Strong Medicine

There is a ray of hope for CFOs who would like to upgrade the condition of corporate health-care plans from “critical” to “stable.” Boosted by a substantial injection of cash from the federal stimulus bill, electronic medical records may help relieve the pain of rising premiums by improving effic...

By Josh Hyatt • May 1, 2009

Leadership in Finance: Pegasystems’ Craig Dynes

Craig Dynes, senior vice president and CFO of enterprise-software company Pegasystems, generally feels removed from the daily news grind of corporate bankruptcy, layoffs, government bailouts, and criticism over how much executives of poorly performing firms receive in bonuses.It has nothing to do...

By Sarah Johnson • April 8, 2009

Explore the Trendline➔

The CFO Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence’s impact on the office of the CFO continues to evolve, and finance chiefs must be aware of the opportunities it will create for growth. 

By CFO.com staff

Ex-Factors

While hoping to complete a second round of equity financing last fall, Data Drive Thru faced a cash squeeze. Needing capital to exploit rising demand for a patented high-speed data- transfer technology, CFO Brad Oldham had two viable options: increase debt or sell receivables. But a frozen credit...

By S.L. Mintz • April 1, 2009

Watching Where You Misstep

Koch Industries didn’t become the nation’s second-largest privately held company without taking risks, but the $100 billion conglomerate puts a premium on risk management, and its approach includes a strong information-technology (IT) component. Software helps the company analyze a variety of exp...

By Thomas Hoffman • April 1, 2009

Gathering Clouds

It was the day Sun Microsystems was supposed to rise again. On March 18th the Silicon Valley computer-maker had planned to unveil a new online service to allow start-ups to manage with much less hardware, by buying computing capacity from a “cloud,” rather like electricity from the grid. But the ...

By Economist Staff • March 19, 2009

A Zooming Market

Looking for locations in all the wrong places? It’s a vexing problem when companies expand or consolidate, especially in unfamiliar markets. A mere few miles may separate a great spot from any number of lousy ones. The width of a city street can spell the difference between locating a facility in...

By S.L. Mintz • March 1, 2009

As the Economy Sinks, Data Breaches Rise

On January 20, as President Barack Obama was being sworn into office in Washington, D.C., a little-known company called Heartland Payment Systems put out a press release announcing that it had discovered a serious data breach. So serious, in fact, that while the full extent of the damage is not y...

By Bob Violino • March 1, 2009

No Way Out?

A stunning confession of fraud by the CEO of India’s Satyam Computer Services sent major corporate customers into damage-control mode half a world away. State Farm Insurance, for one, was able to react quickly. In two weeks it reprioritized key outsourcing projects, redistributed work among other...

By Sarah Johnson • March 1, 2009

Spreadsheets and IRR: It’s All in the Timing

In part one of our exploration of how using spreadsheets effectively can improve internal rate of return calculations, we looked at the sometimes-improper assumption that IRR cash inflows will be reinvested at a rate equal to the IRR. Today we address a second hidden IRR obstacle: cash flow timin...

By Richard Block and Jan Bell • Feb. 27, 2009

SAP Plays the Data Tagging Game

With the XBRL mandate from the Securities and Exchange Commission now official, business software vendors are starting to push their data-tagging capabilities harder than ever.A week after the SEC’s mandate that the 500 largest public companies start to file their financial results using the inte...

By Kate Plourd • Feb. 20, 2009

Spreadsheets at Work: Rating Your Own IRR

It is budgeting season again. Financial analysts are completing their analyses of the R&D or capital spending projects being proposed. And financial executives are either anxiously awaiting those analyses, or already getting started on their reviews. No doubt the analyses include investment c...

By Richard Block and Jan Bell • Feb. 20, 2009

Data Mining in the Meltdown: the Last, Best Hope?

