The Revenue-Recognition Rules Paradox

CFOs at technology companies have a love-hate attitude toward revenue-recognition rules, which play a part in determining how financially healthy their companies appear. While they believe the rules for recording revenue under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles are superior to interna...

By Sarah Johnson • Feb. 5, 2008

Radical Cells

Contrary to what your kids may believe, the personal computer was not created solely to provide access to YouTube, Facebook, and iTunes. In the early days, in fact, no one was quite sure what burning need the PC might satisfy, and even IBM found it difficult to get customers excited about the com...

By John Goff • Feb. 1, 2008

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

Internet Outages Hit Outsourcing in India

Massive Internet outages caused havoc to India’s flourishing outsourcing industry on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press, which reported that the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India said the country had lost half its bandwidth.The outages, which caused a slowdown in traffic ...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 31, 2008

Where in the World Is Your Offshore Finance Team?

While India remains an offshore outsourcing juggernaut, the country’s vendors are beginning to send their own operations to other countries. Indeed, Indian vendors have already moved far beyond their own borders, setting up offices from Ohio to Egypt.That’s a wise move, because competition grows ...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Jan. 31, 2008

Top Five Trends in Offshoring

In finance and accounting — and beyond — offshoring is following in the footsteps of the increasing globalization of company functions. But as the practice of shifting internal work to third-party providers in differing locales expands into new functions and new regions, the need for ongoing mana...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Jan. 30, 2008

SEC May Propose Mandatory XBRL Use

Extensible Business Reporting Language, the computer language for financial-statement filing better known as XBRL, could soon be coming to a regulatory filing near you. The Securities and Exchange Commission may propose the mandatory use of XBRL in the spring and vote on it this fall, SEC corpora...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 23, 2008

SEC Chooses Not to Pursue ChoicePoint

The Securities and Exchange Commission has completed an investigation of ChoicePoint Inc. without recommending any enforcement action.The SEC was looking into possible identity theft and trading in ChoicePoint stock by its CEO and COO, according to ChoicePoint, which provides identification and ...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 23, 2008

The Key to Meeting-Cost Savings

Having cut travel costs drastically through the use of online travel services, in 2004 Xerox began to explore the idea of doing the same for its hundreds of annual meetings and events. In doing so the company joined a trend that had been gathering strength since the late 1990s, though there are m...

By Scott Leibs • Jan. 16, 2008

Will XBRL Spell Higher Audit Fees?

The Securities and Exchange Commission has touted XBRL as a saving-grace technology that will meet investors’ demands for more comparable financial statements across companies. But how much the implementation of data-tagging software will cost companies in the long run is still up for debate, eve...

By Sarah Johnson • Jan. 14, 2008

XBRL Skeptics Abound

Despite a relentless push by the Securities and Exchange Commission to promote its “interactive data” agenda, skepticism of XBRL won’t die. Critics have called the introduction of extensible business-reporting language, or XBRL, a boon for consultancies and regulators but a pain for practitioners...

By Alan Rappeport • Jan. 4, 2008

IFO Sightings

Which companies outperform their peers and manage risk better? When IBM surveyed more than 1,200 CFOs in 79 countries, it found that the companies that fared best on those two criteria had something in common: a high level of integration.That held true across a range of functions, from IT to proc...

By Scott Leibs • Jan. 1, 2008

A Meter for Meetings

If time is money, then wasted time is wasted money, and the wasted time of many people is a pile of money indeed.At least that’s the theory behind Meeting Miser, a free Web software tool from PayScale Inc. that gauges the cost of meetings in real-time based on the salaries of everyone attending. ...

By Vincent Ryan • Jan. 1, 2008

Gaming the System

MiG-29 is on fire: three consecutive wins for nearly 1,700 points have moved the Russian into fourth place, and he’s gaining on two Americans, duner and aubergineanode, who don’t seem to have much fight left in them. But MiG-29 remains nearly 300 points shy of the top spot, held by nhzp339, the f...

By Scott Leibs • Jan. 1, 2008

The Emergence of Convergence

Three years ago, when managers at SunTrust Banks Inc. began searching for software that might help them cope with new regulatory requirements, they kept their demands to a minimum. Although the financial-services company had just endured a tough first year of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, no one exp...

By John Goff • Jan. 1, 2008

Best of 2007: Technology

In the spotlight early this year were some continued themes from 2006, including the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s new Auditing Standard No. 5, which clarified that audits should dwell only on areas ripe for missteps in reporting.As 2007 wore on, the Securities and Exchange Commissi...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Dec. 21, 2007

What’s IT Worth?

Though global spending on IT exceeded India’s GDP last year, a new study suggests that companies aren’t getting their money’s worth. The report, commissioned by UK software company Micro Focus and carried out by Soumitra Dutta of French business school Insead, claims that companies mistakenly man...

By Laura Cameron • Dec. 10, 2007

The Gloves Are Off

A few years ago, when the treasury team at Deutsche Post World Net (DPWN), a €60.5 billion Bonn-based post and logistics firm, decided to start using their ERP system for in-house banking and payments, not many other treasurers would have wanted to follow in their footsteps. While SAP, Oracle and...

By Peter Williams and Graham Buck • Dec. 10, 2007

Rust Belt

Sadly, the horrific collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis in August did not surprise longtime critics of the nation’s transportation system. The truth is, civil engineers, trucking CEOs, even media types (see “Delayed in the USA,” September 2006) have been carping about America’s r...

By Esther Shein • Dec. 1, 2007

Flu Diligence

Flu season never used to be regarded as a corporate risk issue. In fact, “before last year, 99 percent of companies hadn’t thought about it at all,” says Michael Cryer, M.D., senior medical director and principal at Hewitt Associates.No more. Since the potential risk of a virulent avian flu began...

By Karen M. Kroll • Dec. 1, 2007

Insecure About Security

It’s every CFO’s nightmare. A fax comes incontaining a thinly veiled threat: “You have a breach inyour security system and you need to hire us to fix it.”People typically ignore the fax until a second and thenperhaps a third message comes — this time with a samplereport of credit card numbers, sa...

By Esther Shein • Nov. 15, 2007

SAP Purchase Survives Antitrust Review

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has approved SAP’s $6.8 billion purchase of Paris-based software company Business Objects, a deal that combines two major suppliers of technology used by finance operations. The FTC noted on its website that the deal was granted “early termination” of its antitr...

By Stephen Taub • Nov. 7, 2007

The Walls Come Down

What can be left to outsource? Companies have farmed out IT, HR and all manner of business processes. Now, it looks as if management of the bricks and mortar are heading off the books too.European companies have shied away from property outsourcing — which covers everything from the management of...

By Eila Rana • Nov. 5, 2007

Lights, Camera, Audits!

Even though the increasing number of accounting graduates — up 19 percent from 2000 to 2004, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants — should go a long way toward helping accounting firms meet their goal of hiring 10 to 18 percent more grads in the next two years, some...

By Kate Plourd • Nov. 2, 2007

Wireless Transfer

It’s just a box, a little red box. But soon, that little red box may change how banking is conducted.Known as “CryptoVue,” the biometric encryption system enables banks to conduct a wide range of financial transactions and data-processing chores wirelessly, reducing their dependency on T1 lines a...

By Esther Shein • Nov. 1, 2007

Losses Jump, Spending Doesn’t

A snapshot of the latest Computer Security Institute survey findings on computer crime shows that the average loss per company suffering a breach is up substantially after several years of decline. But spending, while up slightly in dollar volume, is dipping as a percent of IT budgets.

By CFO Editorial Staff • Nov. 1, 2007