You don’t need to follow accounting news closely to have seen the headlines: In just the last few months, accounting and reporting errors have contributed to school budget crises, enormous state government losses, and cost the San Francisco 49ers a draft pick.

They’ve also caused embarrassing corrections to earnings reports for Planet Fitness, Rivian, Mister Car Wash, and others. And there’s—don’t worry, we didn’t forget—that “typo” that briefly pushed Lyft’s share price up 67% before it crashed back down to earth, where an investor has since filed a class-action lawsuit proposal that alleges securities fraud. The other four companies also saw their shares fall after the corrections.

It’s not just a few high-profile examples: The SEC took more enforcement actions on reporting, auditing, and accounting last year than 2022; they took more that year than in 2021. Glass Lewis found a 150% increase in accounting errors and misstatements in the 2023 proxy season. Even auditors are making more mistakes, according to a 2023 PCAOB report that found deficiencies in 40% of audits by audit firms inspected in 2022, up from 34% in 2021 and 29% in 2020.

What to do? Preventing these errors all comes down to internal controls, according to Rich Brady, the Institute of Management Accountants board chair and the president of the American Society of Military Comptrollers. Companies should be segregating expense approval, payment processing, reconciling accounts, and other tasks among different staff members, he said, and restricting access to systems and data for unrelated staff, he told CFO Brew via email.

Click here for more on what’s driving accounting errors.—GD

One word that can send shivers down an accountant’s spine? Reconciliation.

Reconciliation is crucial for getting the books in order. But sheesh, is it a pain sometimes? If you’ve got lots of accounts, reconciliation can add days to the monthly close.

Luckily, there are ways to make the process faster and more efficient, and FloQast’s new ebook has all the deets for transforming reconciliation into a total celebration. It covers:

• what kind of balance sheet reconciliation involves
• a framework for seamless month-end management
• the best practices for achieving an accurate reconciliation

Say farewell to number-crunching headaches.

The next guest needs no introduction.

Or, at least that’s what Stripe co-founder and president John Collison said when Lawrence H. Summers took to the stage at the Stripe Sessions, a global internet economy conference in San Francisco last Thursday.

But we’ll give one anyway: In his more than 40-year career, Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University, served as 71st Secretary of the Treasury for President Bill Clinton, director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and as chief economist of the World Bank.

That’s a long way of saying that his take on the state of the economy is about as good as anyone’s. But he’s quick to point out that he’s not some all-knowing oracle.

“Three years ago when we were injecting $2.5 trillion into our economy that I thought had a $300 billion GDP gap, I was pretty confident that that was going to spill over into substantial inflation,” Summers said. “And I just couldn’t understand why everybody wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, and so I said it with a lot of force and a lot of confidence.”

Reflecting on his 40-ish year career, that was one of the moments “when I had the most confident divergence from consensus,” he noted. “At this moment, I don’t have any comparably confident, sharp divergence from consensus.”

To find out what Summers thinks about the economy, click here.—NP

The private sector added 192,000 jobs in April, stringing together three months of accelerated hiring, according to the latest numbers from HR, payroll, and talent management firm ADP.

“Hiring was broad-based in April,” and the information sector was the only one to reduce headcount, Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, said in a statement.

Private firms added 184,000 jobs in March, ADP previously reported.

Employment growth is one reason the economy won’t see interest-rate relief for at least a little while longer. In their latest remarks, Federal Reserve officials cited the strong job market as a reason it will hold interest rates steady.

“Job gains have remained strong, and the unemployment rate has remained low,” according to the Fed statement. “Inflation has eased over the past year but remains elevated. In recent months, there has been a lack of further progress toward the Committee’s 2% inflation objective.”

How strong were April’s jobs numbers? Click here to find out.—AZ

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