Howard Katzenberg on Strategic Accounting

[00:00:00] Not so much a systems and workflow challenge. It’s, it’s really a mentality and desire to really break away from the thought like, “Hey, my job, it’s not financial reporting, it’s business intelligence and business impact,” right? That to me, like, that’s the hard part. You’ve got to get that mentality shift with the people on your account team.  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Role Forward Podcast. I’m Joe Michalowski and this episode is brought to you by Mosaic, a strategic finance platform that transforms the way business gets done, and today our guest is Howard Katzenberg. He’s the founder and CEO of Glean, an AP automation solution that helps finance teams spend more intelligently.

Howard Katzenberg Introduction

[00:01:01] Joe Michalowski: Howard, thanks so much for joining. 

[00:01:02] Howard Katzenberg: My pleasure. I really love what you guys do here.

[00:01:05] Joe Michalowski: Awesome. Really excited to have you on as a guest. But, just, you know, before we dive into main topic, just the usual intro spiel, sort of give us an overview of who you are, how you ended up founding Glean and how you got there? 

[00:01:18] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah. So, listen, I’ve been working in FinTech, or, you know, in finance roles most of my career, from early days at American Express doing venture capital to serving as one of the first employees at OnDeck Capital, one of the the FinTech pioneers, eventually becoming CFO there, taking them public and then becoming CFO of better.com, the online mortgage company,

[00:01:39] and when I looked back at, like, all those experiences as CFO I always had really good visibility into what was driving the revenue. And in fact, like, I take pride in the Tableau or Looker dashboards that get set up, and what I loved about those dashboards is I could always double click and see, you know, basically top of funnel what’s going on,

[00:01:56] conversion rates, what’s happening, what’s going on with that pricing? And, you know, I knew the numbers better than my head of sales or head of marketing. Here’s the exact opposite though when it came to managing expenses. I had zero visibility and for months and, you know, I’d have to wait until the accounting close to get my first read of how we performed and the report I’d get was be like this, this export out of our accounting system where the rows were, the, the vendors, the columns were the month, the cells were the dollar amounts

[00:02:24] but my frustration was I couldn’t double click the same way I could at my revenue dashboard. So I’d see, “Hey, AWS was $40,000 this month. What drove the increase from, like, 20,000 last month?” And I’d have no idea ’cause I couldn’t double click and that really frustrated me. And, you know, when I looked at the solutions we’re using on the finance team to manage vendor spend, we had things like bill.com, which were very tactical,

[00:02:47] Howard Katzenberg: they helped us pay bills, but it wasn’t strategic and as a CFO, it couldn’t answer the questions. I, you know, cared most about with respect to our vendors, you know, what does this vendor do for us? When was the last time we wererenegotiating pricing and are we seeing an ROI with this vendor? The systems only captured one data point.

[00:03:04] How much do we owe them? But what I really cared about is, what are we buying? What’s, like, the unit prices we’re playing, what’s the quantities we’re ordering and systems like bill.com just, like, disregarded that information. So, you know, I found the Glean to really unlock the value and the power on data,

[00:03:20] and you use that to generate, you know, insights into spins, insights into savings, opportunities that otherwise would likely not be uncovered by my finance teams. So, anyway, our customers basically call us bill.com with the brain and that’s what Glean is. It’s an AP automation platform, but it’s really much more than that.

[00:03:38] It’s spend analytics, savings recommendations and a platform for collaborating with your peers on how much you spent.

[00:03:46] Joe Michalowski: Awesome. I love that. And especially, like, from the Mosaic perspective, we talk about strategic finance. That’s, like, our, our core thought and I think that’s why, you know, we align so much with, with what you want to do with Glean, because that’s exactly what 

[00:04:00] I think the vision is for the future of the finance function as a whole is, like, how can we get these people out of the back office and into a role where they can actually double click into all those different functions and really, like, see forward and what the business should do?

[00:04:15] So, really matches up with, with all the messaging that we kind of put out, and so that’s why I’m really excited to have you, you here and, you know, before, when we were talking about having you on, that you had this idea that you sent over, was about strategic accounting, I know you have, like, I know there, there’s such a marriage between finance and accounting, but I would love to know, in your eyes, what the stereotypical reputation is of accounting, it this narrative that you just kind of painted for us and, like, why it’s so important to you for accountants and the accounting function to kind of break the mold that backward-looking sort of unstrategic stereotype? 

