Stylus FMS

Tools Explosion!

Thomas — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:33:21 +0000

When man invented the first tools, and got them going, how would you think he felt – exhilarating? Imagine the guy who got ready the first wheel and rolled it away from him…started chasing it with his mind racing even faster with a thousand possibilities…

Exhilaration was what we eventually felt as a team that was busy all of last week plumbing data from different payment gateway applications – the csvs that they spew out, helping find their way into the finance and accounts application. We were doing this for one of our clients in Australia and there were a few tough challenges. While the technology part was fairly straightforward, the team ‘forming’ was daunting. Accountants working with IT analysts has never been easy and you end up a bit dizzy trying to control iterations, wondering if it ever is going stop. Adrenaline ran high and the tension palpable across client and us and we have survived to tell about it!

The cloud is now teeming with tools and applications that work for all devices. A new skill has to be seriously considered by all CEOs and CFOs – the skill of quickly finding the right tool or assembling one from thousands out there, that will work for processes and workflows in your domain. If you say you are allergic to technology or ignorant or whatever and choose to stay away, you do so at great peril! The tools explosion in the cloud means that you will be in danger of extinction quickly if you do not discover and appropriate the leap in efficiencies that tools provide today. I am glad that the sweat and adrenalin of last week is helping us along this path.

1st February, 2012

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:13:58 +0000

Imagine There’s No Excel

Even the people selling business analytics (BA), business intelligence (BI), and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software — jobs traditionally performed through Excel — sing Excel’s praises. And why not? In a 2011 study, accounting and tax advisory WeiserMazars found that 87% of the CFOs they surveyed relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets in their financial close and also in their FP&A activities, as well as for budgeting and reporting.
“I use Excel,” says Greg Schneider, vice president of marketing for budgeting, planning, and forecasting software provider Adaptive Planning. “If I’m going to look at three different lease options, Excel is perfect for that. It’s a great personal productivity tool.”
(cfo.com)

Smaller Is Better for Outsourcing Market

Since the peak of the financial crisis, when companies put many projects on hold, they have apparently found smaller to be better. The past year was the busiest for outsourcing service providers, with 870 contracts awarded in 2011. Just over 75% of those contracts were between $25 million and $99 million, according to Information Services Group (ISG).
The outsourcing data and analysis firm included only deals worth at least $25 million in its latest tally, released on Wednesday. But its analysts have found that projects on an even smaller scale are becoming more prevalent as well. “Small contracts worth less than $1 million have really taken off,” says John Keppel, president of research and managed services and chief marketing officer of the ISG.
(cfo.com)

Three Steps to Optimize Your Website According to Google’s ‘Freshness’ Update

Business owners have been reeling from Google’s one-two punch last year in changing the way it ranks searches online. The good news is that there are effective ways to optimize your online content to make the best of the changes.
First, Google unveiled “Panda,” a major change to its search algorithm that puts a higher priority on what it considers high-quality content. The search giant updated its algorithm again in November, giving greater priority to “fresh” content that it finds most relevant to recent events and timely topics. The rationale: People seeking information on the latest news and events will likely want the most up-to-date content possible.
(entrepreneur.com)

Emerging Social Media Sites to Attract Users

If you think social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are sticky, today’s emerging sites might as well be liquid cement.
As email and instant messaging loses prowess among users, social networking sites are stepping in as a primary communication channel for some users. And while Facebook continues to reign supreme, emerging sites like Tumblr and Pinterest are taking off fast — making them all the more fruitful for social media marketers.
(entrepreneur.com)

How to sell anything using social media

This article by John Jantsch first appeared onDuct Tape Marketing. Any opinions expressed are his own.
One of my predictions for 2012 is that more people will come to understand that you can indeed do business using social networks and, frankly, I’m already seeing it.
First off, people are getting more comfortable with social media and social behavior. The idea is fading that social media is a pure engagement temple mentality.
(reuters.com)

Finance sector faces big squeeze with low credit growth and high dollar

Finance is facing more serious issues than any other industry this year as the eurozone crisis, weak credit demand and foreign competition enforce major structural change, a key report says.
The Deloitte Access Economics quarterly Business Outlook also paints a bleak picture for manufacturers and farmers because of the strength of the dollar and high interest rates.
But it says the finance sector, which is already in the process of downsizing as banks act to protect profit margins, faces 2012 “with the most trepidation”.
“It has finally sunk in that weak credit growth may be the new normal,” the report says.
(theaustralian.com)

Teaming Up on Innovation

Chances are your employees have some ideas about how to make the business better. Some of them might be brilliant; others abysmal. But few companies are able to effectively corral the ideas and separate the wheat from the chaff, meaning many so-called growth strategies are simply the product of political savvy rather than holistic calculations.
Enter John Varvaris, CFO at fast-growing Best Doctors. He joined the $120 million firm, which provides an employee benefit in the form of a network of leading specialists for additional consultation on major medical decisions, in late 2008 to help it move “from the go-go stage to the middle market,” says the former Ernst & Young partner and insurance-company CFO.
(cfo.com)

Is Finance a Business Intelligence Customer Or Owner?

