Latest news with #forecasting
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Climate
- Washington Post
Here's why Hurricane Erick is quickly strengthening into dangerous storm
WASHINGTON — Having doubled in strength in less than a day and still expected to grow further, Hurricane Erick on Wednesday chugged through the ideal environment to power up quickly as it approached Mexico's southern Pacific Coast. This type of rapid intensification has become more common in a warmer climate , especially in the Atlantic and near the United States , which is not where Erick is now, scientists said. Last year, there were 34 incidents of rapid intensification — when a storm gains at least 35 mph in 24 hours — which is about twice as many as average and causes problems with forecasting, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Otelier launches new budgeting and forecasting platform for hoteliers
Hospitality data platform Otelier has introduced an updated version of its TruePlan budgeting and forecasting platform, which is designed for the hotel industry. This new iteration is aimed at businesses seeking to transition from traditional spreadsheets and obsolete technology to streamline their financial planning processes. The revamped TruePlan offers a modernised user interface, enhancing the technology experience for users. The platform's design promotes cooperation within departments, lessening the need for revisions and avoiding delays. TruePlan's latest version grants hotel portfolio operators the ability to craft more precise forecasts daily, implement bulk actions for workflow efficiency, and foster collaboration among various teams. The company explains that hoteliers can now expect to shorten their budgeting seasons by an average of 30% with TruePlan, which leverages pre-loaded data informed by historical trends and industry-specific indicators. Otelier product strategy senior director Russell Meek said: 'Budgeting and forecasting should be powerful, not painful. 'We have rebuilt TruePlan based on customer feedback, and the result is a platform that's not only faster and more scalable – but one that meets the real-world needs of today's hotel finance teams. With TruePlan, you can go from data to decisions in a fraction of the time.' Key enhancements in TruePlan include a user-friendly modern UX for straightforward use and rapid onboarding, bulk action tools to apply widespread changes with minimal clicks, and a daily-level forecasting structure for detailed and adaptable planning. The updated product's features also include self-service onboarding, built-in collaboration tools, Power BI integration for immediate accounting and planning reports, and pre-built financial drivers for the hospitality sector. Built upon Otelier's centralised integration framework, TruePlan ensures real-time data synchronisation across various solutions, including business intelligence, accounts payable automation, night audit compliance, and financial reconciliations. This integration enables budget creation based on live data from multiple systems, including property management and labour solutions. Last September, payment solutions provider Repay Holdings formed a partnership with Otelier, further enhancing the capabilities of the hospitality software and performance optimisation platform. "Otelier launches new budgeting and forecasting platform for hoteliers" was originally created and published by Hotel Management Network, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
The Independent
13-06-2025
- Climate
- The Independent
Storm chasers battle brutal hail in name of science
Storm chasers are driving into hailstorms in the United States' Great Plains to study the weather phenomenon, which causes billions in damage annually. A team of meteorologists is using radar and cameras to monitor hail and improve forecasting. ICECHIP, the first US hail-focused field campaign in over 40 years, aims to differentiate between storms producing baseball-sized versus golf ball-sized hail, according to co-lead scientist Victor Gensi. The goal is to provide more precise forecasts to better serve the public with targeted information. Watch the video in full above.
Hospitality Net
11-06-2025
- Business
- Hospitality Net
Aptech Unveils TVNG, Its Next-generation Budgeting and Forecasting Tool Purpose-Built for the Hospitality Industry
Pittsburgh, PA – Aptech, a leading provider of scalable accounting, business intelligence, financial planning and management solutions for the hospitality industry, today announced the launch of TVNG, its next-generation budgeting and forecasting solution for hotels. Designed to empower finance managers and department heads to make more informed decisions, TVNG ultimately enables organizations to achieve their strategic objectives. The solution actively engages budget managers with an intuitive non-Excel interface that walks them step-by-step through the process and allows them to document their reasons for each decision along the way. Purpose-built for hotels, TVNG provides property finance teams with a complete set of tools, controls, and built-in reports, with the ability to integrate with Excel for custom data crunching. It features flexible budgeting functionality using a guided approach with an interactive budget navigation map tailored to each department, which orients each user to where they are in the process and how they are doing against finance guidelines. With the integration of actual data from PVNG, blended forecasts are available throughout the year to manage against budgets, identify trends and track the specific data needed to make changes to your plan. TVNG has two forecasting options–at the account level or below the account level–plus, long-term projections can be generated using forecasts to estimate broader trends for strategic planning purposes. Ultimately, a hotel organization's budget needs to be a numerical expression of the strategic plan and that requires engagement, communication, and collaboration. TVNG offers a full suite of integrated components that on one side, ensures ease-of-use and a flexible budgeting process for department managers, and on the other side, more advanced tools developed specifically for the needs of the finance team. Aptech President Jill Wilder TVNG allows user-defined drivers, provides more accurate cost analysis, and adjusts the organization's bottom line accordingly–for a single property or across a full portfolio from one central location. Drivers are defined by the finance team as a control measure, so management can be assured that the right values are being used consistently across the entire organization. Self-service reporting through TVNG makes the budgeting process less complicated, so all approved users can run reports at any time to see a view of the data, as well as the rationale behind the data. With over 60 flexible standard reports available out of the box, all reports are configurable and immediately accessible to the finance team, budget manager or anyone who has the correct security privileges. Now, finance teams can build flexible driver-based budgets and forecasts, manage the planning process from a central location, and set goals for every area of their organization. TVNG is an incredible new solution for our hotel customers to add to their financial planning toolbox , continued Wilder. With our three industry-leading solutions for accounting—(PVNG), budgeting and forecasting (TVNG), and business intelligence (Execuvue)—hotel companies can better understand their financial data and turn it into actionable insights. Through our close customer relationships, we're able to continue to develop new solutions like TVNG in answer to the challenges these hotels face and provide the right tools that allow them to access more accurate data for their finance teams . Aptech will be demonstrating TVNG at HITEC 2025 in booth #3000 from June 17-19 at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. To schedule an appointment with the Aptech team at HITEC, please visit For more information on TVNG and the rest of Aptech's award-winning financial management, business intelligence and planning solutions for hospitality, please visit About Aptech | Aptech, a Jonas Hospitality Company, is a leading provider of enterprise accounting, business intelligence, financial planning and management solutions for the hospitality industry. Its award-winning solutions, which include PVNG, Execuvue and Targetvue, form an integrated technology ecosystem that is designed to help hoteliers at both the corporate and property levels understand their financial and operational data and provide actionable insights. With more than 50 years of experience in the hospitality industry, Aptech's state-of-the-art solutions are used by more than 3,500 properties across North America. For more information, please visit Andrea Mane
Forbes
10-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
AI Is Likely To Increase Revenues—As Long As CFOs Can Access Data
It's indisputable: AI's ability to draw nearly instant results from thousands of data points can improve financial analysis and forecasting. Stanford University's 2025 AI Index Report found that 70% of companies using AI for their financial departments have seen their revenues increase, while 56% report their internal costs had gone down. Despite the positive results, making good use of AI remains a challenge. Coupa's Strategic CFO report found that 44% of CFOs say they can't make informed decisions due to data challenges. Nearly half said gathering spend data is too labor intensive. While 85% said they can access this data instantly, nearly six in 10 said they have to tap into multiple systems. About 14% indicated the data-gathering process can take multiple days. And a quarter said their financial processes are still manual. The best AI system in the world won't be helpful if it can't get the data it needs. And in these times, as trade barriers rise and fall within days and stock markets take off and crash at the speed of social media posts, the ability to quickly perform up-to-the-minute analysis can be vital. CFOs need to reach out to CIOs to ensure that the financial systems and data are all modernized. It's time to get rid of legacy systems and file cabinets full of paper. Nine out of 10 CFOs said having a unified platform is crucial to their success, and the time