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.

As a follow-up to yesterday's blog on Molson Coors' experience with outsourcing, the CFO of the Latin American division of Dutch comglomerate Philips provided a different perspective Thursday morning at the Hackett Group's best practices conference in Atlanta.

While Molson Coors' CFO Stewart Glendinning expressed disappointment over high turnover rates at the outsourcing company the beer company signed up with, Philips' Latin American CFO Ronald Eikelenboom said he planned on high turnover when he inked a deal with Indian outsourcer Infosys in late 2008 to expand the two companies' relationship to Brazil, where Philips' Latin American operations are based.

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.

I owe former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt a sincere apology as a result of last week's stock market glitch.

It seems increasingly clear that electronic trading systems are to blame for the mysterious 1,000 point intra-day dive. And as Floyd Norris thoroughly explains today, their dominance reflects a decision to replace human, market-making specialists with technology.

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.

By this point, press cheerleading for the economy is hardly newsworthy, and I'm not the first to notice the latest example.

But the down-is-up spin on Caterpillar's results cannot escape mention.  As the Business Insider notes, the Bloomberg story is tame by comparison with the ravings on CNBC yesterday.

Landlords, beware!

Companies that have obsessively squeezed every last penny out of labor costs have another big source of expenses to shake-down—their monthly rent bill.

As CFOs continue to examine ways to reduce costs within their finance team and financial processes, many are looking at outsourcing as a means to hand off non-core competencies to an external provider. The goal is to increase efficiency and reduce the expense and resource consumption of such processes by having it managed by a more efficient third-party service provider. However, the risk inherent in outsourcing is that it could involve passing off critical and sensitive processes to someone outside the company, which many companies are, naturally, hesitant to do.

 As a result, co-sourcing - or right-sourcing - is becoming an increasingly popular alternative. It involves retaining certain functions in-house while having a vendor provide other portions of a particular service. Although the traditional definition of co-sourcing is to hire a consultant or the outsourced service provider to manage a transition phase in going to outsourcing, the newer one is increasingly coming to mean ongoing joint management of a particular process – such as accounts payable or receivable. In this way, the most sensitive functions can be managed in-house and routine processes handled more efficiently by the external partner.

How desperate is Time Warner for cash? Desperate enough to charge its freelancers a fee to get paid on time, based on a sliding scale. In other words, Time is indeed Money at Time. 

Gawker likens the practice to that of a payday loan service. And it definitely does have that loan shark quality to it, though we use the word "quality" loosely.