Strictly Business

Happy Earth Day! The news this week is full of environmental statistics. On campus, we will discontinue the sale of bottled water at the end of the semester. This move is estimated to cost the campus $20,000 in revenue. But, other costs will incur, as well. Water stations will be installed. Water fountains will be upgraded, making it easier to fill reusable water bottles. Besides our “earth consciousness,” what strategic goals do we address with this move? How do we evaluate its success? How do we measure the tradeoffs made?

We manage what we measure. So, measurement matters. But, many of the measurement tools associated with ecological management are denominated in flow speeds or error rates or landfill tons. These measures are not meaningful to many of us. Here, we can learn from quality management. Reporting quality problems and progress received appropriate attention when we converted all the problems to a single, common and familiar denominator (dollars!) and added them up. Cost of quality reports revealed to company managers, regulators, legislators and the public reasonable estimates of the expense associated with poor quality. With this data in hand, managers justified expenditures necessary to fix, or even better prevent, quality problems.

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Posted by Lee Warren at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Are you standing in line today at the Post Office to mail your tax return to the IRS? The Internal Revenue Service is expecting your completed individual tax return (or an automatic extension request) for 2008 and today is the deadline. But paper and Post Office lines are so ... last century! The IRS wants your tax return ... but digital only please!

The number of returns filed electronically has grown dramatically over the past few years. Electronic, or e-filing, started in 1990 with 4 million returns and reached 90 million last year. Big number? Maybe, but it only represents 58% of individual returns filed and far less than the 80% goal set early this decade by the IRS.

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Posted by Del DeVries at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TryXBRL is a new information resource with XBRL-tagged financial statements for over 12,000 publicly traded corporations. The purpose is to educate financial statement preparers and users on new capabilities for analyzing financial data with reduced cost, time, and complexity. So what is XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language and why should you care?

XBRL is revolutionizing business reporting through electronic communication of business and financial data. The old days of accountants issuing static reports which require laborious and costly processes of manual re-entry and comparison to work with the data are coming to an end. Computers can treat XBRL data "intelligently": they can recognize the information in a XBRL document, select it, analyze it, store it, exchange it with other computers and present it automatically in a variety of ways for users. XBRL greatly increases the speed of handling of financial data, reduces the chance of error and permits automatic checking of information. (ref: http://www.xbrl.org/Home/)

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Posted by Del DeVries at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)