Taking It Personally

When Tom Goodmanson suddenly jumps up and begins waving his iPhone around — in the middle of a restaurant, say, or from the stands at a hockey game — make sure not to bother him. The CFO of Calabrio is being productive. After all, he’s familiarizing himself with the trendy smartphone because he c...

By Josh Hyatt • July 15, 2009

Financial Software’s Winners and Losers

Just about every organization has an automated accounting system. Almost as popular are technologies that facilitate financial reporting, cash management, and tax planning. But there are lots of other types of financial management applications out there to evaluate. For a small or midsized compan...

By David McCann • July 9, 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

Speed Bumps for Early XBRL Filers, Users

A solution is said to be coming soon to a thorny technical issue that some observers had feared could temporarily render electronic financial reports tagged in eXtensible Business Reporting Language less useful than had been hoped.The issue revolves around the Financial Accounting Standards Board...

By David McCann • June 26, 2009

Internal Auditing: The 24/7 Approach

For Harrah’s Entertainment, an effort to fully automate the internal auditing process begun early last year could not have been timed more fortunately.That’s because the casino industry — already subject to stiff compliance demands from state authorities and the payment-card industry — saw its ba...

By David McCann • June 1, 2009

Oracle Strikes Again

In April, Oracle rushed in where IBM decided not to tread, offering $7.4 billion for Sun Microsystems. What will it mean for corporate IT departments? Oracle CEO Larry Ellison described a new era of “applications to disk” integration and lower costs for customers, but analysts aren’t so sure. “Or...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2009

Green Counters

As a company that sells playground equipment to publicly funded parks and schools, Playworld Systems risks any number of nasty falls. It has to worry not only about governmental agencies that try to protect children from toxic materials but also about community groups that are increasingly using ...

By Vincent Ryan • June 1, 2009

Offshoring’s Best Bets

India’s offshore service providers have had a tough year. With 40% of their business coming from the battered financial services sector, a devastating terrorist attack on their home soil, and a local company brought down by scandal, the once-booming business process outsourcing sector is facing c...

By Kate O'Sullivan • May 21, 2009

In Data-Tag Game, the Feds Are It

Legislation proposed last Friday holds the potential to quicken and broaden the entrenchment of eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, as a standard data format for financial documents.The Securities and Exchange Commission already had mandated that the 500 largest U.S. public companies...

By David McCann • May 20, 2009

Faint Pulse Detected in IT Spending Plans

Large-company spending on information technology, in a freefall since mid-2008, may be showing signs of bottoming out, Goldman Sachs said in a report released last week.Total IT expenditures — including not only capital purchases but also salaries, services, depreciation, and occupancy — will con...

By David McCann • May 15, 2009

Punishing Intel

The European Commission wielded its heaviest antitrust hammer against Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker on Wednesday May 13th. The €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) fine levied on Intel for antitrust abuses is the Commission’s biggest ever punishment and represents just under 4% of Intel’s revenue...

By Economist Staff • May 13, 2009

Reaching Deeper for Savings

You’ve outsourced, you’ve consolidated data centers, you’ve decided that the usual three-year PC refresh cycle can be stretched to four years. All well and good, but what else can you do?“Given the current economic climate, you have to be willing to think a little bit differently about things,” s...

By Thomas Hoffman • May 1, 2009

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

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