Using cloud computing for Business Intelligence (BI) promises to improve the quality and increase the speed of data-based decision making by tackling two historic BI pain points: the lack of ubiquitous access to data, and too many ill-matched, difficult-to-integrate data silos that inhibit composite analysis. Theoretically, cloud computing can aggregate any type of data for use by anyone in the organization in near real time. And once the data is uniquely combined and standardized across the enterprise, forward-looking and historical analytics become not only much more insightful but also proprietary.
In effect, BI graduates to the rank of a corporate asset, on par with intellectual property (IP).
(cfo.com)

How to Diagnose What’s Wrong With Your Business

Over the years, I have met a lot of entrepreneurs who have been frustrated by low profits, lack of growth, or the stress of the never-ending demands. Many struggle with all three. While every business is different, there are common denominators. In fact, I believe there are 10. The tricky part is that failing to have a handle on just one of these areas can result in mediocre performance, a stressful existence, or ultimate and intimate failure. That is one reason the failure rate for small businesses is so high (here are some others).
(nytimes.com)

When Disaster Thunders Through the Cloud

Cloud computing — and the cloud-computing business model — is maturing at a rapid pace with new solutions, systems, and a seemingly never-ending conga line of vendors offering compelling reasons (and deals) for why you should move to the cloud, however they define it. For those CFOs who have enterprise risk management burned into their portfolio of accountabilities, it’s important to examine those offers with a gimlet eye.
One of the core value propositions of cloud computing is that your enterprise’s IT disaster recovery (ITDR) plan is taken care of by your cloud provider.
(cfo.com)

Think ‘Virtual teams’ and not ‘Outsourcing’

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:36:26 +0000

Even as more and more entrepreneurs are opening up to the idea of dealing with “virtual teams” involving advanced cloud technology, there still remain areas where they are hesitant during the initial process start-ups. One of the common concerns being the identification of “outsource-able” components of the business processes.

What could have been an easily closed deal usually become a lengthy process of decision making like the other day one of our prospective clients, after a long chat wrapped the call saying,”This was a useful conversation. But let me now review my accounting processes and identify those components that can be offshore outsourced to your team.” Even though we successfully closed the deal later on, but in other cases the business owners are convinced about dealing with virtual teams, but often get tangled in the process of sorting out the details of such set ups.

Most small and medium businesses today understand that outsourcing, an extension of virtual teams, can be of strategic advantage. What often stops them from moving forward to take this advantage is the inability to identify the ‘outsource-able’ components and set up the work flow. Some give it a try and soon realize that the somewhat complex nature of their financial activity which is often low-volume and high diversity in terms of the financial transactions did not lend itself easily to outsourcing. And the question arises if the tasks that could be outsourced were of sufficient volume that it would result in a significant time savings to justify a long-term arrangement.

But I think we have already moved on from the outsourcing era into the virtual team era. Work flows that cross boundaries of location and geography are now taken for granted. Cross-cultural barriers may still pose some challenges, but technology has facilitated the functioning of virtual teams as never before. For example, in an accounts payable work flow, indexing and posting of vendor invoices can happen in a particular location and approvals from different other locations. The Internet provides for the work flow to sit on a common platform that each operator can access from anywhere.

In such a context, the art of setting up a virtual team outweighs the skill of identifying and outsourcing the “outsource-able” components. Most of us will agree that the competitive advantage of companies are influenced to the greatest extent today by the efficiency of their teams. It is going to be those organizations that excel in creating teams both physically and virtually that will have their noses in front.

Below are some key points to help entrepreneurs get a better understanding while setting up of their virtual team network.
In a blog by a professional consultant it was illustrated:

“Experts on this subject, including Yael Zofi, in her latest book, “A Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams,” has identified eight key characteristics of high-performing virtual teams, which every start-up founder should understand and enable:

1. Members exhibit a global mindset – they look outward, not inward. Effective virtual leaders widen their focus from the local to the global, which implicitly creates an environment of respect. Respect engenders buy-in, without which members can’t take ownership of work product and work toward a common goal.

2. Members share responsibility for achieving the mission. High performing teams have a sense of purpose where members internalize their piece of the mission, thereby transcending the isolation that defines working in a virtual environment. Team members develop an understanding about their mutual dependence to achieve objectives.

3. A culture of openness facilitates trust and authenticity. Effective founders work to create and maintain an environment of team trust to defuse miscommunications. They focus on behaviors, not on personalities, because they know this engenders trust. Then they “say what they mean and mean what they say” to model authenticity.

4. Members engage in meaningful communication with each other. High-performing virtual teams establish and maintain standards on frequency and modes of communication, and hold members accountable for acting accordingly. They also regularly use synchronous communication at critical points to speak with each other.

5. An easy flow of information exists using various forms of technology. Everyone must have access to appropriate technology to enable reliable, current exchanges of information. The amount of “pushed” information (unfiltered e-mails and phone calls) to team members is lower than “pulled” data (e-bulletin boards and intranets).