Breaking Traditional Finance and Accounting Stereotypes

[00:04:52] Howard Katzenberg: Sure. I mean, when you hear accounting, what are some words that people often associate with it? And, you just use, like, kind of back office, right? That’s one, being counters, cost center, and I hear control nerds. It’s rare that, you know, at a board meeting or with your CEO, like, they’re saying, “Hey, let’s get accounting’s opinion on this business strategy.”

[00:05:12] So the, the reputation makes sense. Accounting’s job is primarily, like, financial reporting. It’s all about, like, what happened in the past. It’s not, you know, it’s not forward-looking, but that’s why it’s so important to, to break the mold, and to me being strategic means being forward-looking and really being able to assess what’s going on in the present to

[00:05:29] Howard Katzenberg: make better, quicker decisions that can drive business impact in the future, and when I was the finance leader at OnDeck and Better, I would always encourage not just the accounting team, but really the whole finance org, like, let’s not view ourselves as a cost center, like, let’s be a profit center because no other department is is capturing as much as data as we do.

[00:05:53] Every cash inflows and outflows accounted for, it gets classified know, we’re extremely well positioned to ask questions about the trends we’re seeing and see how it, you know, what the implication is on the future. So, I think, you know, most accounting team are actually underutilized but if they’re willing to embrace a more strategic mindset they can drive a lot greater impact on their own.

[00:06:16] Joe Michalowski: Yeah.

[00:06:16] Love that and I, I do want to get to, I have a question later, like, more about your personal experience with maybe how you’ve gotten to that point, but I want to start with is, like, this sounds great in theory, like, everybody, like, we love to say it, we love, like, make everyone more strategic, forward-looking, but accounting has a lot to do to look back,

[00:06:34] Joe Michalowski: like, there’s a reason why they have these, like, stereotypical reputations ’cause it’s a lot of work to look backwards. It doesn’t mean it’s not, it’s like, it’s still a valuable part of what the business needs, so what do you think are some of the hurdles that, that are standing in the way of making that a reality?

[00:06:51] Obviously the story you gave why you founded Glean and getting into those, like, double-click analytics, that’s gotta be part of it, but what, what else sort of stands in the way here? 

[00:07:00] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah, the hurdles, I, you know, accounting is very prescriptive, like, you close the books, you do your audit, you pay your taxes, you manage AP and AR, everything’s a checklist in accounting, so there’s just so much process and I can’t tell you how many hours are spent researching accounting treatments, writing memos to documents and repeating the same task month over month.

[00:07:22] So, I think a major hurdle is just the routineness of, like, the day to day for, for, like, current accounting operations. And, like, the second hurdle is the fact that each month you’ve got to repeat it, so there’s a little time to actually take a break and, like, reflect ’cause you have to close the books. And lastly, it’s not really expected of them to be more strategic.

[00:07:43] It is, like, job is to do the financial reporting, but, you know, I, I know a lot of accountants and kind of the feedback I hear is, like, every performance review I have, I always hear I have to be more strategic, and, like, I just don’t know how to do that, so, Howard, can you, like, help me? So, listen, I think you have to acknowledge that, like, their job itself is pretty routine,

[00:08:03] but nonetheless they are, like I said before, they are extremely well-positioned given all the data flowing through accounting to be much more strategic or forward-looking.

[00:08:12] Joe Michalowski: Maybe the last episode, the episode is currently live as we post this as a, an episode we did with Temi Vasco, she’s the controller at Gem and in that episode we were talking a lot, she’s, she’s a controller so we were talking a lot about automation but specifically in the context of, like, a month-end close ’cause she’s, she is a self-proclaimed, like, automation nerd,

[00:08:33] she likes to geek out on these things and one thing that she talked about being really important is idea of, like, making her role more strategic was sort of getting out of, like, a siloed finance and accounting function, like, making sure those two sides are kind of blended together a little bit better,

[00:08:50] and she said one of the challenges she’s seen in the past was that or company she’s been company she’s been in in the past is just in those silos, like she doesn’t have a connection to finance. So As somebody who has been the CFO, so you’re kind of leading both sides, what are some, like, examples of ways that you tried to push to break down those silos and, and get over these hurdles that you’re talking about to strategic accounts? 

