FP&A
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How do you manage the accounting for Sales Territories and Regions?
In a fast growing and new organization our sales team is regularly restructured to accommodate changing needs in the field. Part of this change is a regular realignment of territories within regions. How do you organize and report on selling expenses in the GL or reporting systems that accommodates…
1
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Contract Management Software For SMB
Good afternoon, We are currently researching contract management software. As a relatively small company, we would only require 2 or 3 user licenses, and are looking for relatively inexpensive solution. We are interested primarily for the features surrounding vendor contract management. Any suggest…
1
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Do you train for collaboration skills?
The finance department is asked to collaborate or partner more and more with other departments in the hunt for contributing more value to the company. However, are you training these soft skills and if so how do you do it?
3
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Mileage allowances v stipend and potential tax issues
My business is a startup in US; I am UK based with good UK tax knowledge but not the intricacies of US so I want to try and make sure not digging unnecessary holes with the IRS. We have a US Sales team on a car allowance (monthly fixed) plus a mileage rate paid per business mile travelled (well bel…
4
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Car and Travel Allowances
How do you mitigate the taxable portion of the allowances for your employees?
6
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Cash Waterfall w/ quarterly contracts
Proformative, I am currently working on a cash waterfall but am running into some trouble with respect to our contracts. Unlike many SaaS companies that have Monthly Recurring Revenue, our contracts are spread out on a quarterly basis, making it a bit harder to forecast in excel. I've considered ta…
3
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Earnings Smoothing
On which side the aisle are you? I found an academic paper "EARNINGS SMOOTHING: FOR GOOD OR EVIL?*" by Peter Demerjian, et.al. that in their abstract, once you cut away for double-talk, they state good managers, smoothing is good. bad managers, well its bad. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a…
7
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Does DCF even make sense for startup company investments? If so, what discount rate would you apply?
I have a board member who wants me to run a DCF of an investment in a new product we are considering. My concern is that, like many startup endeavors, the assumptions will be SWAGs and that the DCF will not actually answer many questions for us and may actually mis-guide us given how speculative th…
8
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Business Performance Metrics: Can They be Proactive and Not Reactive?
As I have been invited more and more to the "strategic party" with our C-Suite I am getting a first- hand look at the focus and lack of quality information we have in defining and leveraging key business performance metrics (corporate performance metrics) that truly drive our results. I see that P…
12
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Bottom-up budgeting: How to make it count, and will it just get thrown out by the CEO?
It seems that every time we do a bottom-up budget, it a) takes a long time because we get inputs from across our company and have to roll it all up, and b) the bottom-up gets crushed by the top-down because regardless of how the numbers roll up, the CEO or the Board are really the ones driving the …
12
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Can I write off a defaulted promissory note as a bad debt expense?
I obtained a promissory note in return for a business loan of which the debtor has since defaulted. I obtained a summary judgement which has since been vacated due to inadequate notice to the Debtor. It now seems it is a duck in a dry pond. Can I write this off as a personal Bad Expense? Will a tax…
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HBR - Forget Business Plans; Here’s How to Really Size Up a Startup
According to Jim Dougherty in his Harvard Business Review article, "If you want to really understand a firm’s strategy—whether it’s a start up or Fortune 500 firm–you need only two documents: the compensation plan and the pricing plan." What do you think? http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/forget-busines…
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In a customer stratification model, what can be done about the "service drain" customers who are also a target account for one or more stategic suppliers? (Webinar Attendee Question)
This question was asked by an attendee during the Proformative webinar "Using Customer Stratification and Cost to Serve Information in Your Sales Efforts to Maximize Profits" held on October 9, 2012. You can view a video of the webinar and access the presentation here: https://www.proformative.com…
2
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What is the best way to get in front of an Angel investor?
If I have a company that needs a small, early stage investor, what is the best way to find and present to Angel investors?
1
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What's the best valuation metric for financial data and technology companies?
Examples: Thomson Reuters S&P Capital IQ Fidessa
3
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Does anyone have experience budgeting in a matrix organization?
We are currently organized by functional area but we will be moving to a weak matrix structure next year. This will obviously have an impact on our budget process and I would appreciate any insights on how or what to plan in a matrix organization. Thanks.
3
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How to analyze our company's true financial condition and find ways to improve?
Are there any available methods that can help in the analysis of financial condition?
14
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What is the timing of expense reimbursement to employees?
We are trying to shorten our month-end close time and one of the areas we've identified that drags things out is our expense reimbursement timeline. I would like to propose that we shorten our deadlines to submit by day 3 and approve by day 5 (currently submit by day 5 and approve by day 8). Are th…
10
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Looking for receivables factoring provider recommendations for SF Bay Area
We are early stage and have some longer term receivables we'd like to factor. Now I just need to know who would be good. Thank you.
12
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How best to structure sales commissions for a startup high end womens products?
My company is a 5 year startup that designs and manufacture very expensive women clothing and cosmetic products. We finally are ready for wholesale business and need to come up with a sales commission structure for our own sales team. I think the industry average is 12% but giving we do not have a …
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