FM Global CFO Plans for Long-Term Currency Perils

Like Frank Sinatra once did, Jeffrey Burchill might well have been singing “It Was a Very Good Year.”FM Global, the big mutual property insurer where Burchill serves as CFO, this year enjoyed the two conditions an underwriter most craves. For one, unlike last year, when Superstorm Sandy struck, n...

By David Katz • Nov. 8, 2013

Even Microsoft Needs Help Avoiding Spreadsheet Errors

David Yanofsky was riding the New York City subway when he noticed an ad for the new Surface tablet in the Spring Street station. The ad showed a budgeting spreadsheet used in planning a trip to Maui running in Excel 2013 on the Surface tablet. The budget has seven line items, including ones for ...

By Bill Jelen • Nov. 7, 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

Middle-Market Growth Forecast Plateaus

Middle-market companies expect revenue and employment growth to slow over the next year, according to a new survey by the National Center for the Middle Market (NCMM).The 1,000 C-suite executives responding to the quarterly survey predicted that on average revenue  would grow 4.4 percent over the...

By Marielle Segarra • Nov. 6, 2013

The Top Five Areas to Monitor for Employee Fraud

Employee fraud may not be the number one concern that keeps CFOs, CROs and CAEs awake at night, but it can be a significant drain on the bottom line and have a number of other negative impacts on an organization.The most recent edition of The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) “Repor...

By John Verver • Nov. 6, 2013

Global Supply Chains Open Door to Fraud

Propelled by a sharp rise in supply-chain misdeeds, the number of companies hit by fraud has risen by 9 percent in the past year, according to a new study. Seventy percent of survey respondents polled in July and August said their companies experienced fraud in the previous 12 months, compared to...

By David Katz • Nov. 5, 2013

Special Report: Cutting Workers’ Comp Costs

Why should finance chiefs give a hoot about workers’ compensation? For many years, a company’s responsibility for preventing workplace injuries and paying for the lost wages and medical care of employees hurt on the job fell into the hands of specialists. Risk managers assessed the dangers, figur...

By David Katz • Nov. 1, 2013

The Safe Way to Slash Workers’ Comp Costs

In one essential way, Safeway Inc. and Bill Zachry, the food and drug retailer’s vice president of risk management, are an ideal match. In the companies’ 1,406 stores, the potential that a fair number of its 171,000 full-time employees will slip and fall, hurt their backs or cut themselves exists...

By David Katz • Nov. 1, 2013

Should CFOs Care About Workers’ Comp?

Relative to the rest of corporate expenses, workers’ compensation costs may often look like chump change.For the typical company in a sample of 2,939 non-financial public issuers with current market caps of $50 million or more, studied by the Georgia Tech Financial Analysis Lab, workers’ comp ins...

By David Katz • Nov. 1, 2013

Eleven Contingency-Planning Tips

When people hear “contingency planning” they most often think about things like hurricanes, floods and fires. But contingency planning focused on business performance is vitally important. Every business needs a detailed strategy that outlines the steps it will take if it fails to meet — or, conv...

By Bill Fry • Oct. 30, 2013

Promote Your HR Leader, Reap Profits?

Could it be that there’s a financial advantage in having the top human-resources executive be an officer of the company? Perhaps so, suggests new research from SuccessFactors, the SAP-owned provider of HR software.SuccessFactors analyzed the 2012 annual reports of all Fortune 500 companies, which...

By David McCann • Oct. 28, 2013

CFO Supply-Chain Role Tied to Profit Boost

Finance chiefs can help boost their companies’ earnings by getting deeply involved in their companies’ supply-chain operations, a new study by Ernst & Young shows.Forty-eight percent of companies in which finance chiefs engage in such “business partnering” relationships with supply-chain exec...

By David Katz • Oct. 23, 2013

Long Distance Calling

“All politics is local,” former Speaker of the U.S. House Tip O’Neill famously said. As it turns out, so is a lot of business.The key to successful international expansion, after all, is to get the help your company needs to fill the gaps in its expertise. And —especially if you’re a small or mid...

