Corporate finance chiefs who are concerned about their companies’ loan maturities looming over them increasingly are turning to “amend and extend” arrangements. Year to date, about $40 billion in amend-and-extends have been issued, says Ioana Barza, vice president and senior market analyst with Thomson Reuters LPC. Overall, amendments to existing loans account for about 80 percent of leveraged lending activity, she adds. more

Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Computers, claimed that a broad shift to x86-based (PC) systems and automated management could trim $200 billion off the $1.2 trillion IT spending in North America. Following his own advice, Dell expects to save $200 million on his company’s own IT spending by the end of 2010.

Dell was speaking at OpenWorld 2009, the widely reported annual Oracle lovefest. Here is the mp3 link to a snippet of Dell’s talk. A larger snippet can be found here.

What Dell recites is the new catechism of the distributed commodity server age. You previously read about it here. It goes like this: Put your workloads on commodity PC servers and then use virtualization to consolidate them. The payoff: increased server utilization, lower energy costs, and a reduced server real estate footprint. more

The recession is not an equal-opportunity malady. Small companies have suffered – and, importantly, continue to suffer – more intensely than larger companies.

While that news may not surprise, this nugget ought to: The suffering, which takes the form or late accounts receivable (A/R) payments and higher days beyond (payment) terms (DBT), poses a risk to small and large enterprises alike.

Larger companies are making smaller suppliers suffer by taking longer and longer to pay them. Smaller companies are paying larger, big-name suppliers quicker while delaying payments to other small companies.

“Many small businesses live under a tight cash conversion cycle so if they are pushing cash out the door quickly for one class of suppliers (big companies) but not being paid quickly enough by their own customers, (other small businesses) then they can’t pay their own bills and DBT increases,” notes Cortera Vice President Alex Coté. more

Transfer pricing, which always ranks among the most pressing concerns for multinationals’ tax departments, has become even more critical this year. As cash-famished tax authorities worldwide step up their enforcement efforts, many businesses are reviewing their intercompany pricing policies to make sure they’re up to snuff.

While they’re at it, companies should take a good look at new OECD proposals for revisions to its basic transfer pricing guidelines, which may start to impact U.S.-based multinationals as early as next year. more

One way a company can manage its cash when it doesn’t actually have much to manage is to draw out payment terms – with or without letting its suppliers know what’s going on. If your company is on the other end, it essentially becomes a lender to these suppliers.

This scenario has been playing out more frequently in recent months, given that many traditional financing sources have been dry as the Sahara. “Companies that otherwise would have strong balance sheets are having difficulty getting financing for operations, so they’re pushing more heavily on key suppliers,” says Scott Blakeley, an attorney with Blakeley & Blakeley LLP, a Newport Beach, Cal., a law firm focusing on creditors’ rights. more