Controllers Council recently held a roundtable panel discussion entitled, How Controllers Can Support Growth, presented by BILL.
Panelists included Christine Gu, SVP Finance/CAO at Clarify Health Solutions, and Kimberly Hollinger, Controller at Wag! Group.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full roundtable panel video archive video here.
How has or is your company growing? Organically or inorganically?
Kimberly: It is a combination. WAG grows organically through new products and services. That’s something that we’re focused on expanding that suite of services. But additionally, in 2022, WAG did go public through SPAC, which is actually when I was brought on, and then also has done growth through strategic M&A.
Christine: For us in terms of company growth, Clarify is growing both organically and strategically. On organic side, we expand into, know, adjacent verticals and introduce new solutions that cater to evolving needs of health plans and providers. Our growth is driven by deepening the product portfolio and then expanding customer use cases and then also making some critical commercial hires. Then in parallel, we also evaluate inorganic opportunities such as like partnership or tapping acquisitions that can enhance our data or technologies. As a finance leader, play a key role in assessing those opportunities and making sure, right, it balanced our growth potential with the integration risk.
How does Finance & Accounting support growth?
Christine: We support the growth by being embedded into the business. F&A isn’t just like a back-office function for us. We view ourselves as an enabler of growth. We’re centralized, but very collaborative. Our team supports the growth basically through, I would summarize in three key pillars. Number one is operational excellence. So, implement cloud-based systems and automation platforms like BILL, which streamlined AR/AP and reducing manual work and increase accuracy. And then the second pillar that we are driving for is the scalable infrastructure. So, we anticipate growth early and invest in scalable process. For example, like the month-end close automation or real-time dashboards and get us all ready to the extent that we can. We’re not always playing catch-up. The third pillar, I would say, is strategic partnership, especially our FP&A function engage very closely with commercial and the product leaders. We are also surveying the sales function in that regard, and we build very flexible models to evaluate pricing, go to market efforts and then as well as product profitability. In addition to all that, we also partner with outside consultants, and then also have an offshore team to handle day to day transactions, which allows our core team to focus on high value activities such as strategic planning, forecasting, technical accounting, board reporting, controls, and business partnerships.
Kimberly: We support growth. We are a centralized team due to the nature of our company being in the technology space, we don’t have physical locations. So, everything can be centralized more easily. I think it is somewhat dependent on what the business looks like. When I worked at ADESA, we had 56 U.S. auctions. So those were physical locations. We had a more decentralized model and then also some functions were centralized. I think the business and what the support needs, what support the business needs is going to ultimately drive how the F&A team needs to be shaped to really support that strategic growth of the business. So, we support with budgeting, forecasting, other strategic growth projects, but ultimately one of the big projects that we’ve taken on was implementing a lot of automation and controls. So really building that control environment, we implemented a closed software, an inventory management system, and a few other items to really take the preparers to more of a reviewer level and really leave the time open for some of those strategic projects to move the business forward.
Please share how F&A collaborates with other departments or functions to achieve corporate growth objectives?
Kimberly: I think the level of collaboration and support that can be given by the F &A department does depend on the level, the volume of work and the team size. So I think it is important for businesses to leave room for not only just the compliance work, but that strategic work to help collaborate with other departments and have that strategic growth.
At WAG, one of the things that our team does is manage the contracts. So currently, there’s a lot of things that you can sign up, click-through terms, month to month on a credit card, and you could end up having 100 different subscriptions, and you could end up not canceling them on time, or not understanding whether you’re locked into a new term. I think having a very detailed budget and understanding of all the vendors and when that cancellation periods are can help ensure that your expenses are in line.
Christine: Collaboration is embedded in how we operate. For example, with sales, we co-develop commission plan that drive behavior and know, all right. And then we model deal structure to maximize revenue potentials as well as ensuring revenue recognition compliance. So that’s from the sales partnership or collaboration. And then with product and engineering, we align on the capitalizable development activities and then also assessing monetization strategies with them. And then with HR, we partner on workforce planning and cost modeling to ensure alignment with our business budget and cycles. All these cross-functional relationships allows the finance team to move from being reactive to proactive.
What roll will AI or automation have in your F&A department?
Kimberly: AI is a buzzword right now. You see it everywhere. I think there’s a lot of different ways to utilize AI within finance and accounting. It works well for some right now and some AI is going to need a little bit more time to really get there. I think ultimately one of the first things that you need to do is ensure that you have clean structured data, especially if you are a data-heavy business. Because if you have anomalies in your data or your data is not housed in a clean fashion, it’s going to be much more difficult to implement any kind of AI overlay on top to read that data. So, what we have done so far is we are using it in use cases where we’ve assessed the risk. With accounting especially, 99% accuracy is table stakes. It’s compliance. You don’t get that much wiggle room. And then for finance, think we look at it from the sense of, if there’s an error, will that really change the outcome? And if the answer is no, or there’s ways to put guardrails around the AI with a human in the loop, that works as well. One of the things that we’re working on is using it to build out automations for repetitive processes.
Christine: AI and automation are no longer optional. I believe they are foundational to building a future proof finance organization. At Clarify, we’re leveraging automation for AP and reconciliation already. And then we are currently also exploring AI for forecasting and using machine learning model to kind of enhance accuracy and then detect any anomalies. And then expense management, automating policy checks and categorization. And then also the contrary view.
Tell us your story about scaling too fast, or lessons learned?
To view this question and learn more about corporate growth, view the complete webcast here.
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