1173 Posts Found

Most companies offer some type of variable compensation to their sales team for the purpose of driving corporate revenue. However, many still use spreadsheets and disorganized processes to manage this key motivator of the sales force. There is a better way.

Content: Article | Author: Mark Smith | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Human Resources, Management, Marketing / Sales

Business performance management software can deliver great benefits, but many BPM software implementations fail as a result of the company’s inattention to some key characteristics of a successful initiative.

Content: Article | Authors: Mike Davidson, Richard Holt | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, IT / Technology / E-Business, Management, Project Management

The reason that the stock market is so important is not because it raises money; it’s because it is putting a price on your property. Somebody else can buy you. When your stock price goes down, you’re worried, not because you can’t raise more money—you weren’t doing that anyway. But suddenly, it’s as if your house is valued at half the price of the house … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Handy | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Economics, Finance, Market/Investment

While a company’s budget is one of its major forward-looking documents, it’s only one of many plans that coexist across business units. Within any department, then, there may be dozens of plans and forecasts, and they’re usually kept on desktop spreadsheets that don’t match up with one another. Our research finds that the connections between these various forward-looking activities are limited. Although companies are not … [ Read more ]

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

Every now and then a new story of corporate embarrassment, or worse, caused by spreadsheet errors hits the business headlines. Chilling though the stories may be, finance leaders tend to shrug them off, believing “it could never happen here.” But a slew of academic studies over the last 10 years showing that upwards of 86 percent of spreadsheets contain errors suggests that confidence may be … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: John Cummings | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: 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

Even companies that embrace the Balanced Scorecard often take a backward approach to monitoring performance. Many organizations choose metrics based on how much effort data collection requires.

Content: Article | Authors: Bob Paladino, Nancy Williams | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Management

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

As in architecture, a variety of tensions help organizations to take shape and determine the speed at which a company’s leadership vision is realized. Whether these are tensions over leadership, future vision and strategy, or resource allocation, each tugs upon alignments that determine how a company completes its work.

By leveraging such tensions and learning to manage the informal relationships that organizations thrive upon, finance leaders … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Saj-nicole Joni | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Management, Organizational Behavior

In the world of mergers and acquisitions, emphasis is often placed on evaluation metrics that look as if they tell the story, but they can be misleading.

Content: Article | Authors: Angus Hodgson, Phil Dunne | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Finance, Mergers & Acquisitions

To pull away from the pack one needs to break performance tradeoffs by getting better in several ways at once. The struggle for greatness, however, is far more complex and subtle. Prevailing over capable adversaries requires accepting and exploiting tradeoffs and very often seeking an advantage in only a very small number of very carefully identified ways, while frequently accepting a performance disadvantage along other … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Finance, Management, Strategy

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

Companies still struggle with earnings and sales projections, but determined action can yield big improvements in the forecasting process.

Content: Article | Author: John Cummings | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Finance

The promise of meeting or beating consensus estimates and the peril of missing them are profoundly overstated.

Content: Article | Authors: Abhishek Saxena, Rishi Raj, Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance

Too high a discount rate can make good projects seem unattractive. How high is too high?

Content: Article | Authors: Marc H. Goedhart, Ryan Davies, Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance

Companies across all industries have room to grow in optimizing “return on capex.” The fundamental questions of how much to spend, what to spend it on, and how to transform the investment into real returns must be answered in a radically different way.

Content: Article | Authors: Axel Freyberg, Hanjo Arms, Raoul Felix Maier, Ulli Dannath | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Finance, Management

In recent years, global market expansion and price volatility have made the job of cost accounting more important and more difficult. Accenture discusses the merits and drawbacks of several cost accounting alternatives and suggests ways to create an enterprise-wide function that is predictable, repeatable and scalable.

Content: Article | Authors: Doug Derrick, George Marcotte, Les Stone | Source: Accenture | Subject: Finance

Venture capital firms typically create a portfolio of investments and manage them through the insights gleaned from the results of each. These firms often know in advance that most experiments will fail. They are often able to use their growing knowledge to double down on promising avenues and leverage the “skill to kill” to move away from investments that aren’t panning out. They understand that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Adi Alon, Kenneth Hooper, Wouter Koetzier | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Finance, Innovation, Management

Traditional approaches rely on data from comparable businesses—but such data aren’t always available. Statistical modeling can broaden the comparison while controlling for differences.

Content: Article | Authors: Mimi James, Zane D. Williams | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance