IMPORTANCE OF THE CONTROLLERSHIP FOR THE COMPANY PERFORMANCE - SOFTWARE COMPANY EXPERIENCE

The article presents the result of research focused on the Importance of the Controllership for the company performance - Software Company Experience. The main objective of the research was to focus on the common financial problem areas in information technology industry, especially in software companies and with the cooperation of the controllers find out the forms of financial analysis and the solutions for the company performance. The information technology cluster is divided into two sub-sectors: software and hardware. The software sector, which is covered in this report, includes companies involved in a broad range of activities, ranging from those that develop off-the-shelf software products to those that provide custom computer programming, computer systems design or data processing services. Major software companies are: Ciber Inc., Cisco Systems, eBags.com, EMC Corporation, Encoda Inc., Evolving Systems Inc., IBM, Intrado Inc., Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems Inc., ViaWest, Webroot Software Inc. etc. The research was made as personal interviews with the company controller(s). Out of all contacted controllers in state Colorado, 75 % were willing to have a personal meeting to help us with our analysis. We arranged the most common financial areas in examined companies in ten groups and explained them in more detail. The most common financial problem areas, which we set up with the cooperation of the controllers in examined companies, are: the investments in accounts receivable is increasing, the investments in inventory is increasing, he investments in fixed assets in increasing, the funding supplied by accounts payable is shrinking, the return on equity is worsening, sales are declining, the company is no longer making money at historical sales levels, material costs are increasing, freight costs are increasing, direct labor costs are increasing. Also we pointed to the importance different financial analyzes which could be used in the companies when the financial symptoms appear.