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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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