Excel Tip: ‘Find and Replace’ Problems

User question: The Excel Find and Replace dialog drives me crazy. I always have to go to the Options button to specify that it should look in Values. In the figure below, the mouse pointer is showing the value that Excel says is not actually there. Why can’t Excel find a number?Mr. Excel: Psst, E...

By Bill Jelen • May 28, 2015

CFO Banks Face Time with Customers

What do you do if you’re the CFO of a company whose potential customers fundamentally don’t understand your product? You make like a salesperson and explain it to them.Q2 Holdings, which provides an integrated platform of financial services for regional and community banks and credit unions, went...

By David McCann • May 28, 2015

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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

Deutsche Bank to Pay $55M for Hiding Losses

Deutsche Bank will pay $55 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it purposely did not disclose more than $1.5 billion in losses during late 2008 and early 2009, at the height of the financial crisis.The SEC said that the Frankfurt-based company had unde...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • May 26, 2015

Charter Buys Time Warner and Bright House Networks

Charter Communications plans to buy Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, with the hopes that the blockbuster three-way deal will be approved by regulators — who earlier this month rejected Comcast’s deal for Time Warner.“With our larger reach, we will be able to accelerate the deployment ...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • May 26, 2015

How to View Variance Analysis in These Slow-Growth Times

Thomas E. Conine, Jr. — just “Tom,” to us — can stir up a good mix of the theoretical and the practical, when it comes to finance.As to the former, he’s a professor of finance at Fairfield University. As to the latter, he’s the president of a company himself, called TRI Corporation. And TRI bring...

By David McCann • May 22, 2015

Pentagon Watchdog Approved Flawed Audit

Pentagon officials knew there were problems with the work of the outside accounting firm hired to do an audit of the U.S. Marine Corps but still issued a clean audit opinion, according to Reuters.The Marine Corps provided Grant Thornton LLP with its financial statement for the year ended Sept. 30...

By Matthew Heller • May 22, 2015

CVS Buying Omnicare for Specialty Pharmacy Business

CVS is buying Omnicare to dramatically boost its prescription business for assisted-living and long-term care facilities.The Woonsocket, R.I. company Thursday said that it would pay $98 per share in cash for Cincinnati-based Omnicare, for a total enterprise value of roughly $12.7 billion, which i...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • May 21, 2015

Five Banks to Pay $5.6B Over Rate-Rigging

Five major banks have agreed to pay about $5.6 billion in fines to settle allegations that they manipulated foreign currency exchange and interest rates.As part of the settlements,  four of the banks — Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and The Royal Bank of Scotland — were expected to plead gui...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • May 20, 2015

Nasdaq Goes Digital With Bitcoin’s Ledger

Taking a leap into the digital age, the Nasdaq stock exchange has announced plans to use the publicly available real-time ledger of all bitcoin transactions with its private markets platform.The ledger, known as “blockchain,” enables speedier, cheaper and more auditable transactions. Nasdaq’s pre...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • May 20, 2015

SOX Compliance Getting More Costly

Nearly 13 years after the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the money and time spent to comply with its disclosure requirements continue to increase for companies, according to a new survey.Sixty-seven percent of the 460 audit executives and professionals polled by the global consulting firm Pro...

By Matthew Heller • May 20, 2015

St. Louis Fed Confirms Hacker Attack on Website

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has confirmed that hackers attacked its website in April, causing users to be redirected to a rogue web pages set up by the attackers.According to the Krebs on Security blog, which first reported the hack earlier this week, the cybercrooks were apparently try...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • May 20, 2015

Why Capital Expenditures Need More CFO Attention

It’s no secret that cost overruns and delays run rampant in large capital projects. Research points the finger at decision biases, which often play an important role in skewing the forecasting of costs and timing as projects are being planned. But a lack of internal discipline, in both the propos...

By Ryan Davies and Ashish Chandarana • May 19, 2015

10 Most Popular Excel Tips and Tricks

We review a list of 10 of the most popular excel tips and tricks by “Mr. Excel,” Bill Jelen.Moving Data from PDF to ExcelConverting a PDF “data dump” into Excel or Access is made easier with a third-party tool.Forecasting Seasonal Data with ExcelProduction forecasting with Excel usually entails u...

