^The APQC Blog

If we have learned anything in the past few years, we learned that we are living through a time where economic headlines change quickly and finance departments must be ready to react to those changes and make informed decisions quickly.As we near the end of 2023, let us look at some of the trends…

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…

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-…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Despite advances in accounting automation, demand for accounting talent is growing. According to a Glassdoor report, accounting and auditing are among the 15 jobs projected to grow most by 2026. But accounting has a problem: A lot of people think it’s just boring number-crunching. Emily Lado,…

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…

We find ourselves in an unprecedented time today as a result of the virus and associated economic disruption, an environment of many challenges but also potential opportunities for organizations’ finance functions. As principal research lead for financial management research at APQC, I and our…