IRobot Shares Plunge on China Tariff Worries

Robotic vacuum maker iRobot’s quarterly revenue and earnings easily beat estimates but its shares fell more than 9% in extended trading Tuesday amid concerns over supply chain disruption due to U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports.In a rollercoaster after-hours session, the stock initially jumped 10.6...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 24, 2018

Lessons on Auditing from Carillion’s Collapse

If past is prologue, U.K. accounting regulators may want to take a hard look at the great American business tragedy known as Enron.In 2002, the scandalous collapse of the energy company caused the demise of one of the Big Five audit firms, Arthur Andersen, resulting in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s st...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 23, 2018

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

Auditing: Time for an Adjustment?

Failure to detect corruption, negligence in approving an accounting treatment, lack of professional skepticism, failure to unmask fraud, and inappropriate familiarity with the client. The Big Four have been accused of all of these transgressions, and more, in the past three years.Material account...

By Vincent Ryan • Oct. 23, 2018

McDonald’s Shares Jump 6% on Earnings Beat

McDonald’s shares had their best day in three years on Tuesday after the fast-food giant reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings amid a store modernization program that has depressed customer traffic.Revenue at McDonald’s fell 7% to $5.37 billion in the third quarter while net income dec...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 23, 2018

SEC Intensifies Focus on Non-GAAP Metrics

Complementing its recent report on companies’ increasing usage of non-GAAP metrics, Audit Analytics has released data on the SEC’s enforcement of its guidance for use of the unofficial financial measures.This year, through the first six months the Securities and Exchange Commission sent 1,409 com...

By David McCann • Oct. 23, 2018

U.S. Given ‘C’ Rating In Annual Pension Survey

Mercer released its tenth annual Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index on Monday, finding the Netherlands and Denmark to be the countries most prepared to meet the challenge of ageing populations.The two countries offer “world-class retirement income systems with good benefits,” Mercer stated in ...

By William Sprouse • Oct. 22, 2018

Breakout Quarter for Venmo Powers PayPal Beat

PayPal reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue amid signs that its Venmo peer-to-peer payment app has turned a corner after struggling to make money.Total payment volume for Venmo rose 78% in the third quarter to roughly $17 billion. That was a fraction of PayPal’s volume of $143 billi...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 19, 2018

SAP Sales Jump 7% on Cloud Business Surge

SAP’s cloud business fueled a 7% jump in quarterly revenue but its shares fell amid concerns over whether its shift to the cloud will crimp profitability.For the third quarter, the enterprise software giant on Thursday said new cloud bookings increased 36% year-over-year while cloud subscriptions...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 18, 2018

Netflix Posts Big Rebound in Subscriber Growth

Netflix shares jumped nearly 11% in extended trading Tuesday after it reported subscriber growth that crushed estimates, with particularly large gains overseas.In the third quarter, the streaming giant added 6.96 million new subscribers, topping the 5.3 million new subscribers it added this time ...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 17, 2018

Email Scammers Still Tripping Up Finance Personnel

In an investigative report designed to bring attention to the need to beef up internal accounting controls to protect against fraud, the Securities and Exchange Commission found that the finance departments of publicly held companies continue to fall prey to relatively unsophisticated cyber-scams...

By Vincent Ryan • Oct. 16, 2018

J&J Gets Boost From Strong Cancer Drug Sales

Johnson & Johnson reported better-than-expected quarterly results on Tuesday as a big jump in sales of its cancer drugs helped offset a weaker performance from its medical-device and consumer businesses.For the third quarter, J&J’s net income rose to $3.93 billion, or $1.44 per share, fro...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 16, 2018

Report Details Ubiquity of Non-GAAP Metrics

It’s no secret that companies have for some time been steadily using more non-GAAP metrics to quantify their financial performance, leading to accusations of earnings management.A new report portrays just how stark the shift toward the unofficial financial measures has been.Audit Analytics looked...