[00:09:15] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah, listen, I, I think part of it is just, like, messaging. I encourage, like, “Hey, listen, we don’t,” a lot of times finance has this perception of being, like, the “no” people, like, “Let’s ask for budget approval.” “They’re going to say no”. I was like, let’s, let’s reposition that. Like, we, we are partners, thought partners for, for marketing, for, for people, for engineering,

[00:09:36] we want to help them to get to yes, but we want it to be kind of mutual, and, like, both of us have a lot of conviction that this is the right decision. So, have you built a small model that kind of validates, like, what the opportunity here is? If you’re looking at vendors, have we considered other options here?

[00:09:53] Howard Katzenberg: Have we really negotiated the lowest price? We want to be partners with them in making those decisions and ultimately, you know, improve both of our convictions, and that’s the right thing. So, there’s a branding element and I did and they’re like, the accounting team,

[00:10:09] I took them on a roadshow, you know, and, like, to other departments, like, “Here’s what we do. It’s like, let’s appreciation of the day-to-day to financial reporting, but here’s, like, the potential,” and, like, we talked about strategic accounting a lot when I was the CFO at OnDeck.

[00:10:24] But, I think part of it is just, like, how, how you are positioned as partnerand then just, like, you know, communication to, to the other teams that, “Hey, we’re here for you. We’re here to be your partner.”

[00:10:36] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, love that. Communication, collaboration, it’s just, can be such a, like, an abstract concept especially, like, when you’re, you’re so bogged down in getting the numbers out every month. I love this idea of a road trip. It’s like, “All right, everybody, like, let’s go, let’s go chat with sales. Let’s go chat with marketing,

[00:10:54] and, like, let’s really understand,” I think that’s a really cool way to look at it, and I think, the other thing I want to sort of hone in on is, you’re talking about, like, getting away from finance accounting being kind of, like, the “no” people, it’s another thing that I’ve heard come up a lot and and the way it’s come up in the past in our content and, like, the people that we talk to is creating, like, this idea of a self-serve slash accounting function,

[00:11:19] like, what can you do to make the people in the business able to get the numbers they need they need them? I’m curious what your thoughts are on what a self-serve finance accounting function might look like and, like, what the benefits might be? Basically just breaking down those gatekeeping sort of stereotypes that you’ve had in the past. 

[00:11:37] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah, well, actually, before I get there, I just want to touch on something like you mentioned about, like, the positioning. It serves two benefits, one, like, the other teams are aware of kind of what you do, but it also humanizes, like, the people on the finance team and you can develop relationships. Like, I think, one, especially when I was at OnDeck, like, “mole” is, like, the wrong word, but, like, across the company, my finance team, I create relationships with people in marketing, people in sales, people in operations, and, like, we’d get informal feedback, you know, from, from these relationships and I would be able to know that when there’s a problem before they’re, like, it actually surfaced in the numbers. So there’s that relationship-building part too. Once you’re viewed as a trusted partner and you can build that relationship they’ll confide in you, you’re going to get, you know, insights, you know, before it actually starts showing up in numbers,

[00:12:25] so I wanted to make that point. And then, you know, as it relates to kind of this self-serving finance function. I think every CFO just kind of needs to make a determination on how transparent they want to be with all the financial data flowing through the system. But I, I actually recommend, like, what I said before, going on that roadshow, talking about your capabilities and, and basically creating, “Hey, if you have a request,

[00:12:49] you know, you could request it of us, as opposed to making everything, you know, available dashboard,” because you know, certain things are are confidential and you just need to be careful with that. And the other thing that we did just a little bit more proactively at the end of each month we sent to our department heads, not just the financial reports, but a controller’s report. So We branded our controller like this really important person gave you all this supplemental data, and in that monthly report you’d have profitability by product which people had generally not seen,

[00:13:24] geographic breakdown of customers, things like employee camp by office or a function and lot of other custom operational metrics. So, to see the potential the and the analysis that we were generating in finance from then, I hate to, say it. A lot of this is just marketing, right, for the finance

[00:13:42] Howard Katzenberg: but from that, yeah, we were able to just increase our exposure and again, as result, it really increased, like, the requests we were getting how finance can help them.