to make those changes is now. In an uncertain economy, businesses are exploring many options to maintain their revenue and improve their viability. Spinning off business units to allow the business core to be more focused while growing other opportunities is an attractive option for larger companies. David Wyshner is a spinoff expert, having served as CFO for six spun-off companies—including Kyndryl, the managed infrastructure services business spun off from IBM in 2021. I talked to him about the strategy and financial opportunities in a spin. An excerpt from our conversation appears later in this newsletter. A help wanted sign in Selden, New York. For the most part, there were no wild swings in the stock market last week. But that doesn't mean things were uneventful. Employment figures were released, showing weak private sector job growth, according to a report from ADP. The U.S. added just 37,000 private sector jobs—far short of consensus forecasts of 110,000 new positions. Small business employment was down 13,000 and manufacturing jobs were down 3,000. Chris Larkin, head of trading and investing at E-Trade, told Forbes that some tariff-related slowdowns in the market were to be expected. Trump, meanwhile, used the report to demand that the Federal Reserve 'LOWER THE RATE' for baseline interest at its meeting next week. (According to CME FedWatch, 99.9% of analysts think interest rates will not be changed.) The Labor Department's employment report was more optimistic, indicating that the U.S. added 139,000 nonfarm jobs from April to May, and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%. Meanwhile, the newly increased 50% tariffs on most imported steel and aluminum went into effect last Wednesday. Trump had said this increase was necessary to counter 'trade practices that undermine national security,' though it was condemned by global players including the EU and Canada. At the 2025 Forbes Iconoclast Summit last week, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin shared his frustration with Trump's 'anti-growth' tariff agenda, which he said has 'taken their toll already on our economy.' Advocates encourage Tesla to fire Elon Musk by flying a banner over Mar-A-Lago as President Trump and Elon Musk feuded last week. Tesla continues to have a difficult time, though its recent problems have been more directly linked to CEO Elon Musk's relationship with President Donald Trump, two men known for high drama. Soon after Musk's stint as a temporary government employee ended, he took to social media, criticizing Trump's bloated budget bill, which contains several tax cuts and is projected $3.8 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. Tesla's stock plummeted, and Trump threatened to take actions that would harm Musk and his companies, including canceling NASA contracts with SpaceX. As the feud has cooled, Tesla's stock has recovered a bit—but it's still down 11% week over week. Even before Musk's controversial entry into politics as Trump's biggest financial backer and his time heading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, gleefully hacking away at government employees, federal departments and funds for research and foreign aid, investors were becoming increasingly skeptical about Tesla. Aside from reactions to Musk's political turn, markets have not looked kindly at Tesla for about a year, as the company's vehicle deliveries, model development and progress on consumer cars have all been on the downswing. Several pension funds have major investments in the company, writes Forbes' Alan Ohnsman, and they have been pushing Tesla's board to do something about Musk. In April, nine state treasurers and comptrollers sent Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm a letter raising concerns about the risks to their economies if the company falters due to poor board governance. 'No other publicly traded company CEO would've been allowed to neglect his day-to-day duties like Musk has. No exception,' said Illinois Treasurer Michael Frerichs, who signed the letter. 'And if they had undertaken personal activities that hurt the reputation of a company or brand that badly, would they be treated like he has been?' getty AI can be a game changer for businesses, but it can also be an expensive drag on the balance sheet. A new report from billing software provider Chargebee found that companies that grew most in the last year were the ones that changed their pricing strategies to account for AI. The ones that were most successful combined a variety of pricing models: recurring subscriptions, usage-based models, outcome-based models and flat fees. Four in five of the companies surveyed that added AI said they are also changing their pricing. But how to adjust prices, especially in a time of economic uncertainty, is a challenge. Just over half said customer retention is their top concern, but 40% of businesses that adjusted prices last year reported a disconnect between increases and customer value. Nearly a quarter of companies struggled with explaining the benefits of adding AI functions to their services, while technical issues also caused struggles. Most SaaS providers have traditionally charged enterprises based on individual licenses, which is far different from a usage fee. Many companies, the study found, are testing out a variety of pricing structures to see what works best. Forbes senior contributor Alison Coleman talked to several companies about how they're making changes to their price strategies. Kyndryl CFO David Wyshner. If you're looking for a CFO with deep spinoff experience, David Wyshner is a good resource. He's worked on spinoffs as CFO at XPO, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, and is the first CFO for IBM spinoff Kyndryl. I spoke with him about his work with spinoffs, the strategic opportunities they present, and how he's built a solid growth strategy for Kyndryl. