The IMA Student Chapter at Cleveland State University is hosting their student meeting on Wednesday March 17 from 5PM - 6PM. The presentation will be "Get Your Close On: How to Speed Up the Month-End Close Process" and the guest speaker will be Dana Whitted from the IMA Cleveland Chapter. It will be a virtual meeting via Zoom and the cost is absolutely free to all attendees. IMA members will need to register with Chapter President Honey Wess in order to receive 1 hour of CPE credit. NO CPE credit will be given if members hop on the Zoom call and do not register.
To register for this free event, please contact Chapter President Honey Wess at 216-496-8597. We look forward to seeing everyone there.
Guest Speaker
Dana Whitted, CPA
Corporate Controller - Exacta Land Surveyors, LLC
About Dana Whitted
Dana Whitted is a number whisperer, data dominator, and Excel guru disguised as a corporate controller for a privately held land surveying company. She has "big company" experiences that she brings to smaller organizations to help position those companies for success. With more than 20 years as an accounting professional, she has worked in publicly traded and privately held companies, as well as on government contracts. She taught accounting classes for students studying to be chefs, nurses, and corrections workers as well as advanced finance students and IT professionals. She teaches Excel tricks to both the uninitiated and the life-long converts and prides herself on finding a way to get at the data with or without the right software for the job.
She has been a career-long member of IMA, serving on chapter and council boards and global committees. She is currently serving on the Diversity & Inclusion subcommittee of the IMA Global Board of Directors. She holds an MBA from The University of Akron and an Ohio CPA license, and she recently became an amateur radio operator.
Session Overview
Are you challenged by the systems you have and the time it takes to get the data you want? You're not alone.
Many smaller companies have lengthy month-end close processes with little time left for analyzing the results to help make decisions. Or the data that comes out of the month-end process is too summarized to offer insights into the operations of the business.
Maybe you don't have the manpower or money to implement costly tools or ERP systems to speed up month-end, but even the simplest systems can help, if you set them up wisely.
In this session, you'll learn how to leverage the tools you have already or change to a comparably priced better tool to get your monthly results faster and with more relevant analysis. We'll leverage my learnings from converting a 25-day close into a 5-day close over the span of 7 months in 2020 to help you identify how to streamline your own company's month-end process.
We will address real-life examples, providing tips you can take back and use in this month's month-end close!
Attendees will walk away with a tool kit for identifying the problems in their own month-end close, ideas for how to resolve those issues, and real-life examples of how to tackle changing banks, payroll providers, expense reporting systems, and charts of account without significant disruption to the daily operations of their companies.
Attendees will leave this session with tools to:
- Diagnose root causes for month-end close delays
- Identify and implement solutions for those reoccurring delays without disrupting business operations
- Present those solutions to get management buy-in when needed