Timed with the announcement of lower-than-expected fourth quarter profits and some bad news that will affect sales and growth going forward, RadioShack announced that its CFO Jim Gooch will take over the chief executive spot in May, when current CEO Julian Day will retire.

The timing of Day’s departure and Gooch’s promotion seems less than coincidental, given the need for strong financial leadership to get out of the  group's current slump.

E-invoicing can often seem to be the bane of an SME’s existence. As more large companies begin to demand that their SME suppliers use this or that platform to deliver electronic invoices, the hassle can easily seem much greater than the potential value for the supplier. Even as access becomes simpler, the need to manage various solutions for various buyers can be onerous.

Small companies are starting to have access to solutions geared specifically to their needs, which does add to the value proposition somewhat. A number of new vendors are focusing specifically on the SME space to help make it a little bit easier for small companies to migrate to e-invoicing. American Express, for example, offers AcceptPay—a dedicated SME e-invoicing solution.

As banks gear up for increased technology investment in the coming year, the questions is whether small businesses—who now suffer with systems and services that are far from ideal—will see any benefit.

According to a recent report by consultancy Celent, banks have a long way to go in providing technology solutions and services that best cater to the SME market. But with many banks looking to make big investments in corporate services and solutions—especially in the cash management and trade spaces—the hope is that at least some of this spend will be on solutions for the smaller company segment.

With costs varying greatly for different bank services, companies are seldom given insight into what drives their banks’ fee structures and often can feel held hostage to high bank fees with no mechanism to address it.

Particularly since the crisis began and liquidity became tight, companies have often focused more on simple liquidity availability than in bartering for the best fee structure for that access to capital.

As companies start to look at their next round of cost-cutting and efficiency measures, with much of the low-hanging fruit already harvested, next-generation business intelligence and data analytics technology-integrated with a raft of other technology solutions--will provide the backbone to dig more deeply into processes and send and receive information in near-real-time for swift decision-making.

As the crisis progressed, many companies turned to internal cost cutting measures to reduce working capital expenditures and save cash.

In this day and age, it makes more sense than ever for the next generation of chief executive officers to come from a finance background.

There are countless examples from the recent past of finance chiefs making the leap to the top spot. Qlogic’s CFO Simon Biddiscombe moved up to the CEO role in November, for example, and Monsanto’s CFO Carl Casale switched companies to take over as CEO of agricultural cooperative CHS Inc—also in November.

SAP is about to enter another protracted stage in its ongoing battle with Oracle for dominance of the ERP and business software space.

Oracle laid down the gauntlet with the launch this week of Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP—a suite of business intelligence tools specifically designed to pull data from SAP systems and provide analytics around that.

M&A could see a significant uptick this year as sectors such as oil and gas, technology, and healthcare lead the way, according to Steve Krouskos, Global and Americas Markets Leader for Ernst & Young's Transaction Advisory Services.

US companies were responsible for $773 billion in M&A volumes in 2010, according to the Thomson Reuters full-year 2010 Mergers & Acquisitions review—an increase of 11% over 2009. This represents just a third of global M&A activity for the full year, however, which totalled $2.25 trillion, according to the Thomson Reuters review.

Corporate credit quality will continue to rise in 2011, but the majority of the weakest companies are in the US, and those companies are more likely to default than any other segment, according a recent report by Standard & Poor’s.

The report, which evaluated the ‘weakest links’—or companies with ratings of B- or lower, noted that this group of entities tend to have more defaults by percentage than any other group. Noted the report authors: “Although we expect credit quality to continue improving in 2011, a moderate number of companies are likely to default—most likely those at the lower end of the ratings spectrum.”

Transaction banks hold the keys to moving purchase-to-pay (P2P) automation to the next phase of development, according to some market participants. And the developments that are now in the works (some of which you can find more information on in previous blogs here and here ) could radically alter the landscape for corporate P2P management.