Recent TRG blog posts

In the previous post, we examined the first three biggest Excel spreadsheet failures. In this post, we will go through the remaining four examples of why spreadsheets can become a finance professional’s worst nightmare.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has been able to slash the time required to complete their budget process by 40 per cent. And this is just one of the many benefits of an Enterprise Performance Management system.

Depressed demand and increased supply have caused oil prices to fall from over US$100 per barrel in July 2014 to $30 in February 2016. Even though prices have increased somewhat since then, with Brent reaching a five-month high of US$55.99 per barrel on September 15, many experts remain sceptical about the outlook of oil’s US$50-plus status¹. Oil and gas companies, therefore, are bracing for an extended period of low oil prices.

Companies that are constantly trying to cut down on selling, general and administrative expenses (SG&A) may actually hurt their long-term competitive position. This perspective is highlighted in a recent study by the consulting firm CEB.

According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report for Second Half 2013, email was the fourth most commonly used transmission vector by malicious infection attempts on Microsoft computers during that period. This includes malware-infected emails and phishing emails.

Spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel has long been indispensable to organisations thanks to its ubiquity, versatility, and ease of use. Such attributes, however, also make spreadsheets particularly susceptible to human errors, as demonstrated by the following cases.  

The adoption of Financial Shared Services Centre has revolutionised the strategic roles of the finance function in global corporations by delivering more added value to other functions and processes via their analytics and decision-making capabilities. Such centres have evolved to not only focus on traditional tasks, such as costs reduction but also enhance organisations’ effectiveness and efficiency in many ways.

The consulting firm Protiviti and North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management collected responses from 735 board members & finance executives about 30 risk issues that will likely have an impact on their companies in 2017.

Infor SunSystems 6.3 is now available. The latest release of this comprehensive financial management system is particularly significant because it not only delivers plenty of new features and enhancements but also runs on Infor Xi, the latest and most innovative enterprise technology platform from Infor.