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About This Blog Updated daily by members of the Business Finance Expert Network, The Big Fat Finance Blog is intended to arm finance professionals with innovative ideas and best practices that help finance organizations create value.
Which country imposes the highest taxes on corporations?
Hard to say. Assessing the relative tax competitiveness of different countries is an extraordinarily tricky task, and I’m always amazed at how often people — even people who should know better — try to sweep the difficulties under the rug of statutory maximum rates. more
Having last night uploaded a video interview into my Pinnacle editing software, I’ve been busy reviewing different clips today, and I’m repeatedly struck by how affable my interviewee was.
Molson Coors CFO Stewart Glendinning had only minutes earlier finished delivering a keynote presentation at the Hackett Group Best Practices Conference when he agreed to field my questions in front of the camera.
We’ll plan to post our video interview with Molson Coors’ CFO early next week, and we’ll also likely post a short question-and-answer text article – where I ask him to reflect upon his good fortune to be a CFO inside an industry characterized by many as recession-proof. There’s little doubt that Mr. Glendinning has had some practice answering that one. Molson Coors is one of the biggest brewers in the world and makes several popular brands, including Molson Canadian, Coors Light, and Blue Moon. more
“The market for corporate performance management (CPM) suites continues to grow rapidly,” declared Gartner in its latest Magic Quadrant for CPM suites. Why? Gartner explains: “because CPM has helped to manage cost optimization efforts and is now increasingly employed in supporting growth-based strategies.”
That certainly was what led the AAA in west/central New York to opt for CPM from Prophix Software. “We’re able to provide our executive team with business information faster than ever before and do analysis on the information so they can see why something is up or down,” said Kristy Chapman, the auto club’s financial planning and reporting manager.
Budgeting, planning, and forecasting (BP&F) remains the primary use for CPM, although Gartner reports a likely shift to CPM for more strategic purposes, including management and profitability modeling. AAA, for example, expects to use it to identify new places where it might open an office. Gartner also notes a significant uptick in interest from midsize organizations. more
Last fall, the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) published its Report of the NACD Blue Ribbon Commission – Risk Governance: Balancing Risk and Reward. This spring, Protiviti published a helpful analysis of the NACD report.
Why does this concern you? Because the report identifies 10 principles boards may use to ratchet up their oversight of your company’s risk management activities. more
Arizona voters’ approval yesterday of a temporary 1 percent increase in the state’s sales tax underlines the points I made in a recent post: Sales and use taxes are creeping higher around the country, and they now rival state and local income taxes as a rising compliance challenge for business. The Arizona decision may encourage other states to attempt to patch up the holes in their budgets with rate hikes.
It’s the constant changes in rates and rules that make sales and use taxes such a challenge for businesses to track and manage, and which also explain the vibrant health of the best-of-breed technology sector that helps companies cope. more
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