Companies Still on Fence Over Health-Care Reform

PHOENIX — Companies are carefully evaluating health-care reform, but they’re not changing their benefits plans much yet. So said Jan Siegmund, the CFO of Automatic Data Processing (ADP), who spoke at CFO’s CFO Rising West conference yesterday.Even the minority of companies that have significant d...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Oct. 7, 2013

Moving to Managed Services Is Neither Free Nor Easy

Social. Mobile. Cloud. It’s hard to spend much time with technologists these days without hearing about these hot trends in technology for business.Because of technology’s evolution, employees want to use their own devices for both work and personal use. Their devices are usually newer and more c...

By John Parkinson • Oct. 4, 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

Accounting, Finance and IT Hiring On a Cautious Pace

Nearly 50 percent of the 185 CFOs, controllers, finance directors, human resource professionals and other hiring managers in a new survey said they have unfilled accounting, finance and IT staff positions for Q4, compared with 33 percent that indicated such heading into Q2.But they are not in a r...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Oct. 3, 2013

Intuit Reshapes Approach to Small Businesses

For about five million small-business owners, QuickBooks financial software is a lifeline – an inexpensive, easy-to-use program that satisfies their often relatively uncomplicated needs. The same is true for the millions of individual income-tax filers who use TurboTax, which generally costs much...

By David McCann • Oct. 2, 2013

Special Report: Fall Insurance Renewals

This fall, CFOs and chief risk officers appear to be encountering a diverging property-casualty insurance market as they wrangle with insurers to renew the coverage of their corporations’ risks. The property side and the casualty side appear headed in different directions.After being hit with the...

By David Katz • Oct. 1, 2013

Five Ways to Reduce Bad Debt

Myles Watling, CFO, The Phelps Group Many companies set aside hefty reserves, often as much as 10 percent of revenue, to mitigate against future bad debt. Some well-managed companies get away with about half that. We’re a Los Angeles-based integrated marketing communications company – with both a...

By Myles Watling • Oct. 1, 2013

Bank Internal Auditors Warned About Lending Risks

Internal auditors have to be more diligent in their oversight of banks because financial institutions continue to face geopolitical and macroeconomic headwinds, said Richard Reynolds, national banking and capital markets internal audit leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, on a webcast Tuesday.“For 2...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Sept. 27, 2013

Tax Execs Still Clinging to their Spreadsheets

Despite a push to automate tax departments, corporate tax heads say they’re not backing away from spreadsheets anytime soon. More than 60 percent of 100 tax executives responding to a new global survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI)...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Sept. 24, 2013

How Successful is Your CEO?

There are many ways to view a CEO’s success, but one fairly simple indicator is the longevity of his or her reign as the chief executive.  Admittedly some ineffective leaders keep their job for a while but those CEOs that last two or three or even four decades are generally very successful.  For ...

By Gregory V. Milano • Sept. 19, 2013

Statement on SEC Enforcement Action Against JPMorgan

(Editor’s note: Below is the Sept. 19 statement by George Cannellos, Co-Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement concerning JPMorgan’s settlement of fraud charges with the SEC. We run it to inform readers of the principles behind the SEC’s oversight of the rela...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 19, 2013

Innovation: a Make-or-Buy Decision

In good times and in bad, companies often struggle with whether or not to invest in innovation. In a recent Accenture survey, only 18 percent of chief executives at 519 companies across more than 12 industry sectors in France, Britain and the United States said their investments in innovation wer...

By Marielle Segarra • Sept. 18, 2013

New XBRL Version May Answer SEC’s Prayers

Corporations have expressed their disdain for tagging financial data through eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and the Securities and Exchange Commission itself has been criticized for not using it enough internally. But a new version of XBRL could make the data-formatting language mo...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Sept. 18, 2013

T&E Expenses: What Happens in Vegas Does Not Stay There

Corporate executives need to be keenly aware of the importance of travel and entertainment expenses, particularly within the financial services industry, which requires at least some level of spending in order to generate new business leads. Taking a prospective client to a golf outing or hosting...

