The Controller's Role in the Financial Close 2 Credits
The Controllership Series
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Aug 30, 12:00 PM
ET
Within this segment of our controllership series, we will discuss the area of financial close.
There’s something magical about the last few days of every financial period. No wait, not magical - miserable. Finance teams devote enormous time and energy to what should be a smooth operation. And in every workplace, it’s a stress fest. Regardless of a company’s size or financial sophistication, the financial close process can become convoluted.
A common challenge for the controller role is in closing the month-end and period-end books in preparation to issue financial statements. This duty requires precision, timing, and efficiency. Sequential steps — from recording transactions to generating financial statements — must be done efficiently, collaboratively, and accurately before accountants can close the books.
Managers, analysts, Boards, and investors digest market information in real-time and are beginning to expect the same financial results. To meet these high expectations, the CFO and controller need to find ways to speed up their financial close processes to report the financial results before they become perceived as old news in the new world
The closing process has traditionally been a slow one with many companies taking two weeks to close their subsidiary’s books and another two to three weeks to roll up and consolidate the results. In today’s fast-paced digital world, much has been done to help accelerate that process with integrated enterprise resource planning systems, general ledger, and consolidated software.
In this online continuing education course, the speaker Lynn Fountain will discuss the many facets involved in closing the books and will provide insights into expediting the process in order to be able to create more timely financial statements.
Typical steps in the accounting close process include:
In this online CPE/CPD webinar, we will discuss the elements of the financial close and also important concepts to assist the controller in accelerating their close timeline.
This includes addressing of all functional areas of the close including payroll, invoicing, payables, inventory, cash, and the general ledger. In this online CPE course, we will also discuss important concepts of ensuring that your financial close is accurate by discussing bank reconciliations, overhead allocations, bad debt reserves, unpaid wages, accruals for vacation time, account reconciliations, deprecation, and overall financial statement review.
Credits
Course Level
Instructional Method
Pre-requisites
Advance Preparation
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Lynn Fountain has over 39 years of experience spanning public accounting, corporate accounting and consulting. 20 years of her experience has been working in the areas of internal and external auditing and risk management. She is a subject matter expert in multiple fields including internal audit, ethics, fraud evaluations, Sarbanes-Oxley, enterprise risk management, governance, financial management and compliance. Lynn has held two Chief Audit Executive (CAE) positions for international companies. In one of her roles as CAE, she assisted in the investigation of a multi-million-dollar fraud scheme perpetrated by a vendor that spanned 7 years and implicated 20 employees. The fraud was formally investigation by the FBI and resulted in 5 indictments estimating a $13M fraud loss.
Ms. Fountain is currently engaged in her own consulting and training practice. She has successfully executed on several consulting assignments spanning areas of accounting, risk, ERM and internal audit. She is a highly sought-after trainer and international speaker and has produced hundreds of courses delivered through seminars, conferences and on-demand training. She is the author of three separate technical books.
Ms.
Fountain obtained her BSBA from Pittsburg State University and her MBA from
Washburn University in Kansas. She has her CPA, CGMA, CRMA credentials.
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PS
Very Good, but I would like to see examples of entries and how the close entries.
CF
Great info. Well presented. I appreciated the pdf for future reference.
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