I’m happy to report that in recent weeks, I’ve been asked by more than one business writer to share my insights on the changing landscape of corporate budgeting, forecasting, and planning.

It seems that business magazine editors sense that some of the recession-driven changes to traditional planning approaches (e.g., moving to rolling forecasts, implementing scenario planning, and even ditching the budget in some cases) may be here to stay.

In case you missed these articles or have yet to see them (one of them will be published by APQC shortly), here are some highlights of these trend discussions. more

Strong ethical cultures, it turns out, offer some benefits.

New research from the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) indicates that organizations with strong ethical values experience less misconduct, more frequent reporting of misbehavior, and less retaliation on the job.

(Interesting note about the ERC: The organization’s chairman is former U.S. Representative Michael Oxley, who some of you may know as the coauthor of a little-known 2002 law.) more

A vinyl window company in Holly, Michigan, apparently didn’t notice when $1.7 million disappeared off its books over a 3-year period. But the IRS noticed when Pamela Blodgett, the company’s controller at the time, somehow inexplicably forgot to mention on her 1040 an increase in her income by coincidentally the same amount. more

What would it take for your organization to give up the paper payment habit? Or at least cut it back a little? That’s the message from Aberdeen Group’s third annual payments report titled “Global Payments: Maximizing Cash Flow with Electronic Payments and Process Automation”. The study was jointly underwritten by Sage Payment Solutions and Syncada, a joint venture between Visa and US Bank.

According to Nasreen Quibria, senior analyst at Boston-based Aberdeen, businesses that adopt electronic payment channels have been able to achieve a 16 percent decrease in accounts receivable (AR) processing costs and a 14 percent decrease in accounts payable (AP) costs year over year. Given recession-driven mandates to reduce costs and preserve cash during the past 2 years, you might think that this alone would be a compelling incentive.

In a different study, the largest U.S. companies, according to REL Research, saw working capital performance deteriorate by over 8 percent in 2009, the largest decline in more than 5 years. These companies now have up to $740 billion in cash unnecessarily tied up in working capital, which can be freed up by improving their operations in collections, payables, and inventory management. Furthermore, REL found that top-performing companies collected from customers 17 days more quickly than typical companies in 2009.

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