6. A conflict management mechanism. Conflicts are inevitable, and when even simple miscommunications don’t get acknowledged and fixed, trust gets eroded. The founder or leader must actively engage team members early, and follow up to ensure appropriate resolution. When this happens, lengthy energy-draining confrontations are avoided.

7. Work systems produce deliverables within defined constraints. When team members are geographically dispersed, a rigorous effort is required by all team members to coordinate and align components of critical work systems to meet deadlines within time and budgetary constraints.

8. Members have a positive “can do” attitude that spans time and distance. They must all assume their efforts will lead to success. When conflicts and tensions arise, as they inevitably do, members hold these situations within the context of the larger picture and look to quickly find solutions, rather than assign blame.”

As present times witness the changing of virtual team networking into an everyday reality for business owners, it is important to focus on collaboration,innovation and team member satisfaction while engaging advanced cloud technology, interactive regularised communication and setting up of definite and measurable targets.

18 January, 2012

admin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:18:13 +0000

The Top 10 Business Plan Mistakes

It’s been nearly seven years since I posted Top 10 Business Plan Mistakes on this site. Looking back and reading the post again today, I think the list holds up very well. Still, I can’t resist making a few changes. So here is my revised version for 2012, incorporating what I wrote back then that still holds true.
1. Misunderstanding the purpose: It’s the planning that matters, not just the document. You engage in planning your business because planning becomes management. Planning is a process of setting goals and establishing specific measures of progress, then tracking your progress and following up with course corrections. The plan itself is just the first step; it is reviewed and revised often. Don’t even print it unless you absolutely have to. Leave it on a digital network instead.
(reuters.com)

Five Tools for Social Entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurs use business ventures as a means to solve the world’s most complex problems.
These days, a growing number of social entrepreneurs are building for-profit business models, bypassing government association and the confining structure of the nonprofit classification. In a number of states, including California and New York, entrepreneurs can now form so-called B Corporations, which allow company directors to weigh social missions over financial returns.
As a result, more tools are popping up to aid the socially conscious business owner. Here are five resources designed to help do-good entrepreneurs get their enterprises off the ground and into the black.
(entrepreneur.com)

Top Sources of Small-Business Financing in 2012

The credit crunch for small businesses is expected to ease this year, but entrepreneurs may still need to be creative in their search for financing. “The lending market for small business in 2012 is going to be much better — the best year after the recession,” according to Rohit Arora, CEO of Biz2Credit, an online credit marketplace in New York that connects small and midsize businesses with lenders.
Securing loans with a good rate won’t be easy, however. “It is going to continue to be a fight and a struggle to get small-business owners capital at fair prices,” says Ami Kassar, CEO of MultiFunding, a small-business lending consulting firm in Broad Axe, Pa. “It is going to take a long time for us to work our way through this situation.”
(entrepreneur.com)

Six Business Trends to Watch This Year

It may be a shiny new year, but it’s full of the kind of uncertainty that makes business owners bite their nails. Will the economy get worse or maybe a little better? Will consumers keep spending? Or climb back into their shells?
In 2012, it will pay to keep an eye on a few key big-picture trends. Here are six that make my list for top insomnia producers:
Winter sales slump? Retail research firm America’s Research Group says January and February may be deathly slow, as more than 40 percent of consumers said they overspent on the holidays. That’s a whole lot of holiday hangover. It will likely take creativity to book sales in the next 60 days.
(entrepreneur.com)

Will 2012 Be the Year You Start a New Business?

When you’re entering the fifth year of a grueling economic downturn, it’s easy to get discouraged. But some would-be entrepreneurs aren’t letting unemployment figures get them down — they’re seizing the chance to start their own business.
While the tough economy poses challenges, there are also some distinct advantages to starting a business now, including:
Cheap real estate
Affordable leases and cooperative landlords
Weaker competition
Vendors willing to offer generous terms
Low-cost advertising options
(entrepreneur.com)

How to Be a Strategic Communicator: 5 Tips

Even CFOs who are bona fide strategic partners may still fumble when talking finance to the rest of the company. To effectively collaborate with the executive team, the board, and other departments on key financial decisions, they should tell the story behind the numbers, not just interpret them, says Suzanne Bates, founder and CEO of Bates Communications.
That may mean delegating some accounting responsibilities to direct reports and investing more time into honing communication skills, Bates says. “When you get to this level, 80% of your job is communication,” she says. With that in mind, here are five tips to become a more influential, engaging communicator.
(cfo.com)

Europe Counters U.S. in Cloud Computing

European governments, determined not to lose another technology battle to the U.S., are giving domestic companies a leg-up in the cloud.
France set up a venture in November with companies includingFrance Telecom SA (FTE) and Thales SA (HO) to offer on-demand rental of hardware, software and applications that are “made in France.” The German government is working on stricter data- protection rules that would include as a criterion the location of servers that host often confidential and sensitive user data.
(bloomberg.com)

