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Wednesday, January 23, 2013 10:30 AM
Author: Hitesh Dixit | Vice President-FAO Operations and Solutions at Aditya Birla Minacs
Q. What global FAO sourcing trends did we witness last year and what do you think was their impact on the industry?
As CFOs continued to deal with business environment uncertainties, 2012 saw delivery stabilization across diverse verticals and practices. All the stakeholders namely clients, advisors and service providers used this opportunity to iron out current delivery glitches...
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Wednesday, November 21, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Hitesh Dixit | Vice President-FAO Operations and Solutions at Aditya Birla Minacs
WHY ARE FLASH REPORTS IMPORTANT?
An organization's CXO team needs to see periodic (often monthly) performance numbers promptly to identify focus areas and initiate remedial actions proactively. Reporting timelines are thus stringent. Most times organizations tend to blame their departments for being bottlenecks in the timely submission of information as management reports...
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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Keith Alphonso | Director of Business Development at Aditya Birla Minacs
The common preconception of the role played by finance and accounting as that of a purely back office function is not entirely correct. We often define front office activities to being anything that relates to managing clients, interacting with external partner/suppliers as well as government agencies. Those who are a part of the front office are the face of the organization—the more glamorous part of an organization...
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Wednesday, October 03, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Hitesh Dixit | Vice President-FAO Operations and Solutions at Aditya Birla Minacs
Author's Note: Hitesh Dixit, who leads the Finance and Accounting (F&A) practice at Aditya Birla Minacs was the keynote speaker at the “Reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) Tools” workshop organized by the Western India Regional Council (WIRC) of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) on September 22, 2012 in Mumbai. We caught up with him for a quick chat to gain some insight into the key learnings shared at this event.
Q. As a part of the prestigious WIRC event, what were some of your key learnings/take-aways?
Well, there are some fundamental shifts happening...
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Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Hitesh Dixit | Vice President-FAO Operations and Solutions at Aditya Birla Minacs
Editor’s Note: Hitesh Dixit, who leads the Finance and Accounting (F&A) practice at Aditya Birla Minacs, is a keynote speaker at the workshop on “Reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) Tools” organized by the Western India Regional Council (WIRC) of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) on September 22, 2012 in Mumbai. The event will bring together some top finance and accounting leaders, CEOs, business and financial analysts, BI consultants and other experts from the F&A industry. We caught up with Hitesh for a quick chat before the event....
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Wednesday, September 05, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Deepak Narayanan | Director at MyCFO
Author's Note: Today’s difficult times can actually be a blessing in disguise, allowing CFOs to drive through changes in their organizations, with the objective of preserving, improving and productively deploying cash flows. Cash flow needs to be a key metric in evaluating business and operating performance. Cash flow management improves with obtaining more visibility into cash generation and deployment and by weavings...
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Wednesday, August 08, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Keith Alphonso | Director of Business Development at Aditya Birla Minacs
However, size does matter. CFOs of large organizations (annual revenues more than $1 billion) are able to obtain better economies of scale within their F&A departments by consolidating operations, whether through a shared service facility or otherwise. This could also help them garner the critical mass to leverage the capabilities of external outsourcing services providers
In a 2010 survey of mid-market CFOs conducted...
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Tuesday, June 12, 2012 10:30 AM
Authors: Hitesh Dixit | Vice President-FAO Operations and Solutions at Aditya Birla Minacs
Pinak Dalal | Manager-FAO Operations at Aditya Birla Minacs
UNDERSTANDING DEFINED BENEFIT AND DEFINED CONTRIBUTION PENSION PLANS
Over the past few years, there has been a gradual and sustained shift in the type of retirement benefits offered by employers. Increasingly, they are now moving from Defined Benefit (DB) pension schemes to Defined Contribution (DC) pension schemes...
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Tuesday, May 29, 2012 10:30 AM
Authors: Hitesh Dixit | Vice President-FAO Operations and Solutions at Aditya Birla Minacs
Mahesh Thakur | Manager – FAO Operations at Aditya Birla Minacs
ACCOUNTING AND REPORTING STANDARDS: RECENT CHANGES
More and more organizations function globally and the use of finance and accounting (F&A) outsourcing providers is becoming more widespread (often cross border) to ensure adequate expertise and compliance. It is thus all the more imperative for CFOs to ensure that adequate internal controls are put in place and, indeed, remain effective on an ongoing basis...
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Monday, May 14, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Keith Alphonso | Director of Business Development at Aditya Birla Minacs
TECHNOLOGY COSTS UNDER THE CFO MICROSCOPE
Numbers can be daunting, especially when the numbers are in a budget and you are trying to justify costs. And CIOs know this only too well. With technology changing the way we run businesses and manage our work, a substantial amount of money today is spent on IT infrastructure management and upgrades in an organization. Forrester Research has forecast...
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Tuesday, April 24, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Yatheesh Nair | Head-FAO Delivery (Mumbai) at Aditya Birla Minacs
BUSINESS CASE: ACTIONABLE BENCHMARKING FOR SERVICE DELIVERY QUALITY
ISO 9001:2008 conformance is well established within our Minacs Finance and Accounting (F&A) outsourcing practice and we are now in the fourth triennial certification cycle. At this stage we felt the need to bring in a “next practice” method to drive higher degrees of excellence...
