Maybe you’ve already heard, but Disney’s in hot water—and not just because of the actors and writers strikes happening right now.

Disney is being accused by one of its major financial partners of using “nearly every trick in the Hollywood accounting playbook to deprive” TSG Entertainment, a film financing firm, “out of hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to a lawsuit filed on August 15 in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

At the core is the central allegation that there was around $40 million “that should have been accounted for that wasn’t there,” according to Jason Cherubini, co-founder and CFO of Dawn’s Light Media and chair of the accounting department at Stevenson University. “If that’s actually off, and there were gross receipts that existed that were not paid to investors, that’s a straight breach of contract,” he explained.

Cherubini takes issue “when people throw out ‘Hollywood accounting’ as if it’s this massive gray area, and it’s exclusive to Hollywood,” he said. “It really has a lot to do with revenue recognition and where you match expenses to.”

For an inside peek at Disney’s alleged accounting, click here.—NP

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Well, add it to the inflation hit list. CFOs may find their organizations paying more for software as a service this year. Vertice, a platform that tracks SaaS spending across 16,000 vendors, recently found that SaaS prices rose an average of 12% YoY and that 73% of SaaS vendors increased their prices this year.

Which providers are increasing prices, and by how much, may be a function of which ones can afford to do so. Sandeep Beotra, CFO of Degreed, itself a SaaS company, told CFO Brew that his firm uses 150 SaaS vendors, and that when considering price hikes, “not all SaaS vendors are created equal.”

Vertice found the biggest price hikes in finance, sales, and productivity tools. The firm also suggests there’s a method by which firms get away with charging more: “Vendors with opaque, variable and/or complicated pricing structures are the most likely to implement year-over-year price hikes.”

For CFOs looking to keep SaaS prices down, Beotra recommended reaching out to vendors to negotiate prices.

Click here for tips on navigating SaaS price increases.—SW

Private companies looking to fund growth in this high-interest rate environment are facing a tough time raising capital amidst falling valuations, according to a new Deloitte survey.

The problem is particularly acute for smaller companies. Many of the companies challenged by capital raising saw themselves putting out the “For sale” sign within the next six months, which could lead to an M&A boom later this year.

“The No. 1 largest factor that people saw as a challenge or a barrier was a decrease in valuations of their business,” Wolfe Tone, vice chair and US and Global Deloitte Private leader, told CFO Brew. “Clearly, increasing interest rates and pricing was closely behind that. Liquidity challenges not far behind that.”

Private companies have been looking to raise capital to fund a range of growth initiatives; meeting talent needs and expanding tech capabilities are at the top of the list, Tone said. Not far behind was “increasing productivity and improving cost structures.”

For more on how private companies are coping with capital raising, click here.—DA

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 338,000. That’s how many fewer job openings there were in July than in June. The falling number of open jobs seems to indicate that higher interest rates are starting to cool the labor market. There were a total of 8.8 million job openings in July, according to the Labor Department. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “It’s past the time to disagree and commit. And if you can’t disagree and commit, I also understand that, but it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it’s not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so.”—Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the company’s RTO policy according to a recording Insider obtained of an Amazon meeting. (Business Insider)

Read: Maybe we just slow our collective roll on that whole AI transformation trip. (the New York Times)

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