Strategic Finance articles from March 2008

Strategic Finance archives from March 2008

An investment in the future.(Perspectives)
March 1, 2008... Message from the Chair [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] You might think that the future of the management accounting profession rests in the hands of bodies like the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), the Public Company Accounting Oversight...

The adolescent manager.(Best Practices)
March 1, 2008... Steve was ready to make the hire. He'd sifted through resumes until he'd found an ideal match to the specified background. He had the best phone interview ever and a great first meeting. Then his boss weighed in: Yeah, the guy seemed good, but...

Meet Bob Kaplan.(employee of Harvard Business School)(Interview)
March 1, 2008... In this brief Q&A, IMA President and CEO Paul Sharman touches on the work of Robert S. Kaplan, Baker Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School, and asks him to share his thoughts about management accounting today. Bob Kaplan joined...

SEC releases Financial Explorer.(NEWS)(Securities and Exchange Commission)
March 1, 2008... Last month the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) launched its Financial Explorer software tool that's designed to help investors analyze the financial results of public companies quickly and easily. Found on the SEC website, Financial...

Comptroller general to resign.(streetwise)(David M. Walker to resign from U.S. Government Accountability Office to join Peter G. Peterson Foundation)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States and head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), said he will resign his position this month in order to become president and CEO of the newly established Peter G. Peterson...

A time for change.(Letters to the Editor)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... The article by Paul Sharman in the October 2007 Strategic Finance was accurate concerning the need for the content of accounting undergraduate curricula to become more relevant for accounting graduates. Mr. Sharman argued that current...

CIFiR backs mandatory XBRL, tougher restatement criteria .(GOVERNMENT)
March 1, 2008... It has apparently gone unnoticed that the SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting (CIFiR), which I mentioned last month, will recommend to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) to begin phased-in, mandatory adoption...

Four levels of optimization.(BOOKS)
March 1, 2008... Great companies are always looking for ways to reduce general and administrative expenses, whether it's in the area of finance, human resources, information technology, legal services, facilities management, communications, procurement, or...

New SMAs are available.(RESEARCH)(Statements on Management Accounting )(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Two new Statements on Management Accounting (SMAs) are available for IMA members: Managing the Total Costs of Global Supply Chains, published in 2008, will help management accountants and others improve their understanding of and the...

Joseph L. Brumit, 1918-2008.(streetwise)(obituary)(Obituary)
March 1, 2008... Joseph L. Brumit, former president of the National Association of Accountants, now the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA[R]), died January 1, 2008, at the age of 89. He served as NAA president during the 1965-66 fiscal year. ...

XBRL workshop is available.(ADVOCACY)(Conference news)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... XBRL US is sponsoring a special webinar on March 18 from 3:30 p.m. until 5 p.m. EST that will demonstrate how to create XBRL-enabled financial documents and how to participate in the public review of the XBRL US GAAP Taxonomies. The workshop...

Correction.(Correction notice)
March 1, 2008... The name of a member of the IMA Small Business Committee was inadvertently omitted from the list in last month's Strategic Finance. Bruce Pounder, president and founder of Leveraged Logic in Asheville, N.C., is also a member of the Committee.

Redefining management accounting: promoting the four pillars of our profession.(Cover Story)(Conference notes)
March 1, 2008... Last year I attended a conference where one of the speakers discussed some of his concerns about the management accounting profession. To highlight one of his apprehensions, he shared with the audience a quote from a high-ranking officer in a...

The Business of selling movies.(Accounting)
March 1, 2008... Once a movie is produced, it's all about getting as many eyeballs as possible to see it, as they say in the industry. But the competition is steep given the available entertainment options for consumers: Video games. Television. Home video....

Transforming Social and Environmental Risks into Opportunities.(ANNUAL CONFERENCE TOPIC)
March 1, 2008... The concept of sustainability has matured in recent years. No longer is it only about risk and compliance--it's also about innovation and the opportunity to simultaneously achieve excellence in social and financial performance. Capitalizing on...

Calculating elapsed days.(Excel)
March 1, 2008... Dates in Excel live a dual existence. Although the program stores them as the integer number of days since January 1, 1900, Excel's number formatting forces it to display the values in a format such as MM/DD/YYYY. This dual existence leads to...

Tools of the trade.(Dymo LabelManager 210D)(IronKey Secure Flash Drive)(PDF Converter Professional 5)
March 1, 2008... The Dymo LabelManager 210D is a desktop label maker that produces very sharp (180 dpi) one- or two-line self-stick tape labels. You type the label, and the LabelManager centers the text and will remember it in a queue of up to nine different...

License plates and Band-Aids.(Tech Forum)
March 1, 2008... WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY that becomes more transparent every day, and technology contributes in a two-fold and considerable way. New devices and databases constantly remove the distance we've placed between ourselves and the official watchers. ...

Brute-force computing.(End Note)
March 1, 2008... We began hearing about supercomputers back in the '80s. The name most often associated with them then was Cray Research. What made the Crays so unusual was their speed--a function of vector processing that allowed many operations to run...