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5 Macro Trends Shaping the Finance Function
The finance function has become an early testing ground and organizational bellwether for process and performance improvements. In tracking the massive shifts and accelerated trends coming out of 2020, APQC has seen finance functions lead the way on global trends involving transformation,…
Remote Work is Here to Stay for Finance Teams
It’s hard to believe, but March 2021 marks more than one year since the pandemic hit the U.S. in full force. During that time, there have been many changes and challenges (both positive and negative), from scarcities in the supply chain, to new health, safety, and wellness protocols in the places…
Manual Processes Still Challenging Finance in 2021
2020 was a whirlwind of a year, and in addition to learning lessons from the past year, it is important to be thinking ahead to critical success factors for the year to come. To that end, in the fourth quarter of 2020, APQC recommenced its annual survey to understand the key priorities and…
11 Success Factors for Better Order-to-Cash Performance
The order-to-cash (O2C) process is fundamental to the basic objective of every organization—exchanging goods or services for payment—and ensures that an organization has the working capital necessary to operate. Encompassing so many customer-facing activities and interorganizational handoffs, the…
Key Skills for Corporate Treasurers in the “Next Normal”
The pandemic has resulted in increased pressure on finance functions for more accurate forecasting, ready liquidity, and better working capital management. In order to better understand what success looks like for treasury during the COVID-19 pandemic and what it may look like in the post-…
Moving up the Maturity Curve to Accelerate the Speed of Insight by FP&A
The current COVID-19 environment has presented many challenges for planning and FP&A teams. Historical data is no longer terribly relevant to help predict the future. Some organizations (some online retailers, online grocery, face mask and hand sanitizer manufacturers, etc.), are seeing…
What Will Treasury Success Look Like in the “Next Normal”?
Now more than ever before, finance and treasury departments are experiencing a period of intense change, characterized by the accessibility and availability of a myriad of new cloud-based tools and technologies, increasing expectations of service delivery and business partnership levels, and the…
The ABCs of Order-to-Cash (O2C)
APQC is frequently asked for benchmarks, best practices, and examples for key end-to-end processes, such as order-to-cash (O2C). In addition, O2C content on APQC’s Resource Library is consistently some of the most popular content in terms of financial management downloads consistently over the last…
Fighting Cyber Risk and Payments Fraud in Treasury and Finance: Q&A with SME Jeff Diorio, Treasury Strategies
In this “new normal” (or “new abnormal”) that we find ourselves in as a result of the pandemic, the number of cyber and fraud attacks have been on the rise, as have their level of sophistication, as “bad actors” seek to take advantage of the situation. As the owners of remittance and payments…
Lessons Learned for the Finance Function from Past Crises
It has been said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. While COVID-19 is undeniably a moment of crisis for many organizations, the good news is that the finance function can leverage a range of lessons learned from past crises like the 2008 recession. These events have…