Financial Intelligence for IT Professionals: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers

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You Can’t Always Trust the Numbers

If you read the papers regularly, you have learned a good deal in recent years about all the wonderful ways people cook their companies’ books. They record phantom sales. They hide expenses. Some of the techniques are pleasantly simple, like the software company a few years back that boosted revenues by shipping its customers empty cartons just before the end of a quarter. (The customers sent the cartons back, of course—but not until the following quarter.) Other techniques are complex to the point of near incomprehensibility. (It took years for accountants and prosecutors to sort out all of Enron’s spurious transactions.) As long as there are liars and thieves on this earth, some of them will no doubt find ...