ABSTRACT
Finance used to be a fancy name for the accounting department. As its role expanded from general ledger accounting to controllership, new and better opportunities were found and devised for employing and deploying the funds of the organization. Different innovative ways are constantly being devised to better finance through public offerings, strategic alliances, banking relationships, international routes, private investors, etc. Recently, respectable companies made major errors by allowing their financial officers to operate the finance department as a profit center! In many cases, this led to excesses: betting, not hedging, on derivatives, on foreign exchange and on future oil prices. Each company may have a different scale of risk strategies. Another must technique is calculating the cost of reversibility of a decision.