Analysis: Ditch the assumption developed economies are safe

The downgrade of much of Europe’s credit ratings demonstrates in perhaps the bluntest terms so far the collapse of any lingering — if lazy — assumptions that developed states are somehow “safer” than emerging counterparts.
In the years to come, investors may make much harder-nosed assessments of how much to lend Western nations and how cheaply to do it, scrutinizing their economics, demographics and particularly politics much more sharply.
The long-term financial and geopolitical implications may be massive, making it harder for the world’s richest states to find the funds to bail out other countries or their own banks — or to meet the ever growing cost of an ageing population.
(reuters.com)

Cloud storage and virtualization: new solutions for small business

Virtualization, which allows one server to virtually act as several virtual servers, has become an increasingly important technology for businesses of all sizes. And we’re seeing a reflection of that in the marketplace.
Virtualization leader VMware hasn’t traditionally focused its efforts on small businesses. Then, according to group manager of product marketing, Ed Hsu, the company realized that half of the licenses they were selling were going to companies with fewer than 1,000 employees: by definition, small businesses, who accounted for one-third of its revenue.
(theglobeandmail.com)

HP’s CFO Speaks on the Cloud, Shadow IT, and Tumultuous Times at HP

In its most recent 10-K filing, Hewlett-Packard, number 11 among the 2011 Fortune 500, lists among its business risks “the growing demand for an increasing array of mobile computing devices” as well as the “development of cloud-based solutions,” both of which could “reduce demand for some of our existing hardware products” and consequently require HP to “transition to an environment characterized by cloud-based computing and software being delivered as a service.”
(cfo.com)

10 January, 2012

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:15:40 +0000

The Year in Review

Although we might wish it otherwise, there have been few dull moments in the business world this year. Herewith a look back at some of the hot topics covered in these pages (and on cfo.com) throughout 2011.
1) In February, we wrote about the fine art of the turnaround, and quoted a veteran CFO and consultant as saying that the majority of distressed companies he has worked with are hampered by:
A. Poor relationships with their banks
B. An inflexible workforce
C. A too-narrow base of customers
D. A limited view of cash flows
(cfo.com)

QuickBooks Today and Tomorrow

Having problems with QuickBooks? Neil Williams wants to hear about them. As CFO of Intuit, the company that owns QuickBooks (among other product lines), Williams says one of his main missions is to stay close to customers and understand their frustrations. To that end, he and other senior executives devote up to two hours each quarter to meeting with small groups of customers and integrating their feedback into business plans. “First-time experiences and ease of use are particularly important to us,” Williams says, noting that most new customers now come in through the online version of the accounting program.
(cfo.com)

20 big ideas for 2012

The views expressed are his own.
What will happen in 2012? In the spirit of the aphorism “The future is not something to be predicted, it’s something to be achieved,” let me suggest 20 transformations (which Reuters will publish in four groups of five). We need to make progress on these issues now to prevent next year from being a complete disaster.
These ideas are based on the research I did with Anthony D. Williams to write our recent book which comes out in January 2012 as a new edition entitled Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet.
All 20 are based on the idea that the industrial age has finally run out of gas and we need to rebuild most of our institutions for a new age of networked intelligence and a new set of principles – collaboration, openness, sharing, interdependence and integrity. These big ideas will be the focus of much of my writing next year.
(reuters.com)

Small business payrolls rise 55,000 in December

Small businesses created 55,000 jobs in December and increased working hours for employees, further evidence the labor market was strengthening.
In addition, workers at small businesses saw a rise in their paychecks last month, said payrolls processing company Intuit on Wednesday.
December’s gain compared to November’s upwardly revised 70,000 count, which was previously reported as an increase of 55,000.
The jobs market is showing signs of firming, with the unemployment rate dropping to a 2-1/2-year low of 8.6 percent in November. In addition, first-time applications for state unemployment benefits are hovering near 3-1/2-year lows.
(reuters.com)

Best of 2011: Technology

If 2010 was the year when cloud computing first entered the CFO’s consciousness, and its theoretical shortcomings and benefits were debated in something of a vacuum, 2011 was devoted to rolling up sleeves and digging into the cloud’s practical applications. How was cloud computing altering the relationship between the CFO and CIO? How was moving IT capital expenditures to the cloud’s pay-as-you-go, operating-expense model working out? What were the differences between the three main cloud flavors: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)? And speaking of service, what services were the vendors really providing and at what cost? What guarantees were they providing in their contracts, and how much risk were they assuming? (The answers to the last: very few and not any.)
(cfo.com)

Basics of Accounting Are Vital to Survival for Entrepreneurs

Few people start a business because they are good with numbers. In fact, the terms “accounting” and “financial analysis” tend to put business owners to sleep or send them screaming from the room. But to run a business effectively, most owners need to have some understanding of their finances. It is, for example, entirely possible for a company to be profitable but fail anyway because it does not have enough cash coming in to pay its bills.
“It’s like a racecar that goes too fast and runs out of gas,” said Doug Tatum, a serial entrepreneur who is a visiting professor of entrepreneurship at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Business owners do not necessarily need to know how to prepare a balance sheet, but they do have to know which gauges to watch.
(nytimes.com)

