Organizations often use various metrics to measure and benchmark their performance. Performance measurement is used to understand how organizational activities translate into profits or other indicators of success, make strategic and operational decisions for the future, and control (benchmark) performance.  Performance measurement can be done at multiple levels: individual manager, business unit, a set of business units, or entire organization. Performance measurement can include financial and non-financial performance measures. In this article, we will discuss a common financial measure used to evaluate performance: Return on Investment (ROI).

Cost savings are important for all organizations regardless of their industry, business model, or strategy. While cost savings are especially important for companies that rely on the cost leadership strategy and those in the mature life cycle stage, organizations that pursue differentiation strategy can still benefit from cost saving opportunities. In this article, we will discuss how cost hierarchy can be used to identify opportunities to save costs.

Organizations need to estimate costs to make pricing decisions, manage expenditures and investments, forecast litigation outcomes, bid for government contracts, and so on. The common methods used to estimate costs include: account analysis, statistical analysis, and engineering analysis. In this article, we will review an example of account analysis.

Key performance indicators are usually associated with organizational departments or units with highly visible outputs (sales, customer services, production, etc.). However, accounting and finance departments also have stakeholders to whom they provide services. It makes sense then to have KPIs for accounting and finance departments to measure and increase their performance.

Balanced scorecards have a long history in helping organizations become better at what they do. We have a brief review of balanced scorecards in this article.

Key performance indicators are important for the successful management of an organization.

Big data, data mining and business analytics are on the rise these days. Are there ways these can be used by accountants? This article provides an example of using accounting (“big”) data to perform an analysis of customer profitability.