India Mints a Madoff-style Scandal

In a revelation suggesting that Madoff-style and Enron-style scandals can exist in India as well, Satyam Computer Services said its chairman and founder resigned after he had admitted orchestrating a massive financial fraud at that country’s fourth-largest software-services provider.The executive...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 7, 2009

An Open Secret

Last November, Openbravo, an open-source software (OSS) company in business for less than three years, celebrated the one-millionth combined download of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and point-of-sale applications. While the number of actual deployments is far less, given that developers...

By Marshall Krantz • Jan. 1, 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

A Defining Moment

Like the global economy, the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software business has experienced plenty of recent turmoil. Unlike the economy, however, the GRC world is used to it. Almost from the beginning, uniting governance, risk, and compliance into a single entity has been a delicate ex...

By John Edwards • Jan. 1, 2009

Can You Look It Up?

“Discovery” sounds exciting, unless you’re talking about legal discovery. In that case, it becomes a bureaucratic nightmare as you pore through electronic records and paper documents in an effort to satisfy the demands of lawyers. That’s far from a rare occurrence: according to Osterman Research,...

By Marshall Krantz • Jan. 1, 2009

Best of 2008: Spreadsheets

Talk about tapping a rich vein of knowledge and opinion. CFO.com’s decision to ask spreadsheet experts to examine the major technology issues faced by finance executives in that area first created a stir in academia, and then turned many readers into contributors.We emphasized “worst practices” o...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Dec. 30, 2008

New Year’s Resolution: Tag Your Financials

Publicly traded companies will need to change the format of their financial filings to make them more searchable and comparable under a mandate voted on by the Securities and Exchange Commission today. The requirement makes good on one of chairman Christopher Cox’s pet projects, just before he is...

By Sarah Johnson • Dec. 17, 2008

Look for an SEC Data-tag Decision This Week

The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to decide on Wednesday whether to require publicly traded companies to data-tag their financial statements. The vote will come in the waning weeks of the Bush administration, and perhaps also of Christopher Cox’s leadership. The SEC chairman has indica...

By Sarah Johnson • Dec. 11, 2008

Tech Stocking Stuffers: Vendors Pull Out the Stops

Even if they’re wary of investing in a new car, drivers often feel compelled to visit the local dealership to check out advertised offers, such as the ubiquitous zero-percent financing that automakers promoted earlier in the decade. Nowadays, it’s the major technology companies promoting the zero...

By Sarah Johnson • Dec. 4, 2008

Up and Away

Larry Reader’s patience had worn thin. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that too many financial decisions rested on homegrown spreadsheets packed with too much impenetrable data and too few answers. The result was a crippling condition that Reader calls “spreadsheet overload” but which m...

By Russ Banham • Dec. 1, 2008

Month In, Month Out

In this era of the light balance sheet, with companies worried about access to capital and fearful of devoting capital budgets to the wrong things, the option of leasing IT equipment may become more popular. Structured properly, an IT-equipment lease can not only keep a liability off the balance ...

By Robert Hertzberg • Dec. 1, 2008

Off the Hook

Cell phones and hand-held devices such as BlackBerrys are among the most insidious of line items — on an individual basis they seem insignificant, but when you add them all up you may find yourself choking on your morning coffee. They “come in through the permeable membranes of the organization,”...

By Robert Hertzberg • Dec. 1, 2008

IT Spending Growth Slowing to a Crawl

Worldwide spending on information technology is expected to slow significantly next year as a result of the financial crisis.Technology research firm IDC previously had forecast that spending in 2009 would rise by 5.9 percent. But, citing the financial turmoil since September, it revised its outl...

By David McCann • Nov. 13, 2008

Workers’ Online Shopping Costs Companies

‘Tis the season (almost) to be jolly, and to shop. But companies may be significantly exposed to costly data breaches and lost productivity if they don’t take steps to control employees’ online shopping from their work computers.Young employees pose the greatest risk. Four out of 10 Americans age...

