Traditionally, finance departments took a more low-key, risk-averse spot on the org chart, tasked with processing and accounting for transactions. And CFOs were considered little more than bean-counting number-crunchers who said “no” to everything.

But that stereotype hasn’t been true for a while; long gone are the days of being relegated to the back office. And nowhere is that shift clearer than among tech-company CFOs, particularly newer companies and startups.

Tech-company CFOs often can take a more active, strategic role in building and guiding the business than their counterparts at more traditional companies, which should appeal to enterprising finance professionals, according to one longtime tech company CFO.

“What I found out was that I love the entrepreneurial life,” said Kristyn Reed, CFO at MarginEdge, a restaurant-management software company, and who has worked with tech companies as a CFO since the late 1990s. “I loved the chaos of building a company from almost scratch. I loved helping to make order of the chaos, and I really loved being part of a team that was building something together.”

But just as tech CFOs have distinctive roles, they also need to rely on different approaches, skill sets, and metrics than CFOs at traditional firms.

Stakes is high. This isn’t necessarily true about tech giants like Apple, Meta, Google, or Amazon, companies with hundreds of billions in annual revenue. The CFOs of those tech giants are typically bound by the size of their organizations—not to mention the SEC—to adhere to more traditional roles.

Where CFOs can have significant impact is on smaller but growing tech companies, according to Reed. These companies are likely to be lean, agile, and in a hurry to grow. The decisions a CFO makes in this environment can have dramatic consequences. Continue reading here.—DA

Allowing customers to pay in cryptocurrencies has been a flashy way to show your company is modern, hip, and open to accepting all forms of payment. But while the consumer space has led the way, cryptocurrency payments in the B2B realm have lagged behind. And with the latest crypto company meltdown, it’s understandable why companies may be wary.

That could be changing soon. In September, Google announced it would be accepting crypto payments for its cloud services, a B2B product, using Coinbase technology. JPMorgan and Visa also announced that they were teaming up to streamline global payments using private blockchain networks—think SWIFT, but for crypto.

But it’s still early days for crypto B2B payments adoption. Pat White, CEO of digital-asset management company Bitwave, told CFO Brew that about 10% of its customers pay Bitwave in cryptocurrency and that a massive shift hasn’t occurred yet. Moving any B2B payments to crypto would mean massive inflows into the alternative spaces given that business payments volume is estimated to be $51 trillion in 2022, according to the American Banker.

The companies that will make the first move will be those that, even with a 1% decrease in costs, will see a large chunk of change saved, such as Walmart, White told CFO Brew. Publicly, Walmart has yet to outline any specific crypto plans, but the company’s CTO, Suresh Kumar, said in October at a Yahoo All Finance Summit that “crypto will become an important part of how customers transact,” when asked what role crypto would play in Walmart’s future.

In a study from Deloitte released earlier this year, merchants were increasingly using crypto payments. Of those, 75% of transactions were B2C based and only 15% of the transactions were B2B. However, crypto payments aren’t coming from firms’ largest clients; in a digital payments survey released by the Association of Financial Professionals earlier this year, no companies polled said that their major customers were paying them in cryptocurrencies.

Much uncertainty remains around crypto accounting, which could possibly hold B2B transactions back if digital currencies can’t immediately be converted into a fiat. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) released a recommendation in early October that said that companies should report digital currencies “at fair value,” (current market value) but currently, there isn’t an accepted standard to accurately represent crypto holdings in financial reporting.—KT

It’s no secret that disruptions to the supply chain have proven to be an ongoing headache for numerous companies. In the US, the ports of Long Beach, California and Newark, New Jersey are hubs for warehouse space, according to Retail Brew’s Maeve Allsup, but companies are beginning to expand inland:

Amid supply-chain challenges, e-commerce growth, shipping costs, and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the retail landscape is changing rapidly, and the warehousing industry is changing with it.

As companies scramble to build out their distribution capabilities, they’re taking into account labor supply, proximity to consumers, and cost per square foot. And they’re looking toward places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Savannah, and Dallas as their next big warehouse hubs.

Warehouse vacancy rates around the country are extremely low, and in valuable Southern California, they’re at less than 1%, Melinda McLaughlin, SVP and global head of research at Prologis, told Retail Brew.

“It’s an environment of extreme scarcity and it’s very expensive,” McLaughlin said. She added that Prologis, which is the largest global developer of logistics properties, is seeing an increased “open mindedness” among its client companies about where they’re storing products.

Read the whole story on Retail Brew.—MA