I’ve been speaking to finance managers and executives around the country fairly often this year. Many of these recent engagements have taken place at dinners, where the wine and the discussions tend to flow freely as the evening progresses.

One of the most common (and most candid) comments I continue to hear relates to the challenge of taking on additional work – more priorities – without adding either money or manpower due to tough economic times. Most finance managers I speak with want to support the changes they are being asked to make, but they are overwhelmed by yet another “A” priority. What so many finance managers are really looking for is a way to carve out time and space to take on this new and crucial work without increasing costs. In our late-night discussions, we jokingly commented that we could take on more if we could find ways to stop doing much of the dumb stuff we often feel compelled to do. These discussions quickly grew into a running list of “Dumb Stuff We Should Stop Doing!” more

There is the email archiving you do to meet various compliance mandates, and then there is the rest that everyone does. Most people do this kind of email archiving manually through their Microsoft Outlook folders.

This is not the best approach. A recent Gartner report on email archiving points out: “Demand for email active archiving products and services continues to escalate, as pure financial industry compliance considerations are being replaced by the broader market requirements for message retention, mail server management, and legal discovery support.”

“The email archive, for better or worse, has become a rich trove of business knowledge that, if mined and managed effectively, becomes a powerful business tool or, if allowed to run rampant without any controls, can be a litigation minefield. (See wiredFINANCE, Mar. 17, “Delete Data to Minimize Litigation Costs.”) As Gartner says, “Most organizations should be doing some kind of email archiving.” more

Treasurers and CFOs know that the extent to which creditors’ rights are protected in different countries affects just how much and to whom lenders are willing to extend credit. Indeed, a recent study, “Creditor Rights, Enforcement, and Bank Loans,” by Kee-Hong Bae at York University and Vidhan Goyal at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, illustrates the dramatic impact creditor protection can have. The study appeared in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of Finance.

As Bae and Goyal note, in countries in which creditor rights are weak or poorly enforced, banks can be expected to charge higher interest rates, lend less, and/or shorten loan maturities. To determine how much of an impact creditor rights have, the duo examined some 63,000 loans issued between 1994 and 2003 to firms in 48 countries. more

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Forbes’s Tax Misery list, which this year ranked France as the world’s most wretched national tax jurisdiction, thereby giving me an unmissable opportunity to diss that entire nation (my French friends still haven’t forgiven me).

But it seems that Forbes might have gotten it wrong, and I shouldn’t be picking on France after all.

It should be Italy.

And by the way (though this will come as no surprise to anyone), the United States isn’t exactly misery-free either. more