By David McCann • Nov. 13, 2008

Hype or Hope

For the past year, Richard Cameron has been on a mission. The divisional CFO of BT has been overseeing an ambitious project that could help the £20.7 billion (€26 billion) UK telecoms group slash millions of pounds a year off its energy bills and cuts its carbon emissions by 80% from 1996 levels ...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Nov. 4, 2008

Mobile Security

As mobile phones, smart phones, PDAs, laptops, BlackBerrys and other mobile gadgets spread across the business landscape, CFOs are finding themselves working with CIOs and IT managers to fight an ongoing security war. Lost and stolen devices, porous wireless links and devious employees are among ...

By John Edwards • Nov. 4, 2008

Can Companies Excel at Fair Value?

When FAS 157 took effect last November, many finance departments and business units faced a new accounting requirement but lacked any new technology with which to address it. To determine the fair value of a wide range of balance-sheet items, they turned to that old standby, the spreadsheet, to p...

By Robert Hertzberg • Nov. 1, 2008

The Consumer Revolution

Cash may still be king, but on the streets of Japan there’s a new rival for the throne. Millions of people there use their mobile phones to buy anything from vending-machine drinks to train tickets. To pay, a user passes a chip-enabled handset over a compatible reader. Credit is then deducted fro...

By Yasmin Ghahremani • Oct. 17, 2008

Pay Up

There’s never a good time to hear that one of your suppliers is raising its prices, but some times — like now, as economies tumble — are worse than others. So customers of SAP could be forgiven for not being enthusiastic about the news that the German software firm plans to “transition” them to a...

By Tim Burke • Oct. 7, 2008

Power Points

Skyrocketing energy costs mean CFOs who haven’t evaluated energy efficiency in the past two years are “letting money fly out the door,” says Jerry Jackson, energy economist and professor at Texas A&M University. He estimates the right technology can slash the average company’s energy bill by ...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 1, 2008

How’m I Doing?

If you want to see dysfunctional global-finance departments in action, look no further than the subprime-mortgage meltdown. More than a year after the crisis hit, its effects are still rippling through the banking world. As audits give rise to write-offs and restatements, it becomes painfully cle...

By Yasmin Ghahremani • Oct. 1, 2008

Cash, Credit, or Cell Phone?

Cash may still be king, but on the streets of Japan there’s anew rival for the throne. Millions of people there use their mobile phones to buy everything from vending-machine sodas to train tickets. To pay, a user passes a chip-enabled handset over a compatible reader. Credit is then deducted fro...

By Yasmin Ghahremani • Oct. 1, 2008

Can Your CIO Spell IFRS?

In the nation’s finance departments, the wince-inducing memories are still fresh of having to lean on IT for help deciphering Sarbanes-Oxley. Yet CFOs are being faced once more with turning to their technology counterparts for guidance in a major financial reporting project. The job this time — c...

By Sarah Johnson • Sept. 3, 2008

A Place in the Cloud

Over the past two years, Google has spent a whopping $5 billion to construct a network of state-of-the-art data centers. The company’s goal is to meet not only its own insatiable need for computing power, but yours as well.Google’s investment is part of a broad movement toward “cloud computing,” ...

By Vincent Ryan • Sept. 1, 2008

Spreadsheets: Free to Learn

You don’t need a spreadsheet to calculate the cost of the wide array of Web-based spreadsheet instruction and support resources that are available: Most are available gratis. Here’s a rundown of some of the best free sites out there, with their strengths and weaknesses.1) Joseph Rubin’s ExcelTip...

By John Edwards • Aug. 26, 2008

Sloppier Spreadsheets: How Bad Can They Get?

In June, CFO.com followed its popular article Spreadsheet “Worst Practices” with a collection of reader feedback we called Sloppy Spreadsheets: Readers Speak Up. That second column, with annotations by our original writers, drew almost as much interest.Today we offer another sequel based on reade...

By Roy Harris • Aug. 20, 2008