[00:13:52] As somebody in marketing, really loved the idea of, like, financing to market itself throughout the business, and it’s true. I mean, like I, in my roles in the past, like, I’ve never had a real connection to anyone in finance. Like, I see numbers come in or, like, I see someone in Slack, like, kind of pop up and I see the names,

[00:14:09] but I don’t chat with these people, like, day in and day out, and now, working at Mosaic, like, our three founders, all senior finance people with backgrounds and startups and things like that, and so I interact with them on a daily basis and it’s really nice to be in something as abstract as marketing sometimes and hear another perspective from such, like, data-driven people,

[00:14:30] and so, not even just for finance and accounting to, you know, make those connections for their own sake, but for the sake of people like me and marketing, like, I think it makes me better at my job, And so I love kind of the balance of the self-serve idea it’s like, yeah, like, that doesn’t mean just give everybody a dashboard and never talk to them. But so, the point about the roadshow and, like, making those connections, I assume you’d want it to be like a pretty natural thing. Like, I, I’m guessing you don’t have, like, a cadence, like, make sure you talk to them once a month. Like, what, what does it look like when and accounting have those relationships where you’re just chatting on Slack once in a while, is it a scheduled outreach on a monthly basis?

[00:15:11] Joe Michalowski: Like, how do you, how do you go about building that other than, you know, these roadshows where you just, like, get to see them in person?

Building Business Partnerships

[00:15:17] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah. I mean, The road roadshow thing was also, like, maybe once a year we’d give that update, that wasn’t, like, quarterly or monthly thing. But, and I would give this advice to anyone, like, at a company, even outside of finance and accounting. It’s like relationship management. Go out to lunch, grab coffee with people.

[00:15:34] Have drinks after work, that’s where a lot of the magic occurs and, you know, ultimately it’s just about trust, right? “Can I confide with you a problem I’m having? Can you help me solve it?” So, it’s an investment and there’s no right formula, although I guess you could put in place in process if, okay,

[00:15:51] Howard Katzenberg: let’s we, we did, like, a ping pong and that was beer pong actually versus, like, that at one point. as a leader, I would kind of see, like, which teams are acting or is there a good, fruitful, productive relationship and maybe a challenge. Where I saw some challenge I would talk to the other executive and be like, “Hey, let’s get our people together.”

[00:16:12] And, you know, that’s not a finance or accounting thing, that’s, like, any, any time that the two teams are kind of butting heads, like, let’s realize that we’re, on the other side of the table and then, like, get together after work. 

[00:16:23] Joe Michalowski: Love it. Love a ping pong slash beer pong tournament to build morale. Obviously, you know, times have changed with remote work and, you know, I’ve got to find different ways to do it, but maybe someday we’ll all be back in 

[00:16:35] offices and can get back to that. 

[00:16:37] Howard Katzenberg: My team, we, we did a Zoom movie. So we asked the team, you know, out of these six holiday movies, which one do you want to watch? And we treated it like mystery science theater three thousands. We encourage people to have, like, a drink or two beforehand 

[00:16:52] and we ended up watching Die Hard because, of course, that was on the holiday movie list,

[00:16:57] Howard Katzenberg: and, the movie people voted for. But, that was a great team bonding experience and even these remote times, you can be creative and find ways to bond.

[00:17:07] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. I mean, I know this episode is supposed to be about strategic accounting, but I can’t let that comment go by and not bring up the Die Hard-Christmas-movie-or-not-a-Christmas-movie debate. We had it in our internal Slack. I was on, I was in the minority. I said it is not a Christmas movie. I’m very curious where you stand on whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie? 

[00:17:26] Howard Katzenberg: I’ve lost the argument in this one. I’m with you. It takes place, but it’s not a holiday movie.

[00:17:33] of that mindset as well. And I, I mean, I’m glad, you and I don’t need to debate because we could probably just derail this. I bet it could be its own podcast altogether whether or not it’s a Christmas movie but I think that’s a really cool way to. 

[00:17:45] Howard Katzenberg: Right. Is the hot dog a sandwich?

[00:17:48] Joe Michalowski: I don’t think it’s a sandwich.

