Accounting or accountancy is the measurement, processing, and communication of financial and non financial information about economic entities such as businesses and corporations. Accounting, which has been called the "language of business", measures the results of an organization's economic activities and conveys this information to a variety of users, including investors, creditors, management, and regulators. Practitioners of accounting are known as accountants. The terms "accounting" and "financial reporting" are often used as synonyms.
Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost.
Outsourcing is an agreement in which one company contracts a service bureau to be responsible for a planned or existing activity that is or could be done internally, and sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another.
Research and development, known in Europe as research and technological development (RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products and improving existing ones. Research and development constitutes the first stage of development of a potential new service or the production process.
The Central Bank of Ireland is Ireland's central bank, and as such part of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). It is the country's financial services regulator for most categories of financial firms. It was the issuer of Irish pound banknotes and coinage until the introduction of the euro currency, and now provides this service for the European Central Bank.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a type of international private business self-regulation that aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropic, activist, or charitable nature by engaging in or supporting volunteering or ethically-oriented practices. While once it was possible to describe CSR as an internal organisational policy or a corporate ethic strategy, that time has passed as various international laws have been developed and various organisations have used their authority to push it beyond individual or even industry-wide initiatives. While it has been considered a form of corporate self-regulation for some time, over the last decade or so it has moved considerably from voluntary decisions at the level of individual organizations to mandatory schemes at regional, national, and international levels.
Harry Max Markowitz is an American economist, and a recipient of the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize and the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Capital structure in corporate finance is the mix of various forms of external funds, known as capital, used to finance a business. It consists of shareholders' equity, debt, and preferred stock, and is detailed in the company's balance sheet. The larger the debt component is in relation to the other sources of capital, the greater financial leverage the firm is said to have. Too much debt can increase the risk of the company and reduce its financial flexibility, which at some point creates concern among investors and results in a greater cost of capital. Company management is responsible for establishing a capital structure for the corporation that makes optimal use of financial leverage and holds the cost of capital as low as possible.
A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity in which it engages.
Investment management is the professional asset management of various securities, including shareholdings, bonds, and other assets, such as real estate, in order to meet specified investment goals for the benefit of investors. Investors may be institutions, such as insurance companies, pension funds, corporations, charities, educational establishments, or private investors, either directly via investment contracts or, more commonly, via collective investment schemes like mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, or REITs.
A real estate bubble or property bubble is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real estate markets, and typically follow a land boom. A land boom is the rapid increase in the market price of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then decline. This period, during the run up to the crash, is also known as froth. The questions of whether real estate bubbles can be identified and prevented, and whether they have broader macroeconomic significance, are answered differently by schools of economic thought, as detailed below.
The ease of doing business index is an index created jointly by Simeon Djankov, Michael Klein and Caralee McLiesh, three leading economists at the World Bank Group. The origins of the idea are described in a 2016 Journal of Economic Perspectives article. The academic research for the report was done jointly with professors Edward Glaeser, Oliver Hart and Andrei Shleifer. Higher rankings indicate better, usually simpler, regulations for businesses and stronger protections of property rights. Empirical research funded by the World Bank to justify their work show that the economic growth impact of improving these regulations is strong.
Gideon I. Gartner was the founder of Gartner, Inc. a Stamford, Connecticut information technology (IT) research and advisory company.
Return on marketing investment (ROMI) is the contribution to profit attributable to marketing, divided by the marketing 'invested' or risked. ROMI is not like the other 'return-on-investment' (ROI) metrics because marketing is not the same kind of investment. Instead of money that is 'tied' up in plants and inventories, marketing funds are typically 'risked'. Marketing spending is typically expensed in the current period.
Return on investment (ROI) or return on costs (ROC) is a ratio between net income and investment. A high ROI means the investment's gains compare favourably to its cost. As a performance measure, ROI is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiencies of several different investments. In economic terms, it is one way of relating profits to capital invested.
IT cost transparency is a category of information technology management software and systems that enables enterprise IT organizations to model and track the total cost to deliver and maintain the IT Services they provide to the business. It is increasingly a task of management accounting. IT cost transparency solutions can integrate financial information such as labor costs, software licensing costs, hardware acquisition and depreciation, data center facilities charges from general ledger systems and combine this with operational data from ticketing, monitoring, asset management and project portfolio management systems to provide a single, integrated view of IT costs by service, department, GL line item and project. In addition to tracking cost elements, IT cost transparency may track utilization, usage and operational performance metrics in order to provide a measure of value or return on investment (ROI). Costs, budgets, performance metrics and changes to data points are tracked over time to identify trends and the impact of changes to underlying cost drivers in order to help managers address the key drivers in escalating IT costs and improve planning.
Joseph D. Piotroski is an American professor of accounting at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and a Senior Fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER). Professor Piotroski was the inaugural Center for Global Business and the Economy Research Fellow at the Stanford GSB. Prior to joining the faculty at Stanford in 2007, Professor Piotroski was an associate professor of accounting at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (1999–2007).
Quantitative analysis is the use of mathematical and statistical methods in finance and investment management. Those working in the field are quantitative analysts (quants). Quants tend to specialize in specific areas which may include derivative structuring or pricing, risk management, algorithmic trading and investment management. The occupation is similar to those in industrial mathematics in other industries. The process usually consists of searching vast databases for patterns, such as correlations among liquid assets or price-movement patterns. The resulting strategies may involve high-frequency trading.
Technology Business Management Council is a Washington-based non-profit organization with the goal of creating and promoting “best practices for running IT as a business.” As of January 2018, the TBM Council has about 5,100 CIO, CTO, & CFO members who are advancing technology business management standards and education across all industries. Its current board of directors includes executives from AIG, Aflac, Apptio, Cisco, Dollar General, First American, Intuit, Great West Life, MasterCard, Micron, Nationwide, Red Ventures, Stanley Black & Decker, SunTrust, Tyson Foods, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Enterprise legal management (ELM) is a practice management strategy of corporate legal departments, insurance claims departments, and government legal and contract management departments.
