Speaker 1: Dear Mark, hope all is well. We would like to remind you to send us the following monthly reports for October 2022. Income statement, balance sheet at month end, cash flow statement, asset-based loan roll forward schedule, Q4 forecast versus budget. We look forward to hearing back from you. This is how Mark, the CFO in our video, begins his day, with a typical email from the private equity firm that's backing his company. Those were the words in the email. But what they're really saying is, Dear Mark, we'd like to remind you to send us the following monthly reports for October. Income statement, aka, please don't tell us you're still bleeding money. Balance sheet at month end, does your working capital indicate you're about to go under? Cash flow statement, where did you spend our money? Asset-based loan roll forward schedule, nah, you didn't just borrow some more. Q4 most recent forecast versus budget, was your budget a big fat lie? We look forward to hearing back from you, aka, hustle up, we are expecting this today. Mark is the CFO of a mid-sized software company in New York City. The company develops and sells software to other businesses, and it is backed financially by a handful of VCs and private equity firms. I've been a corporate controller for the past 6 or 7 years and have been in the accounting field for the past 15 years. If you've been following the channel, you'll know that I'm a CPA working in New York City and that I started working in public accounting at PwC and now work as a corporate controller at a software company. Back to our CFO. Now, I'm gonna show you how he spends his day, and toward the end of the video, I'll share with you the best career path to follow if you want to one day become a CFO yourself. In terms of schedule, Mark does a hybrid work schedule where he works 2 days out of the office and the rest of the week he works from home. He oversees a team of 20 professionals, but luckily, he doesn't have to directly manage all of them himself. Here is a hierarchy view of where Mark sits in an organization. He reports to the CEO and has 2 main direct reports under him. A controller, right here, this handsome devil on the left, and a VP of FP&A. My role as a controller is to manage the accounting side of the house, or making sure the financial statements are accurate in all material respects, while the VP of FP&A takes care of the planning and budgeting side of the house. You could say that my role as a controller can be summarized in constantly reassuring the CFO that we'll pass the audit and that our books are squeaky clean. Alright, let's get back to Mark our CFO and see what he's up to on a daily basis. It's 9am and he's just read the lovely email from the investors nudging and hustling him to get the October financial statements. He's going to forward that email to the VP of FP&A and to the controller, me, and ask we take care of it, which of course we will. Now we are used to these kind of requests from investors and we have a system for developing these reports and usually get these reports out in a couple of hours. It's now 10am and Mark has a meeting with me, the controller, to discuss the audit. I give him a status update on what's outstanding and when I expect us to be all wrapped up. Let's take a quick 30 second break from Mark and his day and let me give you some information about the Controller Academy. I developed this 6 hour online course in 2022 and it took me about 6 months to complete it. My students learn on demand at their own pace and typically complete it in about 6 weeks. A prerequisite is a high school degree but if you have some accounting degree or education then hey, that's a plus. Finally, my students tell me they learn in those 6 hours more than they learned in a few semesters in school. I'll tell you guys some more about the course toward the end of the video. After that Mark will take a quick coffee break and then he's going to head into his next meeting at 11am where he's going to meet with the sales leaders to discuss the pricing of a new software product. The sales team will present him with their ideas where they consider how to make the most money while keeping in line with pricing with similar products in the marketplace. At 12.30pm it's time to break for lunch. Mark always has a working lunch with someone from the company where they combine eating and discussing one area of the business. After spending about an hour on lunch, Mark will return to the office where he will meet with the FB&A team to discuss the quarterly re-forecast. And the focus of this meeting is on revenue forecasts. The team contemplates two approaches to forecasting revenue in the coming quarter. A bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. With the bottom-up forecast approach it is performed just like the name implies. You start from the bottom with a list of products and services then use the current customer and volume data to try and predict future revenue. While with the top-down approach the team begins from the top meaning they assess the size of the entire market the company operates in and then assess its share of that market. After looking at both approaches they decide as a team to focus more on the bottom-up approach because it will be easier to rationalize when speaking to investors. And then use a light version of the top-down method to validate the results they get from the first method. To get the work done after the meeting the team will have to roll up their sleeves, load up on the caffeine intake and start building the revenue model which will have to account for projected growth by customer, seasonality and other variables. Alright, it's 3pm in the afternoon and it's time for Mark to sit down and review the board slide deck. The executive team meets with the board of directors once each quarter to review the financial results, forecasts and the business outlook. The slides need to be easy to digest and provide good amount of information. Mark has a specific style in mind when it comes to his slide deck. He likes a clean, minimalistic slide structure that allows him to talk over it and provide further context. The slides will present KPIs such as DSO or Days Sales Outstanding, CAC or Customer Acquisition Costs, Growth Margin Growth among other KPIs. All of these KPIs and many more are discussed in depth in my Controller Bundle course for which I'm gonna leave a link down below. Now these board meetings are typically stressful and Mark usually takes the team out for some drinks later on that day to blow off some steam. Now does all of this sound like something you'd like to be doing one day? If yes, here are the likely career paths you can take. Those who qualify for a CFO role typically come out of the following backgrounds. 90% of the time they come from either investment banking, equity research or advisory consulting while only 10% of the time they come out of an accounting background like myself. Now do you plan on becoming a CFO one day? I'd love to hear your background in the comment section and I will try to reply with my thoughts on your plan overall on how to get there. What are the things that you need to know to become a Corporate Controller? Well, number one, you need to know about billing and revenue accounting. Number two, you need to learn how to run an efficient accounts payable process. Number three, you need to know how to record the various business transactions into the accounting software. And number four, you need to learn how to close the books and create and analyze financial statements. This is why after crossing 100k subscribers in YouTube, I've decided to create the Controller Academy. My name is Bill Hanna and I'm a licensed CPA in the great state of New York and I've been working in the accounting field for the last 16 or 17 years with about 10 years working as a Corporate Controller. What is the difference between the Controller Academy and any other accounting course? The difference between the Controller Academy and any other accounting course that you see online is that these other accounting courses tend to be 80% theory and only 20% examples. While with the Controller Academy, I've made sure that we only spend about 10% of the time on accounting theory and 90% of the time on hands-on examples because we learn best through examples. The entire course is built around a real-life company, SpotBooker, which is a software company where we go through the entire business cycle and create the accounting operation around fundraising, billing, payroll, accounts payable, etc. etc. with very little time spent on theory and most of the time spent on how to actually hands-on record the transactions in accounting software. This online course is ideal for accounting professionals ranging from staff accountant all the way up to controller who want to hone in on their skills and understand exactly what is it they need to know to become an effective corporate controller. I teach everything in plain English like how I speak right now so that if you're an accounting student or someone with a little bit of background in accounting, you could also take the course. What you'll get is a lifetime on-demand access to 6 hours of video lectures in plain English plus all of the Excel template downloads that I personally use to run an efficient accounting operation. Also, what you'll get after completing all the lectures and answering a few multiple choice questions, you'll get a certificate of completion that you can download in PDF and post on the certification section of your LinkedIn profile. If we take a look at the company's main financial activities, these are the day-to-day transactions that are happening in the business. And the second type is going to be the month-in-close activities. In the day-to-day activities, we've got billing, we've got payrolls, and accounts payable, you know, to make money, you got to spend money, right? Which you can pretty much summarize by saying these are the accrual adjustments. And then the other activity is going to be account reconciliation. All right, let's rock and roll.