Why We Are Uneasy About the Global Economy in 2012: Harold James

The New Year opens with greater nervousness in financial markets and among policy makers than at any time since the Great Depression.
The gloom is deeper even than in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008, a much greater calamity than anything that actually happened in 2011 (as opposed to what people feared might happen). This dark outlook stems from a state of mind we share with those who lived through the Depression era: the conviction that available policy tools are limited in their effectiveness.
The modern crisis has two parts: an inability to envisage the long-term future; and a realization that, as a consequence, there is no such thing as a safe or secure asset. This combination makes for short-termism.
(Bloomberg.com)

Best of 2011: Accounting

After much brooding about whether the United States would fully meld its financial reporting with international financial reporting standards (IFRS), the Securities and Exchange Commission ended 2011 without making its long-awaited, long-delayed decision on the issue. In fact, after predicting that the decision would likely come sometime in 2011, the SEC doesn’t appear likely to opine on the matter until far into 2012. In a December 5 speech before the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), James Kroeker, the SEC’s chief accountant, said that the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board were “many months away from finalization of even the small group of key . . . projects” essential for convergence.
(cfo.com)

Free Cash Profiles: The Retailers

The difference a quarter can make.
By the end of the third quarter of 2011, the retail industry had plowed much of its cash into inventory for the upcoming holiday season. Typically, retailers are the least liquid and the least profitable in the pre-yuletide quarter.
Thus, a sample of the 195 public companies selling directly to consumers recorded a gloomy median free cash profile (FCP) of -0.78% at the end of the third quarter of 2011, the most recent numbers available. (See chart below.) That’s far less than the 4.95% median FCP for all industries as of the end of 2010.
(cfo.com)

Growing Retailers Spark High Returns

Initial 2011 results point to the second strong Christmas season in a row, with many retailers clearly on the upswing. Selling everything from apparel, jewelry, and fashion accessories to auto parts, electronics, and pharmaceuticals, the retail industry encompasses a broad assortment of businesses delivering on a plethora of customer needs. To deliver value for shareholders, they must deliver value to their customers. How? By providing products they want at prices they’re willing to pay in an inviting environment. The successful companies have learned to motivate buyer demand in the face of tough economic conditions, high unemployment, and low consumer confidence.
(cfo.com)

Breaking the myth

admin — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:08:45 +0000

Australia is a land of franchises which nestles a large network of small businesses whose “owners can leverage a strong brand name and purchasing power of the larger company while keeping their own investment affordable”.
It is often seen that most people leave their otherwise stable salaried jobs and start their own small businesses as they wanted to be there own bosses. But they often get entangled in a common problem among small business owners known as “Entrepreneurial Myth”or “E-Myth” first articulated by Michael Gerber. The mythic assumption is that the business owner often thinks that his expertise in a given technical field would automatically make him an expert at running a business on the same field while in reality he needs additional business management skills to keep his business running smoothly. Even though basic business skills can be easily acquired with time, but the backbone of the small business – “Finance” should be handled by financial experts who can easily manage it while predicting on the emerging trends of the market to facilitate timely and informed business decisions to be taken for future investments.
We have started dealing with small business store owners in Australia since July and have grown with ease so far guided by our four-year-old experience of providing corporate finance services to a reputed Australian franchise. As mentioned above that the small store owners are usually part of a larger franchise network, we decided to draw examples from our experiences with franchise network and outline plans to facilitate the growth of the small store networks.
The following are a few things that I have learned while dealing with the small store networks:
1. Neat Packaging:Once our StylusFMS team have documented all the details of the small business processes using easily accessible online accounting cloud tools, the services could be very well packaged providing the owner with the advantages of well kept and highly organized books which will be further appreciated by his tax accountant.
2. Time-Cost Benefits: One of the best thing about dealing with our team here is the time-cost advantage.While our offshore virtual team of expert financials keep track of your daily accounts, the owners can put their own time to better use such as ways of increasing sales through effective marketing strategies. And all these at a price advantage of 60% lower than charged by local bookkeepers there.
3. Choice of cloud tools: We have seen that it is important that the small store owners take an active part in making the choice of cloud tools to be used while dealing with a well co-ordinated set up of a virtual finance team which will further establish a greater sense of ownership between the owner and the hired team. Packages such as Xero, online accounting software for invoicing/billing, accounts payable, bank reconciliation and bookkeeping, work well while handling finances of small Australian stores. While keeping simplicity and ease of use as top draws, SugarSync, an online backup and file sharing service for secured cloud storage of your files and Dropbox, facilitating easy sharing of photos, videos and docs,are two of the many options available for managing paperwork that can be digitized.
4. Good initiation: Spend the initial time required for setting all the terms of reference in place as having a well-documented initiation process for the virtual set up of our finance team has helped us immensely to keep the process running smoothly for a long time to come. Well begun is indeed half done.
So store owners in Australia, we are ready to serve you and look forward to talk to you as soon as you are back from yet another fun filled holiday break!

Happy New Year!

