Mark Billings, a lecturer in accounting and risk at Nottingham University in the United Kingdom, has spent a number of years studying corporate treasury. His interest was piqued, he says, when he found that the Association for Corporate Treasurers, a UK-based professional group, has only been around since the late 1970s. “That’s not very long for something that’s so important to business,” he says.

To be sure, the corporate treasury function predates that. Billings has found mention of corporate treasury in, for instance, General Electric’s 1899 annual report and U.S. Steel’s 1904 report.

Even so, the relatively late start of the group indicated that the profession had only recently been formalized and gained recognition. To examine why, Billings analyzed the broader economy in which companies operated. more

The company is at a precipice. Market share is eroding, the economy is down, and there is an urgent need to cut costs. There are a number of key projects on the table, any one of which could result in a big revenue upside. The CEO calls the team together – the CFO, COO, and head of Sales and Marketing are all there. If they plan a downsizing, HR may even be involved. The team gets to work.

But where is the CIO? Eventually, everything the company decides to do will have an IT component to it, short of balance sheet reengineering. You can’t even fire someone without IT (you need to lock the exited employee out of the network). more

Finance organizations that have incorporated green IT practices into their operations achieve more than a pat on the back for saving the world. They stand to save significant money through lower energy bills and ensure that they continue in business when economic growth (eventually) returns.

According to an EPA report to Congress in 2007, an IT data center consumes as much as 25 times more energy than a typical office building. The obvious conclusion: Energy efficiency efforts aimed at IT pay off bigger than those targeted elsewhere in the office.

Finance generally isn’t considered an IT energy hog. However, it can be. End-of-month or -quarter closings can make large demands on the IT systems. Similarly, the annual budget marathon can strain IT systems. Finally, sophisticated risk analysis, such as complex Monte Carlo simulations, can run for days and bring even powerful servers to their knees. So, the finance department isn’t completely blameless when it comes to running up IT energy bills. more

That mainstay of state budgets, the sales tax, is under intense recessionary pressure. Collections plummeted 6.1 percent in the last quarter of 2008 compared with the same period in the previous year, according to a report released this week by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. That’s the sharpest year-over-year decline in the past 50 years.

With states’ revenues diving and their budgets buckling, can an uptick in sales tax audits be far behind? more

I seem to be incurring some personal IFRS compliance costs: the amount of time I spend reading through IFRS-related content is consuming more and more of my week with each passing month.

I referred readers to this Accenture survey several postings ago, and I want to point out a few other informational nuggets contained in the report. more