By David McCann • Oct. 15, 2018

Wells Fargo Profit Gets Boost From Cost Cutting

Wells Fargo’s profit jumped 32% in the third quarter, suggesting its cost-cutting efforts are making some headway as it seeks to rebound from its fake accounts scandal.Wells Fargo took encouragement from the bank’s latest quarterly results, which also showed a beat on revenue. “These results refl...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 12, 2018

Flaunting Strong Earnings Damages Stock Price

A company has had a good year, and wants to make sure investors know it. So the headline of its press release announces, “Earnings Per Share up 16.5%” — which, the release reports, is a record.What could be more natural for a company to do than highlight impressive earnings?But, according to new ...

By David McCann • Oct. 9, 2018

Metric of the Month: Cycle Time to Prepare the Financial Forecast

Financial forecasting is a high priority for CFOs, and doing it more efficiently and accurately is an admirable goal. Yet so much has been written about forecast accuracy that it is has become one of the myths of modern finance. When managers chase accuracy, the mere act of forecasting often caus...

By Perry D. Wiggins • Oct. 8, 2018

Costco Warns of Material Weakness in Controls

Costco reported better-than-expected quarterly results but its disclosure of a weakness in its information technology drove its shares down more than 2% in extended trading Thursday.For the fourth quarter, the warehouse shopping leader earned $2.34 per share, an increase of 13.4% on the year-ago ...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 5, 2018

U.S. Factory Orders Continue Growth

U.S. factory orders grew 2.3% in August, according to the latest data released by the Commerce Department. It was the largest monthly increase since September 2017.August’s orders were seen by analysts to have been buoyed by demand for aircraft. Orders for defense aircraft and parts rose 17% in A...

By William Sprouse • Oct. 4, 2018

Ex-Salix CFO Fined $1M for Misstating Inventory

The former CFO of Salix Pharmaceuticals has agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges that he lied to analysts and investors by significantly understating the amount of Salix drugs that wholesaler customers held in inventory.The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Adam Derbyhire failed ...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 1, 2018

KPMG Grows In-House RPA Expertise

For a large finance department where everyone is very busy and working long hours, a dictate to take on responsibility for coding bots to automate hundreds of processes may trigger a bit of resistance.Still, gaining knowledge about robotic process automation programming, maintenance, and tracking...

By David McCann • Oct. 1, 2018

Is Sustainability Fading from Board Agendas?

In 2016, BDO asked corporate directors whether they believed that disclosures regarding sustainability matters — like corporate social responsibility and the impact of climate change — were important to understanding a company’s business and provided meaningful information to investors.Three quar...

By David McCann • Oct. 1, 2018

Special Report: The New Digital Workforce

In a few years, robotic process automation may very well merge with or be rendered moot by artificial intelligence. But for now RPA, as it is known, commands the attention of enterprises and their finance teams to a degree few relatively new technologies have.Management consulting firm McKinsey s...

By David McCann • Sept. 28, 2018

The CFO Journey: From Archivist to Strategist to … Futurist

As organizations face an onslaught of fast-moving, high-impact technological advances — artificial intelligence and blockchain, to name two — it falls to finance  leaders to lay the groundwork for their companies’ transformations to fully digitized business models.A recent survey conducted by CFO...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 26, 2018

Michael Kors Agrees to Buy Versace

Michael Kors, the luxury goods maker, has reached a deal to acquire fashion house Gianni Versace for about $2.12 billion, the companies announced.The companies said the deal will allow them to expand the number of stores, grow online sales, and increase geographic diversity. They expected the com...

By William Sprouse • Sept. 25, 2018

Five Firms Fined for Filing Incomplete 10-Qs

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has sanctioned five public companies for filing quarterly reports containing financial statements that had not been reviewed by an independent external auditor.Rule 8-03 of Regulation S-X requires that an issuer must have an independent registered publi...

By Matthew Heller • Sept. 24, 2018

Are Your Portfolio Reviews Timely, Objective, and Thorough?

In October 2017, Honeywell announced not one but two divestments representing close to $7.5 billion in revenues. It planned to execute each via a tax-free spin-off and receive total dividends of $3 billion at closing.For most companies, a single carve-out would be a major undertaking. For Honeywe...

By Jeffrey R. Greene, EY, Jeff Wray, and EY • Sept. 21, 2018