Budgeting has long been treated as at best a pointless exercise and at worst a waste of time and resources. Once management has decreed what it deems an acceptable increase for inflation, department managers simply plug that increase into the previous year's budget, add in any capital or expansion funding desired, and send the budget forth. Read more...

As Intuit continues to try to move more comprehensively into the cloud with QuickBooks, sites automating a subset of financial management - online invoicing -- continue to launch and, in some cases, flourish. There are dozens of them. Who are they aiming at? Any company that already uses an accounting software desktop product or website already has full accounts receivable functionality. Sole proprietors, microbusinesses and/or companies that don't need to balance debits and credits but who need to bill customers seem the likeliest target audience. And there are millions of them. Read more...