22 December, 2011

admin — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:03:03 +0000

December 22, 2011

Leverage: The Dynamite Strapped to Our Markets

Last week, I was talking to my friend, Landon Rowland. Landon is the kind of guy who knows what is going on in the business world. He’s highly respected as a national leader in the industrial space, having run a major railroad. But he’s also the chairman of Janus Capital, he understands finance like the back of his hand, and he is a major civic leader with a deep knowledge of politics and the regulatory world. Last week, he says to me, “Dylan, no matter who I talk to, no one can give me the total American bank exposure to the Eurozone.” Landon knew how much his own bank stood to lose directly if the Eurozone banks couldn’t pay their debts, but as to the total risk to our system, no way. He couldn’t find out. And it’s not because people were keeping secrets, it’s probably because no one knows. So the danger is that some random strikes in Greece, a country whose economy is the size of Dallas, could set off a chain reaction destroying the American banking system.
The world’s financial system is so tightly linked, so tightly coupled, that semi-random events halfway around the world with zero real economy impact on anything American can still crash our economy. And the links are opaque, so we don’t really know who is vulnerable or how to firewall off the real economy from financial speculation.
The root cause is something I’ve written about in my book, Greedy Bastards: leverage. Leverage means borrowing money and using the proceeds to invest or speculate — it’s a way to multiply gains and losses. Leverage isn’t good or bad — like dynamite, it can be used on construction projects, or as a dangerous weapon. When you buy a house with a mortgage, you’re using leverage. When you borrow from your father to go gambling in Las Vegas, that too is a form of leverage. And let’s not even get to complex betting instruments used by big banks known as derivatives, because then leverage starts to get dangerous. (Huffingtonpost.com)

The path to becoming a Fortune 500 CEO

While we all know stories of legendary CEOs who seem born to the role, most CEOs are not born, they are made. People who aspire to the role have to seize the opportunity and set a path: to manage their career choices and craft their experience to make them a likely CEO candidate.
What does that path look like? To find out, the CEO & Board Practice at Heidrick & Struggles analyzed the careers of all current Fortune 500 CEOs.
Here’s some of what the study discovered:
Develop Financial Acumen
About 30 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs spent the first few years of their careers developing a strong foundation in finance. This is by far the most common early experience of today’s CEOs. As the second-largest constituent, CEOs who started out in sales and marketing roles account for only about 20 per cent of the current big company CEO population.
The prevalence of CEOs with a strong financial background points to the fact that large companies prefer CEOs who can create value for the company and who understand the company’s financial drivers. Typically, companies are looking for CEOs who can develop a strategy and understand the financial ramifications of business decisions.(theglobeandmail.com)
Read more

Ten tips for a successful business turnaround

I have taken part in many business turnarounds in my career, and time and again I noticed the same problems, regardless of whether the reason for the turnaround was a relatively minor situation or a reorganization after bankruptcy. Here are the ten steps that need to happen during any major business adjustment and some of the pitfalls to avoid along the way.(theglobeandmail.com)
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Before Launching, Organize Personal Finances

What happens when your paychecks stop and your business isn’t bringing in steady cash flow or locking in meaningful investment? You live on personal savings. To give your venture the best shot, prepare for that reality before you quit your day job. You can get started with this checklist.
1. First determine how much you will need to cover personal expenses while launching your startup. Mint.com has a good monthly budget calculator. Budget for 18 to 24 months without a salary, to be safe. That length could vary, depending on how quickly you earn a profit or get a round of financing.(Businessweek.com)
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When to Let Employees Work from Home

Q: When should a company allow its employees to work from home?
A: It’s not as easy as giving everybody a laptop and sending them on their way. But when a company’s leadership creates the right workplace culture, says Jim Ball, co-founder of Alpine Access, a Denver-based virtual call-center company and a pioneer in the delicate art of telecommuting, the arrangement can benefit workers, management and the bottom line.
“You have to have it in your DNA the fact that you don’t have workers coming into an office space,” says Ball, whose 4,500 employees–spread across 45 states–all work from home.(Reuters.com)
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7 Easy (and Cheap) Ways to Develop Employees

Michael Lehman, former CFO of Sun Microsystems, has always placed a high priority on supporting employee development. Bolstered by big-company resources and ambitious rotation programs at Sun, his philosophy has helped propel at least eight of his former employees into large-company CFO roles, and countless others into corporate controller roles at high-profile companies like Apple and Coca-Cola.
Lehman, now CFO at venture-backed Palo Alto Networks, is currently working out how to maintain the focus on growing employees’ skills with a leaner staff, fewer resources, and a much smaller budget for such initiatives. As Palo Alto’s first CFO, Lehman says the topic is an important component to helping the company scale. “When I got there, two years ago, there was no concept of employee development; development was for products,” he said during his presentation at CFO’s Playbook for Private Companies conference in Miami earlier this week. Although he believes the details of such development should rest largely with the employees themselves, he pointed out multiple ways that a finance executive can create the right environment for it to occur.(cfo.com)
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Management Tip of the Day: Don’t let your team delegate back

