Customer Stories
Ask the Expert: Closing Faster and More Accurately with CFGI
Rosaleen Pizarro is a Senior Manager at CFGI, a financial consulting firm that acts as an extension of your corporate finance team, serving in a variety of roles – from technical accounting advisor to M&A support to Controller or CFO – and delivering seamless support services.
Rosaleen recently sat down with me to discuss her views on the changing financial close process, and her views on value of close management software for helping accounting teams close faster and more accurately.
Watch my interview with Rosaleen above, or read the edited transcript below.
What do you do at CFGI?
My day-to-day is accounting advisory — going to clients and helping them make their accounting better. A lot of the clients that we go to are companies growing at a rapid rate. They’re trying to get up to speed with the growth of their company and their books, and their records. A lot of them tend to be a little more fun, more vibrant, more in tune with the times, but don’t have processes in place, or they’re trying to get the processes in place.
How is the financial close process changing for fast-growing companies?
So the old way of doing things is not having a checklist, or just having an Excel checklist. You may have five versions of that checklist sitting out there — that’s the old way of doing things. The new way of doing things is to have something more automated that are connected. Clients want everything done quicker, easier, faster, and as accurately as possible. In a world where everything is so technology-driven and you have maybe ten different systems, you want to select a system that we can implement quickly and that we can easily use. That’s what makes FloQast different — the ease of use.
Why is speed and ease of implementation important to you?
There’s other reconciliation software and closed-management systems out there, but then it takes four months to implement. It’s complex. And when you get down to the nitty-gritty of what you need, it’s an easy Excel-integrated software tool that makes life easier as opposed to another complex software that now we have to integrate into our processes.
How can companies close faster and more accurately?
I would recommend FloQast. It helps create structure and understanding. It lets you say “That didn’t work for us this way; doing this task sooner than doing XYZ task slowed us down. We can switch it up next month then see how that flows and works out.” You want something that you can use right away, and where you don’t have to make 10 different, 20 different changes that take you four months to do. That’s why you want FloQast.
