Stacker-Small Business

  For many skilled tradespeople, business can run smoothly day after day until one single accident changes everything. All it takes is one slip, one dropped tool, or one big spill to trigger a lawsuit large enough to wipe out years of hard work. An established business can vanish with just one claim. Most small

  Controllers can calculate the accounts payable (AP) formula quickly, but applying it to a real ledger takes judgment. At close, invoices sit in multiple states, and ERP sync gaps can leave the balance sheet showing one figure and the aging report another. Getting the number right is what makes it defensible to your CFO

  For e-commerce brands, peak season is no longer a single, isolated surge centered around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the weeks leading up to New Year’s. In 2026, that Q4-focused approach is becoming less reliable. Economic pressures, consumer expectations, trade regulations, AI, and supply chain challenges are all evolving faster than historical trends can

  American manufacturing is growing, but the labor needed to keep that growth running is getting harder to find. New facilities, more complex equipment, and tighter production expectations are all colliding with a shortage of skilled maintenance workers. MaintainX surveyed 211 maintenance and operations leaders to find out how that collision is impacting industrial companies.

  Excel was released in 1985. Forty-one years later, here you are, still using it to run your shop. Spreadsheets are wonderful. Your schedule is on there. Your techs’ repair orders (RO) and updates for the day are found on it. Your service advisors use it to track customers. It’s going well, until it isn’t.

  Access to cash and credit is a small business’s lifeline. Your business’s credit rating shows lenders, suppliers, and other vendors how financially stable your business is, as well as how well you’ve been able to manage your cash and pay your business debts on time. Establishing a strong business credit score is the first

  Running a business cost more than planned for most founders this year. A recent survey of 1,500 early-stage founders and builders from Mercury, a fintech platform that offers business and personal banking services*, found that 75% of respondents said their costs came in higher than expected — up from 66% last year. Exactly zero

  If you lead finance in a growing company, your current card may have been picked when travel was your biggest expense. Today, most of the spending runs through software subscriptions, online ads, cloud hosting, and contractor payments, and travel is just one line among many. Comparison sites usually rank cards by their sign-up bonuses

  As a controller at a growing company, you spend a disproportionate share of your close week on invoice coding. You assign general ledger (GL) accounts, cost centers, and dimensions to vendor bills that move through accounts payable (AP). The work is mechanical, but it carries real consequences for the ledger and the close. Invoice

  For controllers at mid-market companies, accounts payable goals usually become urgent when the chief financial officer (CFO) asks for evidence. Invoice cycle times and exception rates are measured inconsistently, so you may have only anecdotal evidence when leadership asks whether the function is improving. Without a standard to measure against, many process changes can