My Journey in Reconciliation Excellence (< 7 min)

Now that I've gotten to know you a little bit better, I'll give you a quick snapshot of me and why I'm excited to help guide your journey towards reconciliation excellence.

First, I'm a wife and mom to five kids.  We've had quite the family journey over the years including multiple cross-country moves, several with our sweet German Shepherd.  I love baseball, vintage, reading, and going for country drives with my husband.  I'm pretty simple – I'm happiest when I get to spend time with family, and I have a tea, a book and a baseball game to watch (preferably one my son is playing in!).

Over the years, my family has heard a lot about reconciliations.  They still don't quite know why I love them so much, but what they do know is that I'm super passionate about helping individuals strengthen their reconciliations.  That's the reason why I've developed this series of certification courses.

As a champion for reconciliation literacy, I've advocated for reconciliation excellence in all of the positions I've held over the years. From auditor to controller to educator to customer success – I've developed and led teams to optimize their financials through quality reconciliation processes. 

In 2007, my passion for accounting process improvement and automation led me to join one of the foremost companies on financial close automation.  However, please know that this specific course is purposefully built in a more holistic manner as I want you to be able to perform stronger reconciliations no matter what technology you choose to use.

No two reconciliations are the same and neither are two accountants.  I thought I’d walk you through my path so far, so you can see that a career in accounting truly is a journey and it’s fun to find your own niche.  I hope this inspires you to consider what the theme of your accounting journey might be.  I would love to hear your story, too!

Reconciliations have definitely been the common thread of my professional life which has now surpassed 30 years. I was first exposed to the art of reconciling back in 1991. It came about through my work at a marketing firm where I was filling in for their assistant who was out on maternity leave.  Part of my duties was to reconcile the advertising request that we had made on behalf of our clients for radio and television spots to the advertising that was actually run (and not run in some cases).  I had to ensure that the actual ad matched as well as when the advertisements were run, how long they were run for and how many were run.  So, I had this unique task, along with being the receptionist, of reconciling our ad purchases to the records of the television and radio companies.  It’s so interesting how your life experiences come full circle and are not for nothing.  I had to identify the exceptions, the differences, and see if they were within our accepted threshold.  For example, if it was within a certain period of time depending on the type of advertising, it was okay. This responsibility definitely forged my passion for reconciliations throughout my life.

Later in 1991, I joined Crowe and worked in the internal accounting department while I was going to college.  I worked my way up from making copies and stamping in invoices to running payroll checks and delivering financial statements to the partners.  So, I truly learned accounting from the ground up.  I interned in the Crowe tax department my senior year of college and worked for an amazing manager who held my workpapers to a very high standard.  I decided to stay at Crowe when they offered me a role as an auditor on their healthcare team upon graduation in 1995. We audited hospitals, nursing homes and group homes, and, as you can imagine, my managers expected me to know what a good reconciliation was.  I was held accountable for analyzing our clients’ reconciliations to make sure I was comfortable with the ending balances.  Was the balance correct and did I have what was needed to support the ending balance so that we could issue the appropriate opinion on their financial statements?

A couple years later, I went back to the internal accounting department at Crowe where I was a financial analyst and I started reconciling some of the accounts.  Some of my other duties required looking at reconciliations prepared by other accounting staff.  The next year I was promoted to assistant controller where I had a team of individuals.  I became the reviewer of those same reconciliations.  I tried to utilize what I knew was or was not a good reconciliation to forge better processes.  As you can imagine, being in the internal accounting department of an accounting firm you have some pretty savvy constituents.  They knew what good reconciliations look like and really understood what should be on their financial statements.  Again, I was held to a high standard and so I did the same with my staff.  With the control of quality account reconciliations, it helped us know the financial statements were accurate before they were sent to the partners.

Over the course of about 10 years, I was at Crowe.  We then moved to Colorado where I led accounting teams at a few organizations - all in different industries, including technology, professional services and home building. Yet again, reconciliations were on my responsibility list.  I learned to embrace them and see them for the very strong control that they are, especially being on the other side of an audit.

In 2007, I joined BlackLine as an educator. I actually happened upon them via a Google search on reconciliation automation.  I was sitting at a park thinking that surely there had to be a better way to get reconciliations done.  As soon as I saw the software in action, I wondered where it had been all my life and eventually I decided to join their very small team. It was very early in their journey; there was not even a glimmer yet of them becoming a public company. I joined them as a solutions consultant. Eventually I created and led teams in customer success, account management, and customer experience.

After about 10 years at BlackLine, I decided it was time to work even more closely with clients, advising them on how to better utilize their financial close software from a consultative approach.  I was able to see their processes more intimately, more on a day-to-day basis, and better understand if the team needed help beyond just their close software itself.  While their challenges were often rooted in a need for stronger reconciliations, I didn’t have the opportunity to work with the individual accountants, just really accounting management.  And, teams’ reconciliations would improve for a season but they were often not able to maintain the momentum they had gained.  This was often due to changes in leadership, subject matter experts and/or systems.  It made me sad which led me to where I am today – creating reconciliation programs with built-in accountability and support for all accountants.

I'm now going to champion your journey to being reconciliation strong. And what that means to me is you having the confidence to understand how to perform a quality reconciliation, to know why reconciliations are so important and then to share that knowledge with others.