By Alexander Johnson • May 19, 2015

Gucci Owner Launches New Suit Against Alibaba

The Paris-based owner of Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and other fashion brands has renewed a legal attack on Alibaba, accusing the Chinese e-commerce giant of allowing its online platforms to be used to sell counterfeit products.Kering SA had dropped a previous trademark infringement suit to try to...

By Matthew Heller • May 18, 2015

How to Get Customers to Respond to Invoices on Time

Asking customers to pay past due or soon due invoices can be similar to asking a small child to do something. The responses fall into five general categories: “I will do it,” “I can’t do it,” “I won’t do it,” “I don’t want to do it,” “You can’t make me do it.”Todd McDaniel The first and probably ...

By Todd McDaniel • May 18, 2015

Finance Chief Tells Why Lexmark Bought Kofax

On May 11, The Wall Street Journal published an article headlined “Lexmark Considered Inversion Before Kofax Deal” that took David Reeder aback.David Reeder The story presented the facts accurately, according to Reeder, the CFO of Lexmark, a company that makes printers and develops content-manage...

By David Katz • May 18, 2015

High Performance

Enterprise performance management systems — not to be confused with enterprise resource planning systems, but closely wedded to the latter in more and more companies — are becoming more useful than ever, thanks to advances in technology and a wider choice of products. EPM software is increasingly...

By Keith Button • May 14, 2015

U.S. Capex Seen Falling By 11%

Capital spending by U.S. companies could fall this year to its lowest level since 2011, indicating corporate bosses are less confident about the economy than they have been in recent years, according to Reuters.Both a Thomson Reuters analysis of spending outlooks from 255 S&P 500 companies an...

By Matthew Heller • May 14, 2015

SEC Sued Over Failure to Enact Political Disclosure Rule

The newly formed Campaign for Accountability watchdog group is suing the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to  require corporations to disclose their political contributions.The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of plaintiff Steve Silber...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • May 14, 2015

‘Venom’ Bug Found in Virtual Machine Software

Cybersecurity experts have discovered a data center software bug that could be used by hackers to take control of cloud networks, though no exploits have so far been reported.The flaw, dubbed “Venom” by the digital security vendor CrowdStrike, takes advantage of legacy code in hardware-emulating ...

By Matthew Heller • May 14, 2015

Special Report: The Payments Revolution

Payments behavior changes slowly, at least relative to other activities driven by technology. How many businesses are still drowning in paper-related payments? Half of consumers still don’t use their mobile phone to pay bills. And few people can completely free themselves of occasionally having t...

By Vincent Ryan • May 13, 2015

Will Virtual Cards Finally Find a Big Market in AP?

If there were a unique credit-card number for every transaction paid for with a card, much of the effort and cost companies must bear to secure sensitive customer data would simply vanish.That obviously can’t be accomplished with plastic cards, but for electronic transactions, virtual card techno...

By David McCann • May 13, 2015

U.S. Firms Eyeing Benefits of Onshoring

U.S. companies are increasingly considering onshoring finance, IT, and other business services operations at home, with many mid-size U.S. cities now offering attractive alternatives to India and other offshore locations, according to a new survey.Consulting firm The Hackett Group said the dimini...

By Matthew Heller • May 13, 2015

Facebook Pushes Vendors to Hike Pay, Benefits

In a move to address economic disparities in Silicon Valley, Facebook is requiring its contractors to pay their workers at least $15 an hour and provide improved benefits.The new rules cover food-service, security, and janitorial workers, among others, at Facebook’s U.S. facilities, a spokeswoman...

By Matthew Heller • May 13, 2015

For-Profit Educator’s CFO, CEO Charged With Fraud

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday charged ITT Educational Services, its CEO, and its CFO with failing to disclose the “abysmal” performance of student-loan programs that the for-profit educator financially guaranteed.CEO Kevin Modany, 48, and CFO Daniel Fitzpatrick, 55, fraud...

By Matthew Heller • May 12, 2015