Laresa McIntyre's blog

Here are 10 best practices for accounts payable in no particular order.  Hopefully your A/P department can put a check beside each of these items.

1. Always pay from original invoices.  If you have to pay from a copy, be sure to check your records for the same invoice number and dollar amount.

We in the finance & accounting field can be creatures of habit.  We get used to looking at things in terms of months.  This is how we are schooled and how most companies set up their books.  The problem is reporting on a monthly basis can make analyzing trends and making comparisons between periods difficult because we aren’t dealing with periods of equal length.&nbs

Today’s post is a guest post from a colleague of mine.  His name is William Crozier and he has over sixteen years of experience dealing with tax issues including their proper financial reporting. 

The time has finally come for private companies that issue GAAP financials to implement FIN 48 – Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes.

Over the past 4 years, I have completed 4 marathons and when I stopped to think about the effort required to train for one, it occurred to me there are many parallels to the effort expended in starting and running a business.

Deciding To Do It

Finance & accounting departments are ultimately about reporting.  If you are a public company, there is the required reporting to the SEC and the shareholders.  And regardless of whether you are public or private, there are many other external reports that allow the business to meet its obligations to external stakeholders like banks.  But the focus of this post is on the

Someone once told me a story about a man who only kept two files in his desk -- one on how to centralize the company and one on how to decentralize it.  It turns out every time there was a change in leadership, there would be a corresponding shift in the way the company was structured.  Why all the flip flopping?  Is one structure better than the other?  Or is this just a

I’m sure you’ve heard at some point in time someone say “but we’ve invested all this money so we have to keep going”.  For the folks that say this, the need to continue on a path is directly correlated to how much money has already been spent.  For them I have two words — sunk costs.

I’m currently reading “Discovery-Driven Growth” by Rita McGrath & Ian McMillan and came across this quote which I thought was so appropriate for today’s post:  “Whenever you see someone doing something really stupid in business, there’s a good chance that he thinks he’s being rewarded for it.”  We all know this scenario and it doe