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. A longer version is available here. What are some of the things you have handled that are unique to a company going through a spin? Wyshner: There are so many opportunities to decide who you want to be when you grow up, and to start the process of getting there. In the case of Kyndryl, there were two really important elements. The first was: Culturally, how do we want to operate? How do we want to act and feel? The fact that Kyndryl's color is red, and that Kyndryl is spelled in a way that's a little bit funky and all lowercase. The fact that we're based here in New York City, not up in Westchester [County, New York] are all little signals that Kyndryl is different from IBM, its former parent company, that were all done intentionally. The culture we set up to be flat, fast and focused, which aren't always things that our former parent was known for. It was a really important part of what we've set up and tried to organize leadership behaviors around. The second element was establishing our strategy as an independent organization. Our rationale for becoming an independent company is one of the best I've ever seen. Previously, we were a captive managed services provider, and that strategically was just not a good place to be. As an independent company, we became an end-to-end services provider across a range of interconnected technologies. That independence to operate across a technology estate, rather than being constrained to a single parent company's technology, was a game changer. It increased our addressable market, changed what we could do for our customers. We weren't there just to provide help on IBM-related stuff. We were there to be a provider of services across their infrastructure and their tech estate, and we put in place a series of strategies to take advantage of the opportunity associated with that. Tell me about the three A's strategy. How does this strategy lay the groundwork for your plans? About three years ago, we announced the three A's: alliances, advanced delivery and focus accounts. The three A's were perfect for us. They were the things that strategically were important that would move the needle in terms of our results and competitive position. And the execution on them has been really strong. One was alliances, in building out our positioning across the tech estate. Advanced delivery was about driving automation and efficiency in how we deliver infrastructure services to customers. We've freed up thousands of people and saved over three quarters of a billion dollars a year by automating elements of what we do: Delivering services in a more automated and sophisticated way, and taking our service quality, which was always really strong to begin with, and making it even better than it was. That's been a huge win for us. It's been a driver of both margin expansion and continuing to have very strong customer satisfaction scores. The third element was our accounts initiative. When we became independent, we looked across our customer base and found that about 40% of our revenues were coming from accounts where we weren't making any money on a gross margin basis, which means we were losing money on a fully allocated pre-tax basis. Was it just because we were unlucky on 40%? No, it's because that's the way those deals had been priced and set up initially, often when our services relationship was part of a broader IBM relationship. That insight was some of the best news ever because it made it a fixable problem. We needed to get those accounts back to market pricing and levels of margin, and that's what we've been executing against ever since, adding to date about $900 million of annual profit. Of all the initiatives I've been involved with, it's one of the best in terms of impact that it's had and the execution we've delivered. We still have some runway there because we operate under long-term contracts, so not all of our contracts have come up for renewal yet. The idea that we're at $900 million and still have some opportunity to deliver more is incredibly exciting. Two years ago in calendar 2023, our stock was up 87%. Last year, it was up another 67%. This year, we're up in the mid-teens. The three A's have been the core driver because we told people exactly what we were going to do. We've reported on it each quarter, and people were able to see the progress that we've made in a way that really has been great in terms of our do-to-say ratio: What we've done relative to exactly what we said we were going to do. If you were to give some advice to other financial leaders, what would you say? One of the roles of finance is to drive great, impactful decision making across the organization. Where finance could be helpful is by analyzing, collaborating and prioritizing, and those are the areas I focus on. The quality of analysis that we can provide can support decision making. In fact, a lot of times, a good analysis makes what makes a decision really rather obvious. And so good objective analysis is really helpful. In organizations of almost any size, particularly larger organizations, collaboration is so critical to making progress. The third thing on my list is prioritizing. I think people and organizations can so easily get distracted by shiny objects, or devote more resources to things that are good or beneficial, but aren't as good or as beneficial as other things. And as a result, the idea of ruthless prioritization and making sure we're spending our resources—sometimes it's money, but it's often time, or organizational bandwidth for change—in a way that's really optimal. Analyze ruthlessly, collaborate ruthlessly—that's not an oxymoron—and prioritize ruthlessly. A recent study showed that managers believe just over a third of their employees are delivering great work. But if viewed through a lens of potential—two-thirds of employees have room for improvement—the statistic sounds hopeful. Here's what you can do as a leader to facilitate the conditions to work toward that improvement. TED Talks feature speakers with resonant, enlightening and inspirational messages. Even if you're not getting up on such a prominent stage, you can learn from them to become a better public speaker. Here are some tips to ease jitters and improve your message for the next time you talk to any size group. Which stablecoin issuer went public on the New York Stock Exchange last week? A. Tether B. Ethena Labs C. Circle D. MakerDAO See if you got the right answer here.