[00:17:49] I don’t think so. I think it’s its own thing. I don’t need to think about it. All right. Howard’s coming back on the, on the podcast again, just because we got the, we got the connection going. Cool. So I, I love the team-building aspect. I think every company is trying to figure that out in this remote workplace

[00:18:08] and we did, like, a company onsite and I got to go to the, to San Diego, I’m, I’m on the East Coast, so I don’t get to meet everybody all the time, and it was really nice just to see people from other departments and I can see how valuable that would be specifically for finance and accounting to do everything that you’re talking about here.

[00:18:24] In the past, when we’ve talked about kind of transforming finance or accounting, the way we have framed it as sort of, like, people, process, workflows, like, those are kind of, like, the three pillars of kind of any office function, and so I want to get to people in a bit, but from, like, a process, workflow, like, tech standpoint, if you’re going to, like, give advice on where to start addressing some of the issues that prevent strategic accounting, like, where, where’s your first investment? Where are you going to start?

[00:18:55] Joe Michalowski: What do you start transforming first after that? 

Where to Start with Strategic Accounting

[00:18:58] Howard Katzenberg: Data. Make sure that the data is cleansed, make sure it’s structured in a good way, I think a good place to start if you, if you have a mindset to say, “Hey, let’s, let’s be more strategic as an accounting is to do an audit of all the data running through a closed process that gets analyzed.”

[00:19:20] If you think about it, every dollar of revenue, every, every expense and dollar of investment gets classified by the accounting team, so in that process I had, you know, as someone from BI team or a data science team to join the audit and make sure they’re thinking through ways, “How do I, how can I automate the collection of this data?

[00:19:37] Howard Katzenberg: How can I stratify it? How can I aggregate it for doing aggregated analysis?” So I think that’s step one, just taking, like, an inventory of all the data. Step two is honestly the harder part. It’s synthesizing the data once you have it and this is where being the strategic now really comes in. And I like to just to start with first principles here.

[00:19:57] So, you know, what drives your business success? It’s revenue growth. It’s profitability. So, what drives revenue? more customers, pricing practices, attrition rates, right? What is all the data I’m collecting on those things? What are the types of analyses or dashboards I can set up those metrics and what drives profitability?

[00:20:17] Right? Like, for me it was always a great understanding of unit economics. So, what’s all the data we’re collecting on unit economics? For our top vendors, are we really understanding how kind of our spend correlates with, with our revenue, right? For any variable cost centers. So, collecting all that data and then synthesizing it translating into dashboards,

[00:20:38] that’s, like, the hard part. Personally, you know, I think I always loved using Tableau. At Glean we, we use Looker and I like it a lot too, so I think having a great BI tool and a great, you know, BI team that can assess, like, making sure all the data is structured and cleansed and put them in the right places is critical.

[00:20:56] And then, yeah, I would just last, I’d say, just to kind of wrap up on this, not so much a systems and workflow challenge, it’s, it’s really a mentality and desire to really break away from the thought like, “Hey, my job, it’s not financial reporting, it’s business intelligence and business impact,” right? If you, if you had that lens about, like, financial reporting, “My job is really to extract information here and, and relevant insights

[00:21:24] Joe Michalowski: so we can just manage the better, the business better going forward.” That to me, like, that’s the hard part. You’ve got to get that mentality shift with the people on your account team. Love it, absolutely agree that,

[00:21:34] you know, step one is getting out of your own head about what your role is supposed to be and kind of transforming it there, but also really like what you’re saying about, where to start with figuring out your data. That, that is a thing that we talk about all the time.

[00:21:49] Like, that’s the problem that we try to solve. One thing you’re bringing up and I love that you are a Tableau and or Looker power user, because something I always want to know from finance people is, like, have you always had a technical, like, finance is not inherently a technical field, like, putting a data and analytics together in Looker and Tableau is not something that

[00:22:15] you would learn on the job as a, as a finance person inherently. Have you always been that technical person? If not, like, how did you learn it? And, is it an expectation now for the finance role or accounting role? 

[00:22:28] Howard Katzenberg: I think it is. Like, a willingness to embrace new software tools. I mean, accountants love efficiency, theoretically they should love new tools that help them become more efficient and more effective. 

[00:22:39] Joe Michalowski: True. 

[00:22:41] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah. You know, I, I was never, like, a software engineer, although I’ve been told I would have been a good one.

