Controllers Council recently held a panel discussion entitled, How Finance, Accounting, and IT Leaders Partner to Achieve Operational Excellence, sponsored by BILL.
BILL is a leading financial operations platform for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). As a champion of SMBs, BILL automates the future of finance so businesses can thrive.
Our expert panelists were Brenna Albert and Gregg D’eon.
Brenna Albert is a VP Global Controller of Medline Industries, a global medical supply company, manufacturer and distributor with over 335,000 products, 38,000 employees, and operating in approximately 110 countries. Gregg D’eon is a Senior Director and Corporate Controller at DraftKings, based in Boston, with more than 4,000 employees. During his nearly eight-year tenure, he served as Assistant Controller and Director of Accounting. Both Brenna and Gregg were recognized as winners of the National Controller of the Year.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webinar archive video here.
Share an interesting example of how finance and accounting partnered or collaborated with you IT department.
Gregg: Our system right now is proprietary, right? Anytime you hop on our app and place a bet, there’s a handful of data that goes through and flows through a series of tables and databases and all that fun stuff across the organization. So, I think really the example I’d share is really our improvements around understanding where certain departments are getting data, how that ultimately translates, and creating our own, we call it financial system of record, essentially. Shrink-wrapped database that has all the information that we need in order to financially report. And then with that, you have to reconcile that database across other databases that are being used in the company. So, you know, not only are we partnering internally to get the right answer and get to the right gap answer. We’re also partnering with our data engineering teams, with our corporate reporting teams and our compliance teams for reporting to states and making sure that all those are in sync.
Brenna: I’m going to go one world back to when I was at Cresco Labs for a kind of interesting example because that was a startup company that was hypergrowth and constrained on resources early on. We’re trying to hold as much cash as we can in the business, keep costs down, went public via reverse takeover, and trying to manage our margins and e-bottom margins and all that stuff. But we were growing, and the kind of partnership that we created with the IT team is we were both growing up together. The way that we had to manage the partnership is understanding our constraints from a cash flow standpoint, the need to get operating leverage, and we’d have to have a multi-year roadmap for these different processes.
Explain the process for determining which F&A automation or technologies to implement – does it start with IT or F&A?
Gregg: I think it really starts with what your goals are for the upcoming year. So, we as a finance organization will sit down and just outline our goals and what we want to accomplish from a finance perspective, from an operational excellence and process improvement perspective. From there, we then will pivot to the IT function and say, all right, well, what do we need to do on the roadmap to achieve this? Do we want to pull, it’s like one of three levers that say whenever you’re trying to achieve a goal, it’s you’re changing your people, you’re changing your processes, you’re changing your technology. And when you’re moving around, when you’re pulling the technology lever, that’s always going to be the largest and most pervasive change in your organization. Then it moves on to, let’s talk through the roadmap of the changes that we want to make.
Brenna: I think it comes down to looking at this roadmap, prioritizing, and then really partnering together with our partners and in the IT organization on what those technology solutions could look like. And then certainly process change, in the way of working come with that assessment. I would say that we at times will be proactive with our IT teams.
Where is your F&A department in adopting automation for manual, repetitive and/or time-consuming tasks?
Brenna: We have a strong process improvement team here at Medline, and they are really focused on evaluating processes, finding those opportunities for automation, implementing bots for different AP/AR-related processes. We’ve done a bit of that as well for some automating of journal entries, for example, allocations and things like that. So, I’d say we’re on an ongoing journey. There’s more automation work that’s certainly coming. We call our bold process for coming up with ideas, going straight to the source, having people bring ideas to that team and prioritizing those and figuring out the right solution and partnership with IT. One thing I would say has been a little bit of a recent challenge for us because there really was such a push for automation over the last few years is that we ended up with possibly too many tools to use to do some of this automation work.
Gregg: There’s always room for automation. There’s always room for us to evaluate a process and ultimately figure out a way to leverage technology to solve it. The problem is it’s striking that right balance of technology won’t necessarily solve all of the your problems, you’re still going to need the processes in place to audit it to make sure that you’re passing the IP standards. I’ll do pretty much anything to avoid taking a screenshot nowadays So, the idea being is focusing on your IT general controls, focusing on your processes and focusing on what makes sense as far as the balance between the two?
Is AI an initiative at your company, and if so, which department(s) and/or roles does AI reside?
Gregg: It’s more with our analytics teams at this point. I think finance tends to be last mover when it comes to things like these because we’re always worried about ITGC concerns, whether or not there’s some sort of security issue that comes up. So, it’s more making sure that the tools that we have in place don’t ultimately kick out a journal entry that gets posted that’s wrong. The idea being is more, I’d say we’re pretty much in our infancy from a finance team perspective. We’re still evaluating what makes sense, but we do use it across other areas of the organization.
Brenna: I know within our IT organization, we recently had a new intern join, and AI is really giving me one of his main areas of focus is figuring out: where do we deploy AI the best way for the company, look at different cycles and processes and figure out where it can be plugged in for creating different efficiencies. I would say, within finance, we do have different things that we’re evaluating, but I wouldn’t say that’s something that we’re aggressively pursuing at the moment.
How do you see the collaboration of F&A and IT evolving in the future?
To view this question and the complete webinar, download here.
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BILL (NYSE: BILL) is a leading financial operations platform for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). As a champion of SMBs, we are automating the future of finance so businesses can thrive. Our integrated platform helps businesses to more efficiently control payables, receivables and spend and expense management. Hundreds of thousands of businesses rely on BILL’s proprietary member network of millions to pay or get paid faster. Headquartered in San Jose, California, BILL is a trusted partner of leading U.S. financial institutions, accounting firms, and accounting software providers. For more information, visit bill.com.
