Stacker Business & Economy

  A surge of market activity, with heavy funding, acquisition, and partnership volume across both CRM and business intelligence software, according to ZoomInfo’s data. Driven heavily by mergers and acquisitions, both sectors are experiencing steady consolidation as major platforms continuously absorb smaller point solutions. In contrast, marketing automation reflects a completely different trend. ZoomInfo monitored

  So far, mid-August has demonstrated that Washington is continuing to solidify a centralized trade architecture by extending national security protections to high-tech sectors, issuing a Presidential Proclamation under Section 232 imposing 15% to 100% tariffs on foreign drones and components. Simultaneously, a landmark federal decision by the U.S. Court of International Trade upheld the

  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