[00:22:47] Like, I was great at credential modeling and I always viewed, like, building a model, like, a forecast model for my business. It’s as much art as science and I would take pride in, like, just how simple, the simplicity and the obligate to my model. I viewed it as art, and I think through that, I became pretty technical in terms of really understanding how tools like Tableau and Looker work

[00:23:10] and, and even just understanding from a data perspective, where’s this data coming from, is it the right data? Is it being calculated the right way if it’s aggregated? So, for me, I suppose I’m tactical in nature but I think it’s a job requirement, really, for anyone on a finance team these days.

[00:23:25] This is, not a plug-it-all, but I’m curious what, what you think. So, something that, that we want to do at Mosaic is avoid finance needing that technical skillset to unlock the kinds of insights that you’re able to get because you have it, like, with a Looker or Tableau. What in your opinion is something a growing market like ours can do to address these challenges? Like, what’s missing in the market of tools that are trying to eliminate that technical need for finance and accounting that could maybe help the people that will never have that technical skills, that, like, if that’s just a real blocker for them? What can the market do better to, to address those challenges? 

[00:24:05] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah, listen, that’s a, that’s a good question. I, I think there is some, like, self-selection part of this and when I say technical, again, it’s, I can’t code in SQL. I know that data scientists do that but I have the, like, the intellectual curiosity that even if I was using your platform, like, I probably wanna

[00:24:23] slice and dice a report a certain way. Having the flexibility to say, “Hey, I don’t want to look at this by quarter, I want to look at by month and I don’t want to look at it for a full month, I want to look at for a month to date through the 27th.” Like, I think just giving enough flexibility to the users where they can build their own custom views,

[00:24:43] that will satisfy the technical curiosity that someone like myself has.

[00:24:49] Joe Michalowski: Gotcha. I mean, it’s, it’s why something is simple and complex as a spreadsheet, it has

[00:24:53] the staying power to be dominant tools since, like, the eighties, it’s because of that flexibility, you can do whatever you want and, and, you know, that’s why we still use them. So, you know, piggybacking off that, that idea of, like, technical skillsets sort of being a requirement, but even just the intellectual curiosity to, to try new tools and to really evolve, we talked about systems workflow, you mentioned mentality is kind of the first step, so this is as much a people-challenge as it is a tech-challenge. So, I know you’re, you’re a Glean now. So, like, you’re, you’re founder versus CFO, but maybe in the past, if you were hiring people, do you have advice for people to hire kinds of accountants, the kinds of finance analysts that, that would fit this mold of, like, a new future-looking,

[00:25:42] accounting strategic finance function? 

[00:25:45] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah. I think you can uncover it in, like, an interview process and, like, some of the questions I would ask is, like, “What excites you most about being an accountant?” And if it’s like, “Hey, I really love the process, the day-to-day, the routine, the checklists,” and they might be a great accountant, right, but that’s not going to be, that person will not be the strategic want to hear there is, like, “I, I love understanding, like, the global view of the business and how everything fits together in nice, financial statements. so,That’s one question you could ask. Another question I ask sometimes is, like, “What, like, what are your career ambitions?”.

[00:26:19] If they want to be a controller that tells me something versus if they want to be CFO one day, that tells me something else, and, you know, I, I would think the person that, like, aspires to be CFO certainly has the potential to be, to be more strategic. Something else I would do is just give them, like, financial statements,

[00:26:35] and you can, you know, you company’s financial statements from, like, a year ago and ask them, “Hey, questions do you have about our business performance?” And if they come back with questions on, like, revenue rec or, like, technical accounting treatment, that’s probably not your strategic accounting, but if they ask you like, “Hey, why is revenue growth decelerating?” Or, “Hey, what drove this decrease in acquisition costs?”

[00:27:01] Howard Katzenberg: That’s probably your strategic accounting. So, I think those are some of the questions that you can parse out which, yeah, what type of accountant they are.

[00:27:09] Joe Michalowski: I really liked the, so that the whole thing, the questions are great, the idea of, like, having a test for accounting, I I’ve never been part of an accountant interview process, but, you know, someone like an engineer, there’s always sort of, like, a skills assessment I’ve written for a living for a long time,

[00:27:26] and so, like, there’s, anytime there’s a new role it’s like, “Okay, here’s the test assignment. Go ahead and write.” Is it common to have test assignment for an accountant? I don’t know what that would normally look like, but I really liked the way you’re positioning it as, you know, being able to look at the financial statement.

