169 Posts Found

Companies often shy away from the method because they fear it or believe it means “budgeting from zero.” In reality, it’s a structured process that can build a culture of cost management.

Content: Article | Authors: Carey Mignerey, Kyle Hawke, Shaun Callaghan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

A big thrust of managerial accounting is to determine the costs of production, which are broken into subcategories, such as variable, fixed, overheads, direct, or indirect costs. Managerial accounting then determines the optimal mix of resources to lower production costs. Those concepts become less and less applicable as digital companies operate largely on a fixed cost structure with very few variable costs. A future challenge … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Anup Srivastava, Vijay Govindarajan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Accounting

A new approach to uncovering the sum of all the parts of a modern firm.

Content: Article | Authors: Frederico Belo, Maria Ana Vitorino | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

With tax rules changing and interest rates set to rise globally, companies need to organize their operations around a new value equation.

Content: Article | Author: Liz Sweigart | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

Make a commitment to the function that knows your company best.

Content: Article | Authors: Andy Ruggles, Mark Schofield, Michael Shehab | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Accounting, Finance, Taxation

In a world rapidly switching to digital business models, the old ways of classifying industries and measuring business performances do not suffice anymore. So argue Barry Libert, CEO of OpenMatters, Megan Beck, the chief insights officer, and Wharton marketing professor Jerry (Yoram) Wind. In this opinion piece, they say it’s time to upgrade Standard & Poor’s Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) and GAAP (Generally Accepted … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Barry Libert, Jerry Wind, Megan Beck | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Accounting

[Mike Maples] spent many years watching people fight to move expenses to other teams, claim revenue for their own team, or even fight against the price of shared corporate services. This “allocation” dynamic is extreme “finance gymnastics” that grows exponentially complex as the business cross-dependencies grow. Ultimately the meaning of P&Ls derived from allocations becomes the undoing of most rational thought in an organization — hiring, investing, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Accounting, Finance, Management, Organizational Behavior

Going back to the history of accounting, a P&L is a tool used by executives to inform decisions around resource and capital allocation, pricing, etc. In a large organization, it is very difficult to assign revenue and costs to a specific unit within a company and even more difficult to offer true span of control or accountability to a unit leader. The creation of P&Ls … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Accounting, Finance, Management, Organizational Behavior

Decision-making is the ultimate reason why accountants and finance people exist. The way to judge the quality of an accounting or performance management system is to determine whether it is spurring quality decision-making.

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Horngren | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Accounting, Decision Making, Finance

Accounting is about understanding and interpreting and getting behind the numbers, and how you use the numbers to really understand the business. Management is all about complexity and diversity and dynamism.

Content: Quotation | Author: Christopher A. Bartlett | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Accounting, Management

Forget ROE or EBITDA—and meet COROA, or “cash operating return on assets.”

Content: Article | Author: Shawn Tully | Source: FORTUNE | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

Steve Player speaks to legendary costing professor Dr. Charles Horngren of Stanford University, whose market-leading textbook, Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis (first issued in 1962 and now in its 13th edition from Prentice Hall), has been used to train more CFOs and other finance executives than any other. In this rapidly changing world, Dr. Horngren provides sage advice on what remains timeless and important in … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Charles Horngren, Steve Player | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

Many companies that look into changing their costing systems find that they are making mistakes, both large and small, that stem from the systemic failure of their cost-accounting systems to deliver actionable economic intelligence that they can use to optimize production, planning, and sales incentive systems (to name three of the most important areas for improvement). If your company makes anything, and particularly if you … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Robert Kugel | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

If neither companies nor investors find GAAP reported earnings useful, it’s clearly time for a new approach.

Content: Article | Authors: Ajay Jagannath, Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

If a hard asset like a machine is somehow impaired, a CFO must reflect the asset’s lower value on the books. The same applies to a contract or piece of software. If customers, on the other hand, suddenly decide they hate doing business with your company, this asset is clearly impaired—but the CFO may not even know about it until too late. And even if … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Frederick F. Reichheld, Rob Markey | Source: Bain & Company | Subjects: Accounting, Customer Related, Finance

There are many things you can do to avoid failing as a manager. You can set clear expectations. You can highlight the underlying purpose of people’s work. You can correct people when they do something wrong. And you can praise people when they do something right. If you do all these things often and well, you will not fail as a manager.

However, neither will you … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., Marcus Buckingham | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subject: Accounting

It’s not that big of a stretch to say that many CEOs – too many, perhaps – would rather learn how to hit a three wood than move up the knowledge curve on accounting. But just like you can’t ask your caddy or anyone else to hit a three wood for you, you cannot – or at least should not – ask your CFO to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: John McCallum | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

Your financial statements may not make the bestseller list, but they do tell an intriguing story—at least to a banker. Unfortunately, the tale they tell may be misleading. Since finance is no place for fiction, you need to make sure your statements tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

To do that, the first thing you need to know is that … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Kate Lister | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subjects: Accounting, Small Business

After 40 years of preaching, we have convinced everybody that cash flow is more important than profit. (Everybody except Wall Street, and Wall Street will never learn that lesson. There are no slower learners than securities analysts. I can testify to that; I was one. So they and the companies they promote still run into credit crunches, which kill about four of every 10 new … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Context Magazine | Subjects: Accounting, Finance

Skittish investors will not be surprised to learn that the bottom line of a company’s income statement fails to tell the whole story. New research by Jan Barton, an associate professor of accounting at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, suggests that subtotals near the center of the income statement, such as operating income, have a much stronger association with contemporaneous stock returns than do the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Knowledge@Emory | Subjects: Accounting, Finance