By Chris Stewart-Smith • Sept. 17, 2013

Cyber Crime and the CFO: Protecting What Matters to You and Your Stockholders

Edward Snowden had authorized access to, and subsequently stole, some of the most valuable proprietary assets of the United States Government. The National Security Agency’s strategies and tactics for fighting the war on terrorism have no dollar value on the balance sheet, but are fundamental to ...

By Jim Burns • Sept. 17, 2013

More Auditor Disclosure Seen This Proxy Season

More Fortune 100 companies disclosed information about their audit committees and external auditors this proxy season than is required, according to a new EY Corporate Governance Center report.Out of the 78 companies in the study, 50 percent disclosed the audit committee was responsible for the a...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Sept. 16, 2013

Beyond the Honey Pot

By many accounts, computer crime has shot rapidly to the top of many companies’ risk management lists. The possibility of a company’s most valuable intellectual property falling into a competitor’s hands or the data systems of its entire operation crashing as a result of hacker’s whim is — or sho...

By David Katz • Sept. 16, 2013

Three Steps to a More Productive Earnings Call

As every earnings season comes to an end, it is striking how often executives and investors alike complain that earnings calls are a colossal waste of time. It’s no wonder. Even a determined listener would be tested by an executive reading highly scripted texts of revenue, margin, and earnings da...

By Werner Rehm • Sept. 12, 2013

CFOs Should Heed Delaware’s Unclaimed Property Maneuvers

Delaware has long been known as a business-friendly state, but its practices regarding so-called unclaimed property have soured its reputation in recent years. CFOs and other executives who work for companies incorporated in Delaware need to be aware of some challenging audit practices the state ...

By Christopher J. Hopkins • Sept. 12, 2013

Cutting Costs? Don’t Look at Head Count First

When you need to eliminate lots of cost in a hurry, you’ll probably pare the work force. Problem is, labor expense accounts for only one-eighth of the average company’s revenue, according to a new analysis.FTI Consulting, a business-advisory firm, performed the analysis on behalf of Proxima Group...

By David McCann • Sept. 12, 2013

CFOs: Don’t Bare Your Soul on Social Media

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: when you’re an executive (especially at a high-profile company), your social media profiles are public. Yes, even if you label them “personal.” Yes, even if you don’t put the company’s name on them. Yes, even if you say that your views don’t represen...

By Marielle Segarra • Sept. 11, 2013

Obamacare Spawns Business Execs’ Pessimism

Health-care reform, particularly the Affordable Care Act, may not be the only thing keeping CFOs, controllers and other business executives up at night. But that issue, along with concerns about political leadership, was cited in a recent study as the “most significant” reason that many executive...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Sept. 11, 2013

Lease Accounting Rules Raise Ire Down to the Wire

As the deadline for comments on lease-accounting rules approaches, equipment lease-financing companies and trade groups are making last-ditch efforts to fight the proposed converged accounting standards. The Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA), one of the strongest opponents of the p...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Sept. 9, 2013

What CFOs Need to Know About Sales Tax on Software Services

This summer, Massachusetts became the latest state to institute a sales tax on software services, adding to the complexity of state tax laws targeting this important high-tech sector. At least 11 states now have some sort of tax on software services or modifications which could be a giant headach...

By Scott Kaplowitch • Sept. 5, 2013

Narrow Net-Income Reporting Can Misguide Investors: Study

Comprehensive income — net income plus other sources of income not likely to happen again — often gets decent billing on corporate financial statements these days.But publicly held companies typically give the non-net-income portions of comprehensive income much less prominence than earnings. The...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Sept. 4, 2013

CEO Pay Disclosure Rule: a No-Brainer

It was in the Dodd-Frank Act, so we knew it was likely to happen, although since it’s generally thought that not all things contemplated by the law will come into being, I was holding out hope that it wouldn’t. I wanted to feel a morsel of appreciation for the government’s intelligence.But now th...

By David McCann • Sept. 4, 2013