The companies that comprise the S&P 500 generated a record high annual cash-flow value for 2010 of $1.145 billion, according to Standard & Poor's.

This beat the prior record of $1.117 billion set in 2006.

Verizon Communications has changed the way its accounts for pensions and other post-employment benefits.

The telecom giant said the new policy recognizes gains and losses in the year they are incurred, rather than amortizing them over time. This will result in $20.2 billion in charges to prior earnings.

It's all about the cash flow.

The biggest concern among chief financial officers these days is cash flow. Not the economy, not jobs, not health care, not the elections.

Although companies of all sizes continue to maintain that they want to further electronify invoicing and payments, data from Phoenix Hecht shows that there was a big gap between the desire to do so and the reality for much of corporate America last year.

In fact, for the first time in quite a few years corporate check usage in the US increased, rather than decreasing.

The biggest transaction banks are on their way to providing fully integrated working capital solutions, but they still have some ways to go—particularly in terms of systems and processes integration.

Even before the crisis, companies recognized the importance of integrating trade, the supply chain, and cash management to have a holistic view on working capital across the organization.

The surest sign that BP's reputation has is worthless is the fact that its stock's market value is now about equal to the book value of its assets. After all, any premium over book value is normally considered to reflect a company's intangible assets, and in BP's case at the moment, its primary intangible is reputation, or rather the lack of one.

So observes Charles Mulford, an accounting professor at Georgia Tech and an editorial advisor to CFOZone.

With Treasuries at all-time lows and bank lending still declining, companies are reorganizing their treasury operations in record numbers as they strive to increase efficiency, reduce costs and make best use of their internal cash. According to a recent survey by JP Morgan Treasury Services, 61 percent of companies polled had either just completed a treasury restructuring, were in the process of restructuring, or were building the business case for a restructuring.

The poll of 182 treasury executives—primarily from large corporations--found that 35 percent were implementing systems that would allow the company to get a global cash balance, 25 percent were reorganizing their bank account structures to reduce their number of banking partners, and 19 percent were restructuring their cash concentration programs to make use of extra cash for self-funding or debt repayment.

This Bloomberg item on the best way to measure corporate performance, which is based on a white paper by Deloitte, seems a bit naïve to me. 

Yes, return on equity is easily gamed by leverage and stock buybacks. But return on assets is hardly immune to financial engineering. 

All that attention you've put into cutting costs and conserving cash has really thrown a wrench into how some investors like to value stocks.

In short, cash flow is way, way up thanks to slimmed down expenses, but earnings are still recovering, politely speaking. What that's created is a stock market trading at historically high price-to-earnings multiples, but at lousy ones in terms of cash flow.