The traditional way of measuring value and business performance of a company is changing. For an increasing number of stakeholders, financial statements and balance sheet information just isn’t enough. Emphasis is now on sustainability, especially related to reputational risk and corporate image. A sustainability incident, like discovering child labor in the global supply chain, can be extremely harmful to brand value and thus revenue and profits.
To: CFO Research Services From: Senior finance executives Date: Fall 2011 Re: Growth prospects Dear CFO Research Services: You may think from our recent response to your survey questionnaire, entitled “Strategies for Better Business Insight,” that we see bright growth prospects ahead. You’d be wrong. The real picture is more complicated. Although a majority…
All too often, finance departments face the same challenges at the end of every reporting period—whether it’s monthend, quarter-end, or year-end. The department must prepare financial reports and statements such as balance sheets, cash flow statements, income statements, and increasingly, management reports, as well as provide information about key performance indicators. On top of that,…
So you’re looking for a system that can help you improve your ability to execute strategy.You’ve been using a spreadsheet for many years to budget and although it is infinitely flexible, you are worried about the integrity of the data and the fact that no one quite knows how the macros and VB scripts work. Oh, and you never seem to have adequate data to make ‘real-world’ decisions.
In the “Preface” to The Gathering Storm, volume I of Winston Churchill’s World War II memoirs, Churchill writes that when President Roosevelt asked for suggestions about what the war should be called, he replied that it should be called “the Unnecessary War.” If someone asked me what to call budgeting I’d say it’s “the Unnecessary Practice.”
According to a recent survey (multiple surveys in fact) most organizations are still using Excel for budgeting. Part of the explanation for that, of course, is “it’s free”. But it’s also because we in Finance have a bias for spreadsheets. No self respecting accountant or finance professional would back down from the challenge of building a budgeting process using Excel (Bill Gates is smiling, I can feel it).
“The first phase of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, ending with the 10 states that vote this week on Super Tuesday, has been about money and message. The next several months will be about maps and math.”
It was those four M’s that caught my attention: money, message, maps and math.
Any candidate for any major office inevitably needs to concentrate on that last M – the math.
CFOs see greater need for accurate, timely data, but may do it on the cheap. They want to boost finance’s analytic, modeling, and forecasting capabilities while maximizing tech’s ROI, says Hackett, even though cost pressures will limit them.
This series of articles is intended to help organizations of all sizes achieve the best results possible from their performance management initiatives. In each article, the goal is to provide at least one simple step that can increase the odds of a successful outcome. This month we look at the list of vendors to be…
I am certain that I have broken the rules of meters in my limerick poem below. My excuse is that I am not a poet!