Beware of the team members who, when you delegate work to them, find a way to push it back onto you, says Harvard Business Review.
The Management Tip of the Day offers quick, practical management tips and ideas from Harvard Business Review and HBR.org (http:\\www.hbr.org). Any opinions expressed are not endorsed by Reuters.
“Have you ever delegated a task to a subordinate, and somehow it ends up back on your plate? Beware of this ‘reverse delegation.’
Employees who are unsure how to do something may enlist you in doing it for them. Don’t automatically solve problems or make decisions for hesitant employees. Focus on generating alternative solutions together, making sure the employee maintains responsibility for executing.
Don’t fall for it when a subordinate makes statements like, ‘You’ll do a better job with this.’ While flattering, and possibly even true, they are often a way to get you involved when you needn’t be.”
- Today’s management tip was adapted from the book, “Guide to Project Management.” (Reuters.com)
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Three Ways to Survive the Euro-zone Mess

It’s the volatility, stupid.
Last week, as European banks seemed perilously close to a credit freeze, six major central banks rushed in to ease interbank borrowing. The stock markets reacted buoyantly. By Monday, however, Standard & Poor’s placed 14 euro-zone nations on tap for possible credit-rating downgrades. Tomorrow, European Union leaders are getting together in Brussels in an urgent attempt to keep their economic ties from unraveling.
To be sure, the overseas economic crisis poses serious financial risks for many U.S.-based and -managed companies if it spreads to these shores. Yet for many others — particularly small and midsize firms with global customers — it’s the volatility spawned by the roller-coaster events in Europe that’s the real threat.
To the CFOs of such firms, the threat, while worrisome, is indirect. While they haven’t yet seen direct hits to their businesses, they are observing that their overseas clients have become cautious about buying products they might have snapped up before. Days or weeks may also pass before a euro-zone purchaser will sign a long-term contract.(CFO.com)
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Social Networking Lessons of 2011

I like to call 2011 “The Year of Social Media.” Small businesses, franchises, nonprofits and entrepreneurs all got into the social-media game — throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what stuck. To many, it probably seemed a chaotic mess of apps and gadgets flooding the market. Businesses had a lot of options to try to connect with customers, and some clear lessons emerged from the chaos.
1. Loyal customers are your best channel to new business.
A lot of marketing energy is spent on branching out to find new customers. That’s fantastic and necessary. What 2011 showed us, though, is that a loyal customer is still your best customer and ultimately your least expensive path to new customers. Loyal customers are more likely to engage with you and your brand community — and connect you to their networks on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social destinations.(Reuters.com)
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Business borrowing signals Canadian growth: PayNet

Canadian commercial lending growth accelerated in the third quarter, showing smaller businesses expanded even as Europe’s deepening debt crisis rattled investors worldwide, according to a PayNet Inc report.
PayNet, which tracks commercial financing to thousands of small and medium-sized companies, said on Thursday its Canadian Business Lending Index rose 6 percent from the second quarter and 13 percent year over year.
It was the first quarter of double-digit year-on-year growth since early 2008.
The quarter-over-quarter jump was the biggest since the beginning of 2007, before the global financial crisis knocked the economy into recession.
The commercial finance sector includes non-bank players such as machinery makers, whose loans and leases to customers are secured against the equipment sold.
(Reuters.com)
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Why small business owners need to join the cloud?

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:30:56 +0000

It is a great time to enter the world of cloud computing especially for small business owners who can benefit the most with its cost effective set up while making use of the latest cloud technology to maintain a smoothly running finance cycle for their usually demanding business processes.

Too much to be done in too little time

While small business owners need more time to get involved in the day-to day business activities but most often gets entangled in keeping a neat view of their finances especially when needed to take a quick call on a change in processes. They are always expected to keep a track of the money they owe to other people and others who owe to them. As small business owners mostly deal with multiple task operators, it is most likely that they often get tangled in their own mess when there is too much to do in too little time. Eventually, it is the bookkeeping process that suffers the first blows before other processes gets affected at such demanding situations. As they can not afford to spend too much money on maintaining a fully functional finance department, it is only but necessary to enter the great world of cloud computing which gives an immense return on every penny spend.

Right time to be on cloud

All one need is to hire online finance and accounting service providers such as what we provide at StylusFMS, who takes care of your entire finance processes without the small business owners spending on any extra sophisticated softwares or maintaining an on-board team of financials. A whole finance department can be easily set up on the cloud with the help of basic cloud tools (which are easily available on the Internet). Financial service provider like our team at StylusFMS can meet them exactly where they are in their current finance department set up while still bringing them the latest cloud technology using the latest tools. And if you are already on the virtual private network, then we can easily serve with F&A and bookkeeping services no matter where you are placed in the world.

Corporate financial service provider such as StylusFMS not only update the books of the small business owners but also help them in maintaining their financial statements, including tax statements, while keeping an account of the overall progress of the business processes. Updated records maintained by top finance professionals further help in drawing a common trend in income and expenditure cycles which in turn help in making informed financial decisions at appropriate times and also helping in predicting upcoming crests in the business cycles.