[00:27:41] So is that common? Do you find people do that a lot? 

[00:27:43] Howard Katzenberg: I certainly used, like, take on, like, assignments, the more senior leader it would be for an accounting role, but, like, the, the exercise I had, which is like, “Hey, take a look at these financial statements.” Like, that to me isn’t really take-on assignment, you could do that in, like, a, in a meeting where you’re just, like, reviewing stuff.

[00:28:03] So, yeah, I think you have to make that determination by role and, you know, within today’s, like, craziness of the job market, you also have to, you know, just make sure that you’re not overburdening the applicant because they probably have three other offers, so you just use your judgment in what to use.

[00:28:19] Yeah.

[00:28:19] Joe Michalowski: I really liked that. I think I’ll bring it back to the team, maybe there’s someone we can do that. It’s a cool idea. so Sort of getting into, you know, more of, now that you’re a Glean, you’re, I assume, on call, your company’s growing, you’re, you’re talking to customers, you’re talking to prospects about

[00:28:35] everything we’re talking about here. Your, your vision is to help accountants and finance people take a more strategic role. Are there any lessons learned you’ve had just from on more prospect calls because in the past your customers were{} marketing leader and the sales leader within the business. Now your customer is the accountant or, like, the finance person that you’re trying to sell into.

[00:28:57] Any, any tidbits you’ve heard kind of, like, where people are trying to go with their role? 

[00:29:02] I also speak to a lot of outsourced accountants. They’re doing, like, closing the books and being, like, the bookkeeping arm for, like, primary smaller businesses, and what I hear from them is, “Listen, you know, we charge $200 an hour.” Am I making objectives to make sure my client feels like they’re getting every dollar’s worth for that 200?

[00:29:22] Howard Katzenberg: ‘Cause I get to compete with the accountant down the street and they hear complaints all the time that, “All right, so much of that $200 is spent on emails going back and forth, trying to align with the client or get an answer. Where’s this document? Going back and forth on that. Is this thing approved?” So when we demo our platform Glean primarily for, like, atheros, accountants and CFOs, their light light up

[00:29:45] because they see a way to, like, either bill fewer hours ’cause there’s just much more efficiency, or help justify the rates they’re charging today because they’re being more valued. of the examples, you know, in our platform that we do is, like, we, because Glean is capturing{} line item information, start and end date of, like, annual commitments. So, like, three months before your bill is about to, relationship will be renewed we generate an alert to say, “Hey, this is going to be renewed automatically in, in two months or three months,” whatever it is. We actually had a, a customer the other day this happened with, with Zoom.

[00:30:21] Their annual bill was coming up for renewal and they would have forgot about it, but because we, we told them that and also we’ve given them data on what other customers are paying for a specific line item at Zoom and it was, like, we said, “We think you can basically get a 25% discount.”

[00:30:38] Howard Katzenberg: So now that customer, I got the update this morning that they started at 0% and now they’re at 20% on the discount. So,you know, those are the types of insights we generate and you can think of, like, an outsource accounting or even someone on the accounting team to the person at Zoom who manages the Zoom relationship in your company and say, “Hey,

[00:30:57] aware that this is up for renewal? Have we looked at other options? by If we stick with, with Zoom, we think we could get up there with 25% discount.” So Like, that’s one way we’re adding value. Another thing we do is like variance analysis. So, if a bill, if, you know, this actually happened with Glean this week where our AWS bill went

[00:31:17] went up, 2 or $3,000, and one of the insights we generate was, like, there were four new line items here that we hadn’t seen before on specific bill I just asked my head of engineering, like, “What are these four line items for? I don’t know, like It’s kind of gibberish to me.” Then he gave me the context.

[00:31:35] Howard Katzenberg: He said, “You know, these are all security-related new services, related to the SOC certification that we’re seeking.” I’m like, “Alright, great. That sounds good.” So just getting context is done much easier using Glean. And then, even things like document storage. If there’s a contract, if there’s a purchase order, all the invoices are stored centrally at, like, the vendor level

[00:31:55] and it’s very easy to access, to start, you know, if you’re managing the relations with the vendor, you can upload the data, the contracts. Everything’s in one place, you don’t have to chase down and spend, you know, inefficient time doing that. So, like, I think all those