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CFOs Now Waking Up to Cyber Crime in AP
A new report on corporate payments fraud carries some stunning facts. The Association for Financial Professionals has released its 2017 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey. Seventy four percent of finance professionals reported that their organizations experienced “attempted or actual payments…
Finance Needs More Know-How
APQC recently conducted a survey of financial management professionals’ improvement goals and priorities. The results reveal vexing challenges in financial process standardization, labor cost reduction, and better decision support. These issues intersect—and not in a good way for many finance teams…
7 Cyber Security Questions CFOs Need Answers For
The growing sophistication of cyber-attacks has made it clear that even corporations with savvy prevention and protection systems are vulnerable. Cyber security is not just an IT issue but instead a cross-functional concern for the digital enterprise that requires attentive executive- and board-…
4 Tips for Using Financial Management Benchmarks Wisely
Finance professionals naturally understand the rationale of measuring managerial and operating progress, so wielding those measures’ corresponding benchmarks should be a straightforward exercise. But a word of caution is due. The impulse to act quickly with benchmarks can take a finance group in…
Financial Process Improvement - the Goals Have Become Broader
According to research conducted in March 2012 by APQC in partnership with IEG, 81 percent of large corporations are currently investing in at least one major program to improve financial management processes. This is a marked departure from previous efforts, which were relatively narrow in…
AP Leaders Really Do It Better
The latest update of the Accounts Payable Productivity Index (APPI)* shows that investments in AP process automation can be very worthwhile. The top-performers in the index (organizations with top-quartile scores for both efficiency and effectiveness) are gaining ground in their efforts to get…
USPS Move Reinforces E-invoicing
Today’s consumer is riding the latest technology wave and moving digital purchases and payments to mobile platforms. In contrast, B2B billing and payment processes remain mostly paper-based. That said, we see on the commercial side a strong and growing desire for accounts payable (AP) process…
Financial Management: Best Practices Today
Need a quick and handy way to learn what top-notch finance executives are up to? Take a look at this webinar that I hosted recently for APQC’s financial management community. I presented a tidy package of what I determined to be the most informative case studies and metrics analyses that our…
Imagine a Sick or Dying Euro
Is foreign currency exchange (FX) volatility a concern of yours? If you manage payables or receivables processes for a large organization that buys or sells in the Eurozone, you should be thinking “outside the box” when it comes to recent FX volatility. And you should pay particularly close…
Tips for CFOs Making Large Capital Investments
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to make time for researching and pondering big-picture ideas, especially those with a contrarian flavor. I want to remain alert to the flow of commercial currents that influence how CEOs and CFOs set growth strategies. Ultimately, those high-level decisions drive…