Demand for performance data is skyrocketing within organizations. Arthur Kordon, leader in the data mining and modeling group at the Dow Chemical Co., says his team has never been so inundated with requests as it has been during the economic crisis. “Executives are coming to us as sources of last...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 12, 2009

A Quick Fix

As car dealers know only too well, the global downturn has made people think twice before splashing out on pricey new machines. Instead they are trying to make their existing sets of wheels last longer. Like car owners, managers faced with a cash crunch are also keen to get as much extra mileage ...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 12, 2009

Chipping Away at Intel’s Seemingly Good News

Intel scored something of a financial public-relations coup yesterday morning, issuing a press release boasting of its plans to spend $7 billion over the next two years on three U.S. manufacturing facilities that will make faster chips and “support approximately 7,000 high-wage, high-skill jobs.”...

By Sarah Johnson and Tim Reason • Feb. 11, 2009

XBRL Is Here

Editor’s note:This article has been updated to clarify issues surrounding the rule’s effective date.The Securities and Exchange Commission is officially moving corporate regulatory filings into the Internet Age. This morning the SEC issued the final rule mandating that the 500 largest public comp...

By Marie Leone • Feb. 10, 2009

Tech CFOs Hoard Cash and Stand Pat

More technology companies are looking for a liquidity boost now than was true a year ago — but not because they want to make capital expenditures or ramp up new product lines.Just over one-third (34 percent) of 100 tech-company CFOs said they expect to seek new capital this year, according to BDO...

By David McCann • Feb. 3, 2009

Offshoring Vendors Slice 15 Percent Off Some Deals

Outsourcing service providers are shaving as much as 10 percent to 15 percent off existing contracts in order to keep their customers during these uncertain times, according to A.T. Kearney, a consultancy.In a white paper released this week, the firm notes that vendors have become more flexible i...

By Sarah Johnson • Feb. 3, 2009

IT’s Time to Trim

Among the gruesome numbers to come out of the financial crisis are the ones hitting corporate IT, especially at major banks. In a recent round of cuts, 650 IT jobs will go at Credit Suisse, 500 at HSBC and up to 1,800 at Barclays. Many are also slashing their spending with contractors. Goldman Sa...

By John Zhu • Feb. 2, 2009

Have They Got a Deal for You

Last year, Guardian Life Insurance was approached by one of its IT vendors with a very attractive offer to replace its leased equipment a year ahead of schedule. The deal ultimately let Guardian reduce its expenses by $6 million, netting a 25 percent reduction off the run rate, while simultaneous...

By Robert Hertzberg • Feb. 1, 2009

Masters of Their Domains?

To guard its brand, Verizon Communications built a gargantuan portfolio of 10,000 domain names (such as verizoncentral.com and many other permutations). Last summer, though, company executives began “thinking like cybersquatters,” says Sarah Deutsch, associate general counsel for the company. It ...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 1, 2009

ERP Made Easy?

In the early 1980s, the designers of Kwik-Chek, Intuit’s first personal-finance package, set a bold goal: a novice PC user should be able to install the software and print a check within 15 minutes. Developers whisked people off the streets of Palo Alto, California, and timed them with a stopwatc...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 1, 2009

How to Limit Your Outsourcing Risk

U.S. and global companies had a serious wake-up call last week when Satyam Computer Services’ founder confessed to accounting abuses that included making at least one false $1-billion cash entry on his company’s books.Among the concerned corporations were customers directly affected by the scanda...

By Sarah Johnson • Jan. 15, 2009

Data-Tagging: New Push for a Global Standard

The closest thing the global accounting community has to the Rosetta Stone — the international financial reporting standards taxonomy for 2009 — was released on Monday for public comment by the International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation. It is the centerpiece of the foundation’s XBRL...

By Alix Stuart and Marie Leone • Jan. 12, 2009

Offshoring’s Uncertain Future in 2009

Outsourcing experts and providers are hoping the down economy will give them an up side: Companies needing to make drastic cuts could see a solution in replacing costly full-timers with contractors working in countries that provide lower wages.Some say it’s already happening. Consero Global Solut...

By Sarah Johnson • Jan. 8, 2009

Satyam CFO Quits as Scandal’s Scope Widens

Correction: In an earlier version of this story, the CFO of Satyam was misidentified.As the CFO of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. submitted his resignation in India’s ballooning accounting-fraud scandal, remaining senior managers of the global outsourcing giant focused on explaining the internal c...

By Don Durfee and Roy Harris • Jan. 8, 2009