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Shweta Verma | Sr. Project Manager & Product Development Head-Factoring at Aditya Birla Minacs
Editor’s Note:
Aditya Birla Minacs’ Shweta Verma, along with Ramesh Revuru, is participating in the 18th Annual Factoring Conference by the International Factoring Association (IFA) in Huntington Beach, California over April 18-21. Minacs is launching Factorin SaaS at the conference; make sure you catch up with them at Booth 21 for a demo!
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By host on
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Shweta Verma | Sr. Project Manager & Product Development Head-Factoring at Aditya Birla Minacs
Editor’s Note:
Aditya Birla Minacs’ Shweta Verma, along with Ramesh Revuru, is participating in the 18th Annual Factoring Conference by the International Factoring Association (IFA) in Huntington Beach, California over April 18-21. Minacs is launching Factorin SaaS at the conference; make sure you catch up with them at Booth 21 for a demo!
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Monday, April 09, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Yatheesh Nair | Head-FAO Delivery (Mumbai) at Aditya Birla Minacs
GENESIS: HOW TO TAKE OUR QUALITY JOURNEY FORWARD?
In February 2010, a team from our Finance and Accounting (F&A) Center of Excellence (COE) sat down to review reported issues with various programs. During this process, client program teams were also involved in generating a multitude of ideas through internal Lean workshops to understand/define what constituted “defects”...
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012 10:30 AM
Authors: Hitesh Dixit | Vice President-FAO Operations and Solutions at Aditya Birla Minacs
Gauri Vaidya | Senior Manager-FAO Operations at Aditya Birla Minacs
2011 has beena very important year.We learnedabout new ideas, applied them toour processes and envisioned better ones. Today, we share our top 10 automation ideas for theaccounts payable (AP) process. We implemented many of these ideas in 2011 and are exploring and executingothers in 2012
• Use Excel to Upload to Software
Most accounting packages, including standalone or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software packages, offer this utility.Using Excel has the following benefits:...
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Sunday, February 19, 2012 10:30 AM
Authors: Keith Alphonso | Director of Business Development at Aditya Birla Minacs
Jeffrey Knopman | Cofounder and Principal, Profit Solutions Group Inc., an Aditya Birla Minacs Partner
If you are financing your business by Factoring, you had better factor in the possibility of being hit by chargebacks and deductions issued by major retailers, specialty stores and catalogues.
WHAT IS FACTORING?
So what IS factoring? Well, it’s been around for quite some time—4,000 years to be precise. Legend has it that it is the brainchild of King Hammurabi of Mesopotamia, credited with having established the world’s first metropolis, Babylon. Factoring can be defined as a financial transaction...
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Tuesday, February 07, 2012 10:30 AM
Authors: Amit Sharma | (Formerly) Vice President & Head Procurement Outsourcing at Aditya Birla Minacs
Bhawna Bhatia | (Formerly) Manager-Finance & Procurement Services at Aditya Birla Minacs
In our previous blog, we discussed how an outsourcing strategy could help a CFO be a better “partner” to the business and proposed a framework for organizational transformation. In this post, we intend to offer some concrete directions to derive early business results In this post, we intend to offer some concrete directions to derive early business results from such an exercise. In strategic planning for the transformation of the finance and accounting (F&A) organization, visible quick wins with low hanging fruit will make it easier to take on more complex challenges. In fact, an astute CFO would plan for some KPIs to be achieved within 3, 6 or 9 months of kickoff...
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Tuesday, January 31, 2012 10:30 AM
Author: Hitesh Dixit | Vice President-FAO Operations and Solutions at Aditya Birla Minacs
“Physician, heal thyself” is an adage that can well be applied to today’s stressed finance leaders. In a global business environment in which every item of spend is under the microscope and every cent of revenue is increasingly hard fought, the finance and accounting (F&A) organization is no longer outside the purview of review for both performance and cost effectiveness.
ENTER COFF: DUST IT OFF, TAKE A CLOSER LOOK!
As every CFO knows, the F&A organization’s effectiveness...
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By host on
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 10:30 AM
Authors: Amit Sharma | (Formerly) Vice President & Head Procurement Outsourcing at Aditya Birla Minacs
Bhawna Bhatia | (Formerly) Manager-Finance & Procurement Services at Aditya Birla Minacs
OUTSOURCING ENABLES CFOs TO BE BUSINESS PARTNERS
Today’s chief financial officers (CFOs) essay many roles far beyond the finance and accounting (F&A) function. They act as custodians, strategists and “partners” to their business. As a good business partner, CFOs work outside their F&A silo and, in effect, span the organization as facilitators and catalysts to enable the achievement of business goals
What does being a “business partner” really mean for CFOs?
- Drive a culture of financial transparency across...
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By host on
Tuesday, December 13, 2011 10:30 AM
Authors: Keith Alphonso | Director of Business Development at Aditya Birla Minacs
Jeffrey Knopman | Cofounder and Principal, Profit Solutions Group Inc., an Aditya Birla Minacs Partner
It’s the season to be jolly and there is no reason to be sorry if you know how to save your money from the…Grinch. Like the story of how the Grinch stole Christmas, chargebacks and deductions can be a similarly harrowing experience for consumer products suppliers.
UNAUTHORIZED DEDUCTIONS AND CHARGEBACKS ADD UP
But is the deductions issue fictitious? Is there really a problem? There sure is! Quite like the loss of water dripping from a faulty faucet, chargebacks and deductions that are...
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