The history of pie charts is more fascinating than you might think. A secret agent who plotted the collapse of the French economy with counterfeit money and the founder of modern nursing are but two of the intriguing historical characters who used pie charts to explain and advocate. The first known pie chart was published in 1801 by Scottish engineer, political economist, and secret agent Willi...
The first thing to know about Pivot Tables is that there is nothing a Pivot Table does that an advanced user can’t also do through writing formulas. The value of the Pivot Table is that the data can be sliced and diced quickly and the drag-and-drop interface means that there is no need to wrestling with sometimes-unwieldy formulas. Instead, Pivot Tables help you explore the data and visualize the...
Days Payable Outstanding or DPO is the average number of days between the time the company receives an invoice and when the invoice is paid. DPO is typically calculated on a quarterly or annual basis. If a company has a DPO of 23 for its most recent quarter, that means it took 23 days on average to pay its suppliers during that time. DPO is a key cash-flow metric that indicates how well a compa...
A key step on a product’s long march from inventor’s brainchild to customer’s favorite gadget is manufacturing. Technically, manufacturing is the process of assembling raw materials into products on a large scale using machinery. But manufacturing is no brief stop on the journey and it must be planned for and nurtured just like any other phase in a product’s birth. An optimized manufacturing pr...
Take, for instance, the complex but necessary issues of globalization. Growing companies that have international markets in their sights will need their accounting software to seamlessly integrate multiple currencies, multiple tax jurisdictions, and multiple languages. But the key to the difference between ERP and simple accounting software goes well beyond features which can come and go. The...
...structured data can be defined as a controlled and hierarchically organized vocabulary used to describe and classify entities, be they news articles or a business’s products and services. In organizations, structured data helps make information more accessible and easier to analyze, leading to deeper insights. On the internet, it helps make information and web pages become more discover...
Metadata is frequently described as “data about other data.” Whether describing the contents of a web page, providing the technical details of the kind of camera used to capture an image, or the administrative information of usage rights, among many examples, metadata provides additional information that helps assets get found and used more efficiently. In fact, metadata is mainly designed to be m...
...In the world of accounts payable (AP), one of the most challenging jobs is managing the onslaught of supplier invoices that arrive each month. This includes verifying that the invoices are real — small businesses experience billing fraud twice as often as their larger counterparts, according to an Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) report — and then paying the ones that are....
HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language, is the simple language at the heart of the World Wide Web. Created in 1989 by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, HTML was originally considered to be a solution to help scientists at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The first website went live in August 1991. It was a page written by Berners-Lee explaining how to write HTML. To say it caug...
Imagine if a warehouse wasn’t a place to store inventory but just another stop along the distribution path to a customer. This is the idea behind an inventory management strategy known as rolling inventory. Using this strategy, the delivery truck augments the warehouse space. Instead of going through the time and expense of offloading and storing an entire truck’s worth of goods, the rolling inven...
A financial controller’s list of priorities reflects the wide-ranging and complex responsibilities associated with the role – from overseeing day-to-day accounting and finance tasks to managing staff and technology. Depending on the organization, a controller may have to create new policies and processes from scratch, as well as ensuring that existing processes run as efficiently as possible.
As the head of the organization’s accounting team, the financial controller plays an increasingly strategic role in ensuring the company runs smoothly. There are many opportunities for controllers to improve the efficiency of day-to-day financial operations and enhance the business overall. New technologies help companies streamline or eliminate manual tasks and create more accurate financial...
If you want insights into how a company’s business is performing, operating income is a key metric to understand. Operating income measures the profitability of a company’s core business operations after deducting all operating expenses. It shows how efficiently the company can generate cash from its business operations. By excluding the effect of taxes, interest and one-time events such as acquis...
When the first bits were dropped on the first hard-disk drive, it’s not likely that computer scientists imagined the onslaught of data just 50 years would bring. But those pioneers probably recognized that data management was going to become a challenge. Part of meeting that challenge is data modeling: the practice of developing data storage and retrieval solutions that fit the requirements of a p...
In the data mart model, marketing, sales, finance and each operational business unit has access to the segment of the data warehouse and the information that is most relevant to them. Instead of live queries run against mammoth tables, queries run through a data mart are tight and targeted — and fast. Just as important, data marts provide frameworks to deliver actionable reports more rapidly....
An example of the former comes from the publishing industry. A publisher creates books which they sell to bookstores and bookstore chains at a steep discount in exchange for a bulk purchase. Historically, the discount offered to bookstores is 40%, allowing the book store room to make a profit by selling it to consumers at a higher price.
That is exactly how blockchain works, however super-charged by computers to have thousands or tens of thousands of nodes. When an authenticated transaction is posted to one node, that information is automatically posted to them all. So, as did Scrooge in the example above, a discrepancy can be found out by checking across nodes. And since computers are at play here, a thousand nodes can be checked...
