Don’t Risk Your Data — Assess It

Disgruntled employees, hackers, incompetent personnel and competitors engaged in corporate espionage are all concerns for a business.  Even more concerning is what they can do to your data.  Theft, corruption, errors or complete data loss are reason enough to possibly lose some sleep at night.  This is why every business must be cognizant of the [...]

FIN 48: Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes

Today’s post is a guest post from a colleague of mine.  His name is William Crozier and he has over sixteen years of experience dealing with tax issues including their proper financial reporting.  William has his own consulting practice providing temporary tax function management, support and advisory services. The time has finally come for private [...]

What Marathon Training & Business Share in Common

Over the past 4 years, I have completed 4 marathons and when I stopped to think about the effort required to train for one, it occurred to me there are many parallels to the effort expended in starting and running a business. Deciding To Do It Whether you want to run a marathon or start [...]

Financial Reports: Useful or Useless?

Finance & accounting departments are ultimately about reporting.  If you are a public company, there is the required reporting to the SEC and the shareholders.  And regardless of whether you are public or private, there are many other external reports that allow the business to meet its obligations to external stakeholders like banks.  But the [...]

(De)Centralization

Someone once told me a story about a man who only kept two files in his desk — one on how to centralize the company and one on how to decentralize it.  It turns out every time there was a change in leadership, there would be a corresponding shift in the way the company was [...]

It’s OK to Let Go: Sunk Costs

I’m sure you’ve heard at some point in time someone say “but we’ve invested all this money so we have to keep going”.  For the folks that say this, the need to continue on a path is directly correlated to how much money has already been spent.  For them I have two words — sunk [...]

Pay it Right

I’m currently reading “Discovery-Driven Growth” by Rita McGrath & Ian McMillan and came across this quote which I thought was so appropriate for today’s post:  “Whenever you see someone doing something really stupid in business, there’s a good chance that he thinks he’s being rewarded for it.”  We all know this scenario and it doesn’t [...]

Who’s the Best? Benchmarking to Keep Ahead

“Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs” ~ Henry Ford Being better than the next guy is a driving force for many businesses especially in highly competitive industries.  Everyone wants to be at the top of the heap and set the standard for excellence.  And for those who aren’t [...]

Keeping Score: The Balanced Scorecard

Too many times there is a complete disconnect between the budget and the strategic plan of the business.  A strategic plan defines the direction the company wants to go in the longer-term and becomes the road map when making decisions about what avenues to pursue. This disconnect between budget and strategic plan is often the [...]

Being Flexible: Using a flex budget

As mentioned in last week’s post on budgeting, the issue with the static budget is that it is out of date before the first month-end makes its appearance.  When this happens, a tremendous of amount of energy is spent month after month “explaining the numbers” when they may not need to be explained or can [...]