Month-End Masters User Gathering

Full Description

Got the FloQast basics down? Let’s take your FloQast knowledge to the next level! During this session, we’ll share the most common goals we hear from accounting departments and how you can use FloQast to achieve them. You’ll learn how to:

• Take key steps in FloQast to further shorten your close
• Provide visibility of your close status to your CFO within minutes
• Answer questions from auditors before they ask
• Encourage team members to take ownership and accountability for their work

Full Description

No longer just a solution to help accounting teams organize their work and collaborate, FloQast is increasingly helping these teams do the work, too.

Join product managers Aynsley Moffitt and Erika Heckscher as they delve into two new modules that help automate and streamline operations and thereby save hours and for some organizations, even days of work. Spotlighting Flux Analysis to help bridge the gap between accounting and finance and Matching to expedite the reconciliation process with intelligent automation, these two solutions can help accounting teams increase their efficiency and overall organizational impact. Tips on best practices to roll out, how to best leverage and how to gain organizational buy in will be shared.

Full Description

Want to learn how to “level up” as a finance leader? When Jerry Raphael joined Stack Overflow as controller in 2015, he was deep in the close every month. Just a few years later, Jerry has transformed his role from a number cruncher to a business leader adding value throughout the organization. How did he do it? By creating a standardized, repeatable process for the month-end close, empowering his accounting team to close the books without the need for constant monitoring.

In this fireside Q&A session, Jerry will share how he’s been able to add value to the organization beyond the close as the primary data intelligence person responsible for non-financial business metrics in addition to the financial statements. We’ll also discuss how he’s using FloQast with his team at Stack Overflow to enable a flexible work environment with employees on multiple continents and the effects — both professional and personal — on dramatically improved organization and collaboration for his team. The result is a culture built for success that makes it easy to hire and has dramatically reduced turnover.

Full Description

For over 20 years, all publicly-traded companies have been required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to implement and test for operating effectiveness internal accounting controls to comply with SEC requirements. In all that time, compliance hasn't gotten much easier — until now. In this session, Derek Mernagh, Corporate Controller at Yelp, will share how his team leverages the advanced collaboration features in FloQast to document the preparation and review of Yelp's SOX controls, as well as SEC Reporting. See the "before" and "after" of SOX compliance as Derek shares how his team moved from email and other documentation of controls to organizing it all in close management software. Derek will also share best practices for granting access to internal and external auditors so they don't have to bother his accounting team when it comes to SOX testing, and tips on closing the books in a an efficient and accurate manner.

Full Description

Look beyond the hype and discuss how advances in technology will impact how FloQast evolves as a close management solution - both in organizing the work of the close, and leveraging technology to help get the work done. What technologies - such as artificial intelligence - will FloQast most likely leverage to improve the product? How will that change what FloQast offers? What accounting tasks are likely to be automated? Most importantly, what impact will all these changes have on the accounting process, and how will they change the role of the accountant as humans do less data assembly and more data analysis? Take a peek into the future of FloQast and how accountants will use it.

Full Description

These days, an audit is something you really can’t avoid — but who says it needs to be a pain in the asset? In this session, ex-auditors at FloQast will walk you through the best ways to engage with auditors using FloQast and how you can design a scalable process that minimizes compliance risk that might even lower your audit fees.

You’ll learn how to:

• Position FloQast to external auditors as a way to significantly reduce audit risk
• Utilize FloQast auditor licenses for a more efficient and transparent audit engagement
• Align common bottlenecks in the PBC process to efficiency gains that come with using FloQast
• Maximize the use of existing FloQast functionality to optimize your internal control environment

Full Description

With stops at Shopping.com, eBay, and Move.com to his name, Rob Krolik was an experienced Silicon Valley finance executive before he took over as the CFO for a burgeoning Bay Area startup called Yelp.

During his tenure with the tech giant, Krolik oversaw the company’s successful IPO, which Fortune Magazine called the “Best IPO of 2012” and its enormous growth from $50 to $750 million. Today, Rob sits on multiple Boards, teaches a CFO class and serves as General Partner and CFO at Burst Capital.

In this session, Rob will share firsthand lessons learned from his long, distinguished finance career and he will share his secrets for what he believes are the three keys to success for the financial professional.

Full Description

FloQast was designed to improve the month-end close process, but over the years, many teams have started to use it beyond the close and even beyond the accounting department. Increasingly, teams are using FloQast as a way to improve collaboration with other departments and as a management tool to facilitate a culture of continuous improvement (and thus a faster, more accurate close).

In this session, you’ll learn:

• How to use FloQast analytics and reports to enable a culture of continual improvement, as well as host better project kick-off and debrief meetings
• Best practices for inviting and engaging outside users such as finance, payroll, and auditors to leverage the power of FloQast for increased collaboration and visibility across teams into the status of the close
• Tips for successfully onboarding new employees and helping them understand their assigned processes, policies, and procedures
• Ways to use FloQast to successfully scale accounting operations across multiple regions, and even globally

Full Description

Join us in honoring some of the most innovative professionals in the world with our first annual Month-End Masters awards. Month-End Masters are accounting and finance leaders who are making a material difference not just for their teams but also more broadly in their organizations. These individuals embody the concept of a controller as a strategic leader, not just a number cruncher (though they need not be controllers, and also likely still have the skill to rock an Excel spreadsheet).