By Jason Staeck and David W. Owens • Oct. 23, 2013

SEC Proposes Crowdfunding Rules

Nearly a year and a half after the passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, the SEC voted today to propose rules governing crowdfunding. The rules, if adopted, will allow companies to raise up to $1 million every 12 months from non-accredited investors. Firms that use crowdfunding can ...

By Marielle Segarra • Oct. 23, 2013

Predictable Uncertainty in State and Local Taxes

Unfortunately, uncertainty is everywhere in the business world.  From a financial management and reporting perspective, uncertainty is never a welcome environment. Predictability is the desired environment. Corporate management and business owners live and die (and often are compensated) by the f...

By Jr. and William M. Backstrom • Oct. 22, 2013

Ten Techniques for Agile Corporate Resource Allocation

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Many senior executives face exactly this situation in allocating critical corporate resources. Every year, they turn the handle on the same strategy-development, capital-planning, talent-managem...

By Olivier Sibony, Michael Birshan, and Marja Engel • Oct. 22, 2013

Past Performance is No Guarantee

We humans are creatures of momentum. We expect things that have gone well to continue to go well and things that have gone poorly to continue to go poorly.This is true in many ways. One of the easiest places to observe is in the stock markets. Many of us tend to look at stock that has gone up a l...

By Gregory V. Milano • Oct. 18, 2013

Only Half of Companies Hedging Currency and Other Risks

Forty-eight percent of nonfinancial companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges remained exposed to volatility in foreign exchange rates, commodity prices and interest rates in 2012 because they did not hedge them, according to a new study by Chatham Financial.The interest-rate and currency risk adv...

By Vincent Ryan • Oct. 17, 2013

U.K. Watchdog Softens Stance on Auditor Rotation

In another blow to advocates for full and mandatory audit rotation, the U.K. Competition Commission has decided against requiring listed firms to put their audit contract out for tender every five years, instead requiring them to do it every ten years.The Commission, which proposed final measures...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Oct. 17, 2013

CFOs to Congress: “This Isn’t a Game”

Reporting by David M. Katz, David McCann and Alissa PonchioneDespite an eleventh-hour deal in the U.S. Senate that would temporarily reopen shuttered government offices and let the country avert a debt default, finance chiefs say their businesses have already been hurt by Washington’s wrangling o...

By Vincent Ryan • Oct. 16, 2013

Out of Africa, Opportunity

Africa, you’re no China. Yet.In part, that’s the message that surfaces from the Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey for the second quarter of 2013. This survey marks the first time that CFOs from countries in Africa have participated as respondents in the quarterly tempera...

By David W. Owens and Josh Hyatt • Oct. 16, 2013

In the Comfort Zone

If you had bought shares of Wyndham Worldwide four years ago, you would be sitting pretty today. Since March 2009 the hospitality giant’s stock has grown more than 2,000%, and now trades around $60.What accounts for the spectacular growth? The hospitality industry has recovered from the recession...

By Edward Teach • Oct. 11, 2013

Transforming Cisco: One Finance Function At a Time

When Cisco’s low-to-mid $20 stock hit the $15 levels in 2011, the networking equipment maker put a number of key turnaround strategies in place. But none took a higher priority than transforming its finance function, said Frank Calderoni, executive vice president and CFO at Cisco Systems, speakin...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Oct. 10, 2013

How The Hartford Was Saved from the Brink

The story of financial institutions teetering at the edge of an abyss in 2009 and 2010 remains alive today, with rules under the resulting Dodd-Frank Act still being cranked out (with many more to come).Since the carnage of autumn 2008, when Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns all van...

By David McCann and Kathy Hoffelder • Oct. 9, 2013

May the Field Be with You

Simplifying the decision-making process is a fundamental goal for CFOs, given the competitive necessities of agility and speed. Unfortunately, many traditional planning, budgeting and forecasting systems see the business world as local and linear, not global and cooperative, frustrating this impe...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 9, 2013

Groupon to Seek Better Tax Jurisdictions

PHOENIX — Groupon is in the process of switching some of its intellectual property to lower tax jurisdictions around the world,  Jason Child, CFO of Groupon, said during a panel discussion yesterday at CFO’s CFO Rising West Conference.Describing the company’s difficulties with tax compliance as t...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Oct. 8, 2013