Opinion
The Winning Agenda for a New CFO's First 100 Days: From Assessment to Vision
The CFO role is increasingly broad, yet nearly 10% of top-company CFOs leave within a year. Boston Consulting Group analysis indicates that new CFOs should focus on planning rather than speed in their first 90 days, laying the groundwork for long-term success by assessing the finance function, defining the vision, setting priorities, building relationships, crafting the investor story, and developing a roadmap.
Price-Volume-Mix Analysis: A Key Tool for Improving Enterprise Performance
Price-Volume-Mix (PVM) analysis is a method that helps Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) decompose revenue or profit changes, encompassing price effects, volume effects, and mix effects. Written by Vendavo CFO Dayton Kellenberger, this article introduces the basic concepts, implementation challenges, benefits, and the necessity of enterprise-level application of PVM analysis, emphasizing its value for precise decision-making and long-term growth.
Remote Work Becomes a Tax Compliance Challenge Worrying CFOs
After the pandemic, remote work has become widespread, with employees working across state or national borders as the norm, but tax compliance issues have come to the forefront. Topia's Adapt survey shows that 28% of employees have worked outside their state of residence, and only one-third reported all days to HR. As the tax gap widens and audit risks rise, CFOs need to view remote work as a necessary condition for talent competition and balance compliance with employee expectations through location-sharing mechanisms.
Pandemic-Related EBITDA Adjustments: How Should CFOs Weigh Them?
The financial challenges triggered by the pandemic have prompted CFOs to reassess the necessity of EBITDA adjustments. Data shows that the adjustment magnitude fell from 24.4% in Q4 2019 to 21.8% in the same period of 2020, with only 1.6% directly related to the pandemic. The article analyzes company-specific methods, selection of value drivers, and introduces three strategies—annualized earnings, 2021 EBITDA, and month substitution—emphasizing the importance of defensible metrics.
GAAP is Outdated: Talent Should Be Treated as a True Asset
Marvin Weiss, a retired accounting professor, points out that GAAP, rooted in the production-driven era, does not treat talent investments as assets, leading to undervaluation of knowledge-based companies. He suggests capitalizing human resource expenditures and amortizing them over expected service years to address the confusion caused by non-GAAP metrics.
CFOs Should Carefully Consider Tax and Legal Risks Before Closing Offices
The pandemic offers cost-conscious CFOs an opportunity to save expenses, but closing offices may be short-sighted. HR strategy may trigger unexpected tax and legal risks, especially when employees can work remotely. CFOs and CHROs need to coordinate on office space, remote policies, and the relationship between compensation and location.
The Art of Remote M&A: Using Long-Form Writing to Compensate for the Shortcomings of 'Zoom-Style Deals'
In the era of remote work, tools like Zoom are convenient but struggle to support the deep communication required for M&A negotiations. UserTesting Chief Strategy Officer Mona Sabet, drawing on her company's practical experience acquiring a Norwegian tech firm, proposes replacing bullet-point communication with long-form writing. By leveraging collaborative platforms like Google Docs, teams can achieve more comprehensive understanding and alignment in virtual environments, thereby improving the success rate of remote M&A.
Six Strategic Values of Accounts Payable Digitalization for CFOs
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic exposing operational vulnerabilities, CFOs need to re-examine internal controllable process bottlenecks. Accounts payable (AP), as a labor-intensive link, can achieve significant benefits through digital transformation, including cost reduction of up to 80%, processing time shortened by 95%, and reduced fraud risk. Based on industry insights from a Transcepta executive, this article systematically outlines six core advantages and cites a practical case from a large university to demonstrate the quantified results of automated processing.
Data Analytics Empowers Audit Function Upgrades: New Paths for Compliance and Internal Audit in the Remote Work Era
The pandemic has forced compliance and internal audit functions to shift to remote testing, making data analytics a key tool for ensuring the effectiveness of risk mitigation measures. StoneTurn experts point out that directly accessing underlying data, connecting disparate data sources, and adopting risk-based testing can significantly enhance audit efficiency and effectiveness. This article, incorporating updates to the DOJ guidelines and anti-corruption cases, provides specific operational recommendations.
Plan Your Exit Path from the Start of Your Startup
The pandemic has driven explosive growth in U.S. e-commerce, with online spending in the first half of 2020 increasing by $88 billion compared to the same period in 2019, and 1.3 million newly registered e-commerce businesses. Chris Shipferling, managing partner at Global Wired Advisors, writes that founders should plan their exit path from the company's inception rather than waiting until growth becomes apparent. The article analyzes three primary exit methods—M&A, IPO, and family succession—and uses cases like Asana's direct listing and Furnitureland South's family succession to illustrate the importance of early planning, while emphasizing that identifying and amplifying value drivers (high profit margins, brand strength, management teams, high-growth tracks) is key to achieving a desirable valuation.