Just a click away!

Hence, hire yourself an entire finance department and that too with just a click…Below is what you will get by working on cloud with finance service providers such as StylusFMS:

Get access to a wider pool of global professionals with a wide range of professional skills
Increase or decrease your off-shore team size in accordance to the need of business processes
Optimize your finance and accounting processes
Get access to cutting edge technology without any major capital investment
Get huge cost advantage while engaging needful resources and latest available technology

As the world is going through the turmoil of plummeting market scenario, it is only but wise to join this upcoming cheap bandwagon of Cloud computing to survive and continue for better times ahead. It is better to join now when it is at its initial stages before this too becomes a costlier affair with predictable increase in its demand for providing online services.

Pujarini B.N.

Using tools to gain competitive advantage

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:10:21 +0000

Cloud computing have been in news for quite a long time now…Even though most of us know what is cloud computing, below is a list of basic cloud tools popularly used in remote engagements. And if you already know about it, then we have enlisted a few of the latest cloud offerings of the last few months.

Cloud computing is constantly evolving in providing business processes involved in any sector of life with an opportunity to capitallize on the advanced technology available at a click away and all in a reasonable pricing involving a magic team of virtual experts. This can be only possible with a constant invention of better tools to run a “frictionless” remote engagement.

The basic tools that are mostly available free online or at a cheap price such as – Google Applications(Gmail, Google Documents,Calender etc.) Outlook, Wordpress, Salesforce.com, Zoho, Quickbooks online edition, Powerpoint, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Analytics – are the first steps to establish a smooth functioning of remote engagement with a virtual team. This can be further enhanced with an active participation in other communicative and social media tools such as twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype, Delicious, WebEx, Blogger, Wikipedia etc.

Apart from setting up the basic tools, it is also important to keep one updated with the latest offerings in technology at various fields of the cloud in order to gain competitive advantage especially in an age where technology changes at every second trying to shrink the world as one whole economy.

There have been a series of latest offerings under the banner of Cloud Tools that are aimed at establishing a smooth communicative channel between the virtual team and the business owners covering a wide range of functionalities of cloud computing such as security of processing data, devices with cloud compatibility and hardware and software development packages to facilitate cloud workings.
The below are just a very few of the offerings made by Cloud developers and enhancers.

There has been a series of launch of advanced application devices including latest versions of Apple iphones, Apple iPads and other similar offerings from other IT giants to facilitate transaction between cloud based service providers and entrepreneurs.

This was further boosted by a solid-state storage provider for cloud services – SolidFire who “has raised a new $25 million round of funding to help improve performance and reliability for emerging cloud providers”. It was further reported in Reuters.com, “SolidFire sells powerful solid-state hard drives to cloud service providers, which in turn boost performance and reliability of said cloud services. Along with the hardware, SolidFire gives cloud providers tools that can help automate how they use storage systems, which creates a higher degree of management potential.”

There has also been some latest offerings on achieving better security for your business data as – “Dome9 Security™, the leading provider of cloud security management for public and private clouds, as well as for dedicated and virtual private servers (VPS), at Cloud Expo 2011 announced it has entered into the Cloud Tools Program with Rackspace® Hosting, (NYSE: RAX), the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry.” (as reported in prnewswire,com)

The forever growing opportunities of cloud computing show tremendous potential of facilitating functioning of business processes at cheaper rates without compromising on qualitative technology while the latest tools are ways to leverage the productivity of remote arrangements.

Don’t think anymore while you can be easily a part of this new age of technology…..

Pujarini Basu Nadaf

Analysis: Are you having enough of it?

Thomas — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:20:31 +0000

A former colleague of mine who was a visionary and a very creative mind used to warn us of too much analysis that would cause ‘analysis paralysis’. He would sooner side with Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’ than worry much about Business Intelligence.

However, the tools that are accessible even to small business leaders now, thanks to the advent and progress of cloud computing, allow for information driven decision making far more than ever before. But many business owners and CFOs are still unable to take advantage of this opportunity because of two key reasons:

Their plates are already full and to make room for coming around to address the area of business intelligence or if you like accounting intelligence sounds very daunting
Small and medium sized businesses have a limited competency spectrum at their command and often struggle to find the complementary skills to both complete the processes end to end as well as step back and analyze data.

Stated differently, in order to finish the accounting cycle well in time and then tackle analytically – all costs, marketing costs, project profitability, product profitability, customer profitability, key stake holder performance etc, seems quite an ask. Given a dream team that commands all the right skills and attitudes and compliments each other, it would seem like a walk in the park. But that’s not usually reality!

But, could a new reality help you? The reality of virtual teams complimenting your existing effort to fill in the gaps? It gives you the opportunity to design your own ‘visionary finance team structure’ in a flexible way. Flexible because you can tailor the team – both your on premise one as well as a virtually engaged outsourced team such as StylusFMS to give you maximum cost efficiencies in your context. I am finishing a template for this and will be happy to share and discuss with you if you email me at thomaspm(at)stylusinc.com