Stacker-Business & Economy

  Accounts payable (AP) automation challenges often become visible after go-live. The controller realizes exceptions are still piling up. The enterprise resource planning (ERP) sync broke after a vendor name change, and approvers have quietly reverted to emailing PDF invoices for sign-off. The finance leader is asking where the time savings went, and the honest

  Restaurant chains are falling into two camps: those that are expanding and those that are contracting. On one end, growth-driven brands like Culver’s, Texas Roadhouse, and Nothing Bundt Cakes are opening hundreds of new locations; on the other, legacy heavyweights including Wendy’s, Papa John’s, Denny’s, and Pizza Hut are closing locations. While inflation, changing

  Most controllers can pull up their accounts payable aging report in a few clicks. Fewer can say, with confidence, which of those open invoices are simply moving through the normal approval queue and which ones have quietly stalled for three weeks because nobody claimed them. On a lean team, that gap tends to surface

  Innovation can attract investment and reshape economies. The U.S. Economic Development Administration identifies innovation as a driver of global competitiveness, job creation and economic growth. However, innovation activity varies substantially by region. Some states generate more patents, support greater research and development activity, and attract more venture capital than others, giving them a stronger

  If you’re a controller inheriting a policy from the last finance lead, the cost of leaving it untouched shows up fast. Invoices might get approved in chat tools. Vendors may send bills to whoever they have an email address for. The document may still sit in a shared drive, but it no longer reflects

  For most controllers, accounts payable (AP) document management is a collection of habits that emerged as the company grew. Invoices arrive by email, get forwarded to a department head for approval, come back in a separate thread, and get attached to the QuickBooks bill. Six months later, the auditor asks for supporting documentation for

  Sales reps spend only about 40% of their week actually selling. The rest of their time disappears into CRM data entry, quote-building, planning, and dozens of other tasks that don’t directly contribute to moving a deal forward. If software was supposed to lighten the load, it has yet to do so. Instead, the average

  Cleaning businesses and workers confront a market paradox: The services sector is booming while job growth stalls. Automation threatens to displace workers, yet the technology remains prohibitively expensive to deploy at scale. The tension between market expansion and employment stagnation reveals what’s really at stake: persistent pressure on wages, job security, and the viability

  Since the S&P 500 was introduced in its modern form, US equities have experienced dozens of corrections, crashes, and bear markets. Some declines lasted only a few weeks before markets rebounded, while others erased years of gains and required nearly a decade to fully recover. Yet despite the differences in their causes, severity, and

  Economic growth can change a city quickly. An influx of new residents and expanding business activity creates visible momentum, even as rapid change brings new strains. In recent years, some American cities stand out for attracting people, investment and development at a pace that sets them apart. Boomtown status does not mean growth benefits

  Every year, someone in finance asks whether the company’s AI spend is worth it. Every year, leadership says yes. And every year, the employees actually using the tools have no idea the question was even asked. Now, corporate America is starting to sweat over its AI bill. Microsoft canceled most of its Claude Code

  There’s no way around it: America is getting older. The country’s median age climbed to a record-high 39.4 in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau population estimates, up from 35.6 in 2001. Almost one-third of Americans are over the age of 55, compared with roughly a quarter of the population in 2010. It would

  Teams evaluating CRM solutions typically follow a similar process, including assessing features, pricing, and integrations, booking a demo, and testing through a free trial. A key component that’s often overlooked is whether the company behind the CRM will be the same or better a few years down the line. The worldwide CRM software market

  The US job market is showing signs of stabilization after several years of uneven hiring and uncertainty, according to a new Q3 job forecast. Published in a job market report from professional services company Toptal, the forecast projects conditions for several key areas of the U.S. labor market: all nonfarm job openings, professional services

  Eight years ago, GDPR became enforceable across the European Union. The first two years were quiet enough that plenty of organizations took the silence as a sign the urgency had been overstated. Then came Google’s 50 million euro fine in 2019 and Meta’s record-breaking 1.2 billion euro fine in 2023. The organizations that had

  Picture a typical day at your store: Customers are browsing the floor while employees in the back are packing items for online orders. A customer messages your shop’s social media page asking if a product is in stock. Someone’s sorting through hundreds of price changes needed across your different channels, while another employee updates

  Every June, for some industries, a familiar pattern emerges. Phones seem to ring less often. Invoices start to stretch. Decision-makers seemingly vanish, their joyful “out of office” replies taking their place. During the summer, B2B companies may notice a slump in sales that stretches beyond just a few months, resulting in major long-term consequences

  For years, the warning has been the same: AI is coming for jobs. But the data from businesses actually using it shows otherwise. Small businesses using AI are four times more likely to say it helped them hire than say it led to cuts, according to the 2026 AI Impact Report from Intuit QuickBooks.

  In mid-July, new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh testified before two congressional committees and pledged to restore annual inflation to the central bank’s stated target of 2%. Given that inflation, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index, has been above that mark for 63 consecutive months, Warsh has some work ahead of