If a company determined it would lose $8.5 billion in the current year, more than it had previously expected, due to lower volume of business, what would it do?

Close plants or warehouses, fire employees and orchestrate a major restructuring.

Submitted by Adrienne Gonzalez, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Administrative expenses are a part of any non-profit's overall operating expenses and though donors generally give to charity with the hope that their contributions will help fulfill the organization's mission as opposed to cover SG&A, Charity Navigator has a top ten of the worst offenders when it comes to admin expenses. Let's take a look, shall we?

Rising labor strife in China has potentially significant implications for US companies and financial markets. The irony is that what companies want isn't necessarily the same thing that markets do.

Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism does a good job of explaining why.

Companies have been slashing costs with abandon since fall of 2008--and they aren't likely to stop anytime soon. In fact, in April, 54 percent of more than 2,000 executives surveyed by McKinsey reported that they plan to reduce operating costs over the next 12 months, compared to 47 percent in February. 

Trouble is, such cost cutting seldom has much of a long-term payoff. According to McKinsey, only 10 percent of cost reduction programs show sustained results three years after companies wielded the ax. 

I'm down at the Hackett Group's best practices conference in Atlanta and just finished a video interview with Stewart Glendinning, CFO of Molson Coors, on the topic of outsourcing.

While the video won't be up for awhile, I can report that Glendinning wowed the crowd of 250 or so finance executives in attendance this morning with a frank keynote address on the subject.

Submitted by Niclas Osmund, republished from the Benche, a financial community for corporate treasurers. 

 A majority of treasury managers and professionals wish for more centralisation of a number of activities. For example payments, collections, liquidity structures and organisation set-ups. But, it doesn't seem to happen.

This is one of the conclusions we can draw from a survey that SEB together with GTNews has conducted every year since 2006. In the areas mentioned they state having a de-centralised set-up but have a strong wish to centralise. This is consistent and doesn't seem to change over the years.

Hertz Global Holding's $1.2 billion deal for Dollar Thrifty shows that cleaning up a corporate balance sheet can pay off. But finance executives who go to the trouble in hopes shareholders will be rewarded by an acquirer shouldn't count on a big premium.

The new executive team at car renter Dollar Thrifty spent the last year strengthening the company's balance sheet after Scott Thompson joined as chief executive in the fall of 2008 and began a turnaround effort.

Looking for an easy way for your company to save a few bucks on office supplies? Change the font in the documents you print, reports the Associated Press.

The idea is simple enough: Certain fonts use different amounts of ink. That Arial font Word formerly defaulted to actually cost you money compared to using something like Century Gothic. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has asked its faculty and staff to switch to Century Gothic for all printed documents. By doing so, the school figures it could save between 5 and 10 percent on its annual $100,000 ink and toner bill.

Hey, I got hold of some interesting data from Audit Analytics on the length of time that some US companies have had the same auditors.

The issue arises in connection with a CFO cover story on audit fees that I wrote about yesterday.

I find this op-ed today on exports more than confusing. Essentially, the author, a business professor and former chief economist at the Dallas Fed named W. Michael Cox, says that President Obama's call for the U.S. to compete more effectively on that basis should not focus on boosting manufactured goods.

But it seems to me that our so-called comparative advantage in services that Cox says is a sufficient source of GDP growth has in fact put us at a disadvantage to countries such as China and Germany.