Three Reasons Modern ERP Drives the Contemporary Controller
As discussed in the Controllers Council study titled The Contemporary Controller, 2020 pushed controllers into new roles, created new responsibilities, and did so quite efficiently. The office gave way to the home office. Meetings gave way to Slack channels and Zoom...
Diversity Begets Diversity: Lacking It Distances Talent
It doesn’t sound incredibly complicated—people want to be surrounded with others similar to themselves. Unfortunately, for those in the accounting profession, it’s hard to find talent in the black and brown community, potentially pushing diversity and inclusion...
Three Reasons Companies Should Be Open to Virtual CPE
CPE has long been a part of the accounting profession—and no matter what license you hold, maintaining it requires you to never stop learning. But after 2020, a year that shook up the business landscape, many have looked at different ways to maintain this learning—and...
Staying Afloat When Surrounded by Bankruptcies
Naval formations are interesting things. Each vessel, be it a destroyer, battleship, cruiser, aircraft carrier, or submarine plays a role in keeping the other protected. Aircraft carriers, despite being among the most valuable for their larger role, are often the...
Preparing for Travel and Expense in a Post-COVID World
If there was any business process that was fundamentally changed by COVID, it was business travel. Relied on by airlines and hotel chains, salespeople, executives, and more needed to update everything about their workday to reflect the fact that meetings were...
Eight Tips to Reduce Fraud in Financial Reporting
As the pandemic and lockdowns continue, company leaders are juggling a variety of plates. Limited staff numbers working from home, manual and paper-based processes, and a lack of oversight create challenges in maintaining visibility. Unfortunately, this creates a...
Five Technologies Controllers Should Know in the 2020s
If 2020 wasn’t the year of the word “unprecedented,” it was the year of disruption. Disruption, disruptive, or disrupted was thrown about throughout the year to explain how workflows, processes, or technologies have changed. But disruption is not new. Digital...
Five Steps to Addressing Capex Risk Management
Capital expenditures are a balance of risk and reward—risk and reward that has been kicked into overdrive in the past year. Money is tight and many leaders may have seen their capital project plans delayed or changed as a result of the recession. But as a long-term...
Denied PPP Forgiveness? Another Option Might Reduce Liability
After a year of tumultuous changes—pandemics, recessions, lockdowns, and the like, 2021 is upon us. But alongside the pandemic came the CARES Act and the associated Paycheck Protection Program, providing forgivable loans to businesses whose revenue was impacted by the...
Addressing Increasing Challenges in Audits and Internal Controls Reporting
Internal controls reporting represents significant work, significant risk, and a significant challenge for corporate finance professionals. A core portion of the job responsibility for controllers and those throughout the department, many leaders find themselves...
From Knowing Why to Knowing How: A Controller’s Look at Cybersecurity
If it affects the bottom line, it’s finance’s responsibility—and few things impact the bottom line as heavily as a data breach. In the past few years, you may have heard terms like phishing, brute force attacks, and ransomware, but what exactly do these mean? In...
Audit Readiness: Six Ways to Approach Assurance without Breaking the Bank
The audit process is rarely something that you or your team considers fun. No one looks at the thought of an audit—opening your books to people who you don’t know, letting them poke and prod through your documents, and waiting for answers—and thinks to themselves,...