The tax revenues of state and local governments are still tanking. The Census Bureau yesterday released figures for the third quarter (a readable summary is available here), and it’s not a pretty picture. Overall revenue was down 6.7 percent compared with the same period last year. Corporate income tax fell a breathtaking 18 percent, from $11.6 billion to $9.5 billion. Receipts from sales tax and individual income tax also dropped, by 9 percent and close to 12 percent, respectively. Oddly enough, given the state of the housing market, property tax revenue was a relatively bright spot, eking out a 3.5 percent rise.

Inevitably, all of this will mean increased demands on governments’ favorite unpaid tax agents. more

About the time you are guzzling your third eggnog this holiday season, you might want to consider the following business IT questions for 2010.

Do you really need a fat client on each desk? Fat clients are the conventional desktop and laptop computers, richly configured with memory and storage and loaded with applications. They are costly to own and operate and increasingly unnecessary in a world of SaaS and cloud services. You can find almost any desktop application you need online at Google and others.

Does Microsoft have your organization’s best interests at heart? Many managers think they have no alternative to Microsoft Windows, Windows Server, Exchange, and a slew of other Microsoft applications. That is no longer the case. Between the cloud, SaaS, and open source, you have a lot of alternatives that are as good or, quite often, much better and may cost less. Check out the SaaS Showplace for starters. more

TO: SANTA CLAUS, c/o The North Pole

Dear Santa,

I have been a good boy this past year. I believe that qualifies me for a 100 percent order fulfillment of the following Christmas present requests. (And I promise there will be no returns and exchanges like I did last year.)

My top Christmas gift choice is that the marketplace will begin to view analytics-driven performance management as being much broader than a narrow CFO-driven approach to only financial reporting, budgeting, and unconnected dashboard dials. Those are important, but performance management includes so many more integrated methodologies, with each one embedded with all flavors of analytics, such as segmentation and statistical correlation. more

Here’s my end-of-year roundup of oddball business-related taxes. I’ve included proposals as well as actual laws, and I lean heavily on the sales-and-use side, always a good source of weirdness ever since aggressive taxation caused the unfortunate demise of the wig powder industry in the 18th century. more

This time of year usually brings a brief period of relief for finance teams within organizations that use a calendar year-end.

Hopefully, your weeks of budget negotiations have finally concluded with the board approving a 2010 budget. Yet for many, this “accomplishment” fails to generate any deep satisfaction. It feels shallow because good managers know that the actual shelf life of a budget is very short.

The 2009 Business Finance survey of planning, budgeting, and forecasting practices (view here) researched how long budgets remain relevant. Two-thirds of the respondents said they were obsolete within four to six months. Even more startling: In 2009, a whopping 28 percent of respondents acknowledged that their budgets were obsolete on day one. more