skeptical that better times are right around the corner. That sentiment was clearly evident in the first two weeks of operation of the CFO Prediction Ma...

By Vincent Ryan • July 27, 2009

Turnaround, Here We Come

For many companies, experiencing the recession involves hanging on in survival mode — dumping costs, squeezing bucks out of working capital, and praying for an economic turnaround to rescue them in 2010. But since business is all about maximizing opportunities, even companies that continue to thr...

By David McCann • July 16, 2009

Waiting for a Sign

Adrift in a sea of conflicting economic indicators, CFOs are sending mixed signals in this quarter’s Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey. While they report a marked increase in optimism compared with last quarter, they still plan to lay off employees and cut spending. Fift...

By Kate O'Sullivan • July 15, 2009

Imperfect Futures

“A great deal of uncertainty exists in the global economy, making it extremely difficult to know how our customers will respond during the remainder of 2009.”Where have we heard this line before? In this case, it was Caterpillar CEO James Owens, a former CFO and economist, explaining in April why...

By Alix Stuart • July 15, 2009

The Metric System

In 2002, when Lee Gelb advocated a rigorous productivity analysis of Starbucks employees, her belief in the value of metrics was regarded as quixotic or worse, by many people in human resources. True, F.W. Taylor had pioneered what came to be known as “scientific management” through detailed labo...

By Josh Hyatt • July 15, 2009

Betting on the Dollar

When it comes to retail pricing, could $9.98 be the new 98 cents?Gary Cino thinks so, and he’s been right before. Twenty-five years ago he founded 98 Cent Clearance Centers, a 66-unit chain where the top price was, as the name suggests, less than $1. He sold that business for about $80 million in...

By Josh Hyatt • June 12, 2009

The Machinery of Cash

Editor’s note: To download a Microsoft Excel file containing the full results of the CFO Midcap 1500 Machinery Industry Scorecard, click here.Hit by a 22 percent drop in first-quarter revenue, the machinery industry provides an example of how corporations are struggling to hold the line on cash i...

By David Katz • June 9, 2009

CFOs Hoping for the Best, Planning for the Worst

Adrift in the sea of conflicting economic indicators, CFOs are sending mixed signals this quarter. While reporting a marked increase in optimism compared with last quarter, they still plan to lay off employees and cut spending, according to the latest CFO magazine/Duke University Global Business ...

By Kate O'Sullivan • June 3, 2009

Think Small

Heading off on a business trip? Don’t forget to get a receipt — from the chambermaid, the coat-checker, and the barista. Sound impractical? Maybe, but these days no travel expense is taken for granted, and travel policies now routinely impose strict guidelines on reimbursements and the documentat...

By Josh Hyatt • June 1, 2009

Disciplinarians’ Dilemma

In a 2000 interview with CFO, business guru Gary Hamel claimed that finance executives are the enemy of innovation. And that was when times were good. Today nearly all CFOs have a mandate to conserve cash, and that intensifies the pressure to put a cap on corporate creativity. Indeed, a new McKin...

By Kate O'Sullivan • June 1, 2009

Cheaper Advice

Consultants have seized upon their Next Big Idea: You. Having seen clients pull back on discretionary spending, consulting firms now regard the finance department as a still-warm, if not hot, target for their services, thanks to the slimming down most departments have endured. IBM, for example, p...

By Alix Stuart • June 1, 2009

Small Business in Europe: Humble but Nimble

Not much about Die Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur, a royal porcelain factory, has changed since it was taken over in 1763 by Frederick the Great. Privatized by the state of Berlin in 2006, the firm still moves to a slow rhythm; it makes its tableware mainly by hand, and each of its painters is t...

By Economist Staff • May 22, 2009

Hope Returning to Exec-level CPAs, with an Asterisk

Pessimism about the economy among executive-level accountants has receded markedly since February, according to research results released today.At least, that’s one way to interpret the research, performed in late April and early May by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and t...

By David McCann • May 13, 2009

Change of Fortune

Shortly after news broke in January of accounting fraud at Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services, Manish Dugar, CFO at rival Wipro Technologies, launched his own crisis-management programme. He visited or called the finance chiefs of many of Wipro’s customers to explain “what we do different...

By Tim Burke • May 11, 2009

Top Ten Concerns of CFOs

It’s amazing how much information can be crammed onto the tiny chips in credit cards, ID badges and mobile phones these days. For the companies that make the chips, it’s also amazing, and frustrating, that prices for these products decline year after year, often steeply. For this reason, explains...

By Jason Karaian • May 11, 2009

Those Lucrative Intangibles

In hard times, finance chiefs extract value from every asset in sight. But what about the assets they can’t see, like copyrights, patents, and trade secrets?Intellectual property (IP) may be intangible, but it can fetch substantial sums. As knowledge-based firms have flourished, the value of IP i...

By Josh Hyatt • May 1, 2009

How Healthy Is Your Bank?

On March 27, Omni National Bank of Atlanta was closed by federal regulators. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency put the $956 million (in assets) bank in receivership because losses had depleted most of Omni National’s capital, and there was “no reasonable prospect that the bank [would]...

By Edward Teach • May 1, 2009

Looking for Funding? There Must Be Something Wrong With You

Mark Rostick didn’t mince words to describe the current state of venture capitalists’ willingness to take risks on young companies these days. “No one has any money to buy anything right now. Nothing,” said the director of Intel Capital during this week’s annual meeting of the National Venture Ca...

By Sarah Johnson • April 30, 2009

CFOs: Source of Pessimism?

The consumer-spending numbers will not be getting any help from CFOs anytime soon, the results of a new study by Grant Thornton suggest. In the accounting firm’s recent survey of 530 finance chiefs and senior controllers in the United States, 65% say their company will not raise employees’ salari...

By Kate O'Sullivan • April 17, 2009

Business Outlook Survey

If there is one sector that would be expected to take a beating as a result of the widespread economic malaise, it is luxury goods. And yet Fazal Chaudhri, group finance director of Exelco, an Antwerp-based diamond manufacturer, distributor and retailer, says that year-on-year sales were up in Fe...

By Jason Karaian • April 2, 2009