Chrome River CURRENTS

What keeps a CFO awake at night and prevents them from getting a good night’s sleep? Certainly, CFOs have a lot of issues and stresses to deal with. A recent study compiled a list of the biggest issues facing today's CFO. Addressing these issues appropriately can help propel a company into a higher earnings bracket and relieve upper management stresses.

Electronic invoicing and mobile payment options are among the hottest trends in business today. Although many travel managers are familiar with these payment technologies, they don't see implementing them as a priority. Their concern lies instead with optimizing their company’s expense management system, according to a recent survey by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA). Results of this survey also showed that expense managers were much more interested in recording or imaging receipts and collecting travel data in one single database than adding mobile payment options to their travel management mix.

In our current digital age, you might think going paperless is all the rage. However, paper still seems to be cluttering a good number of workspaces. Regardless of where your company is on the paperless continuum, going paperless can make your office more efficient, isn’t that difficult, and does not cost absurd amounts of money. It can also offer your business good PR and good ROI. Here are five tips to help get you thinking and acting in a paperless mindset.

Earlier this year, Forrester Research surveyed 348 financial decision-makers around the globe regarding corporate expenses. Almost a quarter of executives tallied indicated that Travel & Entertainment (T&E) expenses were one of the top three most challenging operating expenses to control - second only to maintenance expenses.

The buzzword floating around companies and their IT departments today is Big Data. The predominant thinking is that there is value in ‘data’ and companies should store as much data as possible. Accordingly, many firms now save almost all their data for data mining purposes. Frankly, this approach is at the least unnecessary and at the most overkill.

Predictive analytics, or the sifting through of company data in order to highlight important patterns to make predictions and better decisions, is currently a hot topic in the business world. Advocates believe this approach holds great potential especially with a recent report from Nucleus Research suggesting that predictive analytics helped Mueller Inc. obtain a 248 percent ROI on new packaging equipment after investing in and using IBM's SPSS Modeler technology.

Massive data breaches affecting global companies like Sony, Neiman-Marcus and Target have solidified the unsettling fact that even huge mega companies cannot always prevent compromises in customer and company data.

With employee travel and entertainment (T&E) spending accounting for up to 6% of total corporate costs and continuing to increase, it's wise for companies to monitor T&E spending. Lack of careful T&E oversight can open the door to fraud, policy violations and corporate waste. Consider the below tips to keep your corporate T&E spending in check. 

Too often, CFOs spend so much time focusing on the daily requirements of their specific employment activities that they lose sight of their long-term career goals. Although they definitely need to devote time and energy to their current employer, they also need to invest in their own personal future career. They do not want to be caught suddenly looking for another job when they have not prepared for that eventuality.

Our world is producing data at an unprecedented rate. More impressive than the simple generation of data is the fact that the data can be stored, accessed, manipulated, analyzed, and applied. With this proliferation of big data comes the ability to use it; any business that fails to take advantage of the plethora of available data is setting itself up to lose out on valuable insights.