Strategic Finance articles from December 2006

Strategic Finance archives from December 2006

Imagining the future ...(accountants)
December 1, 2006... As we approach the start of a new calendar year, many people take the opportunity to assess their performance against the goals they have set for themselves. More importantly, it's a great time to dream of what you would like your future to be...

Yes, Oscar, there is magic.(Best Practices)
December 1, 2006... Oscar likes to take long walks with his grandpa. The two of them trek all over the redwood-studded hills where grandpa built his dream house. Oscar especially likes to go into the densely wooded areas--what he calls "the deep, dark forest where...

How small slights can cause big damage to morale.(Careers)
December 1, 2006... Sometimes the little things can matter as much as the big issues when it comes to keeping employees motivated and satisfied. Most managers intuitively know this and do their best to regularly show their appreciation to staff members and perhaps...

IFAC committee proposes guidance for achieving ethical behavior.(Ethics)
December 1, 2006... The International Accounting Education Standards Board (IAESB), a committee of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), has proposed guidance designed to assist in the ethics education of young accountants before they become...

Nevada's new controller.(Kim Wallin)
December 1, 2006... What do you do after you have successfully owned your own CPA firm, served as Chair of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA[R]), been ranked as one of the 100 most influential people in accounting, and even been named "Woman CPA of the...

Resolving your "back burner" business issues.(small business)
December 1, 2006... Most small business owners have a perpetual "to-do" list that they can never seem to get around to working on in the heat of everyday activities. Yet if they take care of some items before the end of the year and at the start of the new one,...

IMA publishes draft SMA.(Institute of Management Accountants, Statement on Management Accounting )(Brief article)
December 1, 2006... The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA[R]) has released a draft of a new Statement on Management Accounting (SMA) for public comment. Titled Implementing Enterprise Risk Management, it was written by Professors William G. Shenkir, Ph.D.,...

Excellent insight.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2006... Dr. Lin's article [October] provided an excellent insight into our competition for the 21st Century. It ought to be required reading for Bill Ford, Ron Gettlefinger, and anyone else who still adheres to yesterday's industrial management-labor...

SEC set to issue new 404 guidance.(Securities & Exchange Commission )( Public Company Accounting Oversight Board releases guidelines for stock options auditing)(reforms in Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States)
December 1, 2006... This month the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) will give an indication of how it wants to loosen management's requirements under the much-vilified Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which dictates how much companies report on their...

Effective leadership.(Yukl and Lepsinger's leadership model)
December 1, 2006... In today's competitive business environment, the difference between a company succeeding or failing often comes down to the quality and effectiveness of its leadership. But most of the thousands of books and articles that have been written...

Make risk management and internal control work for you: by tailoring an integrated, business-process-based template solution, small companies can address risks and controls in a cost-effective manner, whether or not SOX compliance is mandated.
December 1, 2006... Smaller companies are avoiding risk management and internal control efforts because they hope that the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) won't require them to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). They are frightened by reports of the...

Second-wave benefits of XBRL.(XBRL)
December 1, 2006... U.S. and international corporations are still in the early stages of implementing eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) as a common computer language for reporting, exchanging, and analyzing financial and business reporting data. At...

What's your main technology concern? Among one group of accountants, security issues dominate the top 10 technologies list.(Technology)
December 1, 2006... Whenever new technology raised questions, accountants of the past would flood the IT department with questions. Not today. It's now the responsibility of management accountants to care for all information in the business. To provide this care...

Empty the cigar box.(NeatReceipts Scanalizer)(IOGEAR's Germ-Free Wireless Laser Mouse )(Adobe Acrobat Connect )
December 1, 2006... NeatReceipts SCANALIZER combines a compact scanner and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software in a single solution that will store and organize expense and tax receipts, bills, business cards, and all sorts of other paper effluvia that's...

The music genome project.(Tech Forum)
December 1, 2006... THE MAPPING OF THE HUMAN GENOME was supposed to take 15 years, but it was completed early in 2003 after 13 years of combined effort by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. The goal was to create a database that...

XBRL is to XML as lemonade is to lemons.(XBRL)
December 1, 2006... When you were growing up, did your parents ever say, "If Johnny Jones jumped off a cliff, would you jump off, too? "Many companies are "jumping off the cliff" when they hope that embracing XML will solve all of their problems, but they are...

Elegant thinking.(Pocket-Mod form Chad Adams)
December 1, 2006... Do you think you could fit your entire day on a single sheet of paper? The daily calendar you check in the morning, meetings and contacts, notes, the Sudoku puzzle you do during lunch, the to-do list for tomorrow, the items you need to pick up...