Accounting

Know what your project is worth in today’s dollars.

Do you know what your most profitable product is?

You've been ordered to reduce overhead by 10%, 20%, or even (wince) 30%. How do you do it? First, don't expect to reach your target with a single big...

Companies are increasingly paying for acquisitions with stock rather than cash. But both they and the companies they acquire need to understand just how big a difference that decision can make to the value shareholders will get from a deal.

Scott Anthony, president of Innosight and author of The Silver Lining, explains how to innovate when time and money are tight.

Few, if any, articles on finance that have appeared in HBR have enjoyed the influence of the 1962 article reprinted here as a “Classic.” Gordon Donaldson’s analysis of how many companies haphazardly established their debt capacity, and his careful explanation of what he considered a better way, seemed to strike a chord among corporate administrative […]

Less than a decade after the frantic merger activity of the late 1960s, we are again in the midst of a major wave of corporate acquisitions. In contrast to the 1960s, when acquirers were mainly freewheeling conglomerates, the merger movement in the 1970s includes such long-established giants of U.S. industry as General Electric, Gulf Oil, […]

Too many CEOs are penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Measuring the value of intangible assets such as company culture, knowledge management systems, and employees' skills is the holy grail of accounting....

The subject of transfer pricing doesn’t normally excite many people, but when your transfer pricing system is less than perfect, life gets interesting. We at Bellcore first got interested in transfer pricing in 1983. That’s the year before AT&T was broken up and Bellcore was being formed as the centralized organization supporting the seven regional […]

More than eight out of 10 day traders lose money.

Corporate treasurers and chief financial officers have become adept at quantifying and managing a wide variety of risks: financial, hazard, and operational....

For professional services firms, the only way to address clients' most complex issues is for specialists to work together across the boundaries of their...

This article presents the research findings of a leading U.S. corporation, AT&T, on a series of important economic questions and issues, with an interpretation of the material by one of the company’s top executives. The subject is corporate earnings patterns in different industries, investment trends, the relation of profits and investment to GNP, and other […]

Employees are constantly in motion—making sales calls or taking service trips; visiting an international office for a few days or relocating there for a few years; soaring across oceans in the corporate jet or heading across town in the company car. Typically, these activities are administered by an assortment of departments and vendors. But we […]

In recent years, companies have reduced their dependency on traditional accounting systems by developing, activity-based cost management systems. Initially, managers viewed the ABC approach as a more accurate way of calculating product costs. But ABC has emerged as a tremendously useful guide to management action that can translate directly into higher profits. Moreover, the ABC […]

Clarity is needed to bring banks into the game.

Many companies now recognize that their cost systems are inadequate for today’s powerful competition. Systems designed mainly to value inventory for financial and tax statements are not giving managers the accurate and timely information they need to promote operating efficiencies and measure product costs. In response, they have tried to redesign their present systems, but […]

Learn the ABCs of cost variance analysis through this simple illustration.

The key to selling well-designed, well-crafted products at high margins is the aesthetic coherence of the company and its goods. Embodying that ideal...