Chrome River CURRENTS

After many years as a road warrior, I have noticed that I’ve developed patterns and routines in my business travel to help maximize my efficiency and minimize my stress. If you asked my wife, she might just chalk it up to my being OCD in nature, but these simple tips are now part of my business travel routine:

A requirement of every chief financial officer’s job is to find ways to improve the company’s profitability. Improvements can be accomplished by making the best use of corporate funds and reducing expenses. How CFOs reduce company costs can vary greatly from one business to the next. The industry type, business size and corporate structure are all important factors.

The way to drive performance is to measure it. Do you want to judge the success of a project? Do you want to change people's behavior? You need to create Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that quantify the objectives you are striving for. Your KPIs may change from project to project and from year to year. But they should be consistent in their ability to measure the success or failure of any set of activities.

It seems like every day I hear about a new travel technology, a new pitch from a travel start-up, or a tale of a future where traditional travel-related technology (e.g., expense reporting tools, online booking tools, TMCs) is replaced by a “new-wave,” “Google-ized,” “Big Data,” and/or “artificial intelligence” solution. These new travel technologies are designed to save travelers money and make them more productive, informed, smart, happy and mobile. But quite often, they violate current corporate travel policy. Even I sometimes ignore my company’s policy by using a car service app on my iPhone (my guilty pleasure).

There is a popular saying in the South that is appropriate in the world of small business: “It’s hard to drain the swamp when you’re up to your elbows in alligators.” For small-business owners, with limited time and resources, it is difficult to keep control of finances when most of your time is spent just keeping the business going. Customers are calling, shipments must be unloaded, orders are pending, and employees are complaining. All of these distractions can keep a small-business owner or manager from taking a hard look at finances.The issue is not necessarily when to examine finances, but how small businesses manage expenses and finances. Applying the following tips could actually give you the time you need to get a handle on your finances: 

Back in the olden days, spreadsheets were considered the finance team’s dream data structure. Many accountants developed complex algorithms to turn a spreadsheet into a full blown application and fully managed their finances through their spreadsheets. In 2004, CFO.com found that out of 14 technologies discussed with finance executives, spreadsheets were one of the two most widely used tools for running their departments.

World-renowned Italian artist Franco Innocenti lives in what remains of a 10th century castle tower and paints the world as he sees it. His paintings reveal a reality different from the one to which we are accustomed, as Franco removes objects from their natural environments and places them in completely unusual surroundings, creating absurd combinations that reveal paradoxical aspects of the world around us.

In any business there are specific questions that should be part of every continuous improvement plan:  

The breaking news that the Labour Member of Parliament for Rotherham, Denis MacShane, is facing a 12-month suspension from the House of Commons for submitting false invoices that were “plainly intended to deceive” highlights the constant diligence required of organisations to monitor and control their expenses and incoming invoices.

This was also the subject of a September survey that found nearly one-third of 1,000 UK employees who took taxis for work admitted that they routinely cheated on such expense claims. The people polled indicated that they added to the taxi bill or expensed fares that were not business related.

 "Taxi Receipt" Photo. Ebay.co.uk 10 Jun. 2012. 06 Nov. 2012 <http://www.ebay.co.uk>.

Few would argue with the truism “Numbers don’t lie,” but inaccurate numbers can and do lie all the time. A good example is the vast number of inaccurate numbers that can enter an organization’s financial system via expense reports. Organizations that allow employees to write or type expenses into a form that is manually reviewed and re-entered into the accounting system by a staff member have introduced several opportunities to enter inaccurate information for each transaction.