Three U.S. utility companies, including Exelon and Pacific Gas and Electric, have canceled their membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in response to the powerful pro-business lobbying organization’s stance on climate change.

This Washington Post article, which reports on Exelon’s defection, cites a Chamber spokesperson as saying that the lobbying group’s message has become “muddled.” more

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the degree of automation in financial processes has advanced dramatically. And while most companies continue to strive to develop and implement even more automation into their transaction processing and financial closing and reporting processes, there is little doubt that the manual journal entry is going to continue to be a key component in the financial closing and reporting process for the foreseeable future.

This statement is based on my own admittedly non-cientific survey of leading financial personnel who are in my professional network. These people have roles such as CFO, chief internal audit executive, deputy comptroller, SOX team leader, and even partner with a national CPA firm. They work in a wide variety of industries, including manufacturing, medical products and services, telecommunications, state government, and energy, in addition to public accounting.

Since I am working on an article about risk and the manual journal entry process, I have been holding various types of discussions (phone and e-mail) with these outstanding accountants and financial professionals. One of them brought up an intriguing thought about the future importance of the manual journal entry process, given pending changes in accounting standards. more

I feel like an analyst. For the past several weeks, I’ve been talking to GRC software vendors and consultants to get a feel for what needs to be covered in 2010.

Most vendors continually think about the problems and issues their customers confront; however, they tend to really dig into these challenges each autumn as they, too, prepare for the new calendar year.

These discussions and email exchanges have produced some interesting themes. more

. . . it’s not clear that the positive trend is sustainable.

For the quarter ended in June 2009, free cash flow at approximately 3,500 publicly held North American companies stood at 4.76 percent of revenue, up from 4.60 percent in March. That’s according to an analysis by Charles Mulford, professor of accounting and director of the Georgia Tech Financial Analysis Lab, Atlanta. Mulford has been measuring free cash flow, or the percent of revenue that’s available to shareholders, for several quarters. His analysis covers companies with market caps of at least $50 million, other than those in the financial sector.

Free cash flow for this group has risen steadily since December 2008, when it had sunk to 4.12 percent of revenue. “We’ve seen continuous improvement in companies’ ability to generate free cash flow,” Mulford says. more