How Budgeting is Evolving

It was little more than a year ago when we surveyed Business Finance readers on their budgeting practices. We were surprised to learn that 28 percent of finance executives viewed their 2009 budget targets as having become obsolete before the year had even begun. Meanwhile, two out of three expected their 2009 budgets to be obsolete within the first 6 months of the year.

In the face of such incriminating data, we decided that it was time to write an obituary for that cumbersome business process. more

A recent piece from Jake Swearington cites a survey of 1,600 executives by William Baker, a professor of marketing at San Diego State University, which found that those firms that rely heavily on external social networks scored 24 percent higher on a measure of radical innovation than companies that don’t.

Late in January, wiredFINANCE looked at the suggestion that social networking for business is “cr*p” and found that there actually can be something of value for business in social networking. Months earlier, wiredFINANCE found that budgeting and any collaborative financial process, such as accounts receivable, could benefit from social networking.

Even my colleagues at Business Finance Magazine have recently created a Linked-in page and a Twitter page. What’s more, BF’s editor in chief Jack Sweeney and managing editor John Cummings have begun tweeting daily. Clearly, Social media/networking also can do good things for the business itself. more

Would you rat on your company to the IRS for a share of the proceeds?

Many would, apparently. more

As finance organizations emerge from the recession with a renewed mandate to help their companies grow, many are not the same organization they were 18 months ago.

The finance organization inside BNY Mellon Asset Management is just such an organization. Having largely de-leveraged its balance sheet over the last 18 months, the investment firm’s asset management finance team is once again focused on helping to grow the firm’s 15 investment management boutiques. However, the bank’s effort to better manage costs — an initiative in part driven by the crisis — is forever changing the scale and shape of the firm’s global finance organization. more

Management teams that are on the prowl for acquisitions may find themselves doing some treasure hunting. That’s because they likely will find a growing amount of opportunity in distressed assets, or the debt or equity of a company that has declared bankruptcy or is restructuring itself. That was one of the points that was made clear during a webcast hosted by Ernst & Young last week, titled, appropriately enough, “Buying Distressed Assets.”

After all, business bankruptcy filings more than doubled between 2006 and 2008, jumping from 19,695 to 43,546, reports the research group American Bankruptcy Institute. Filings in the third quarter of 2009 (the latest data available), at 15,177, were nearly three times those of the third quarter of 2006.

Similarly, the number of mass layoffs – a rough proxy for corporate restructurings – jumped from 938 for the month of February 2006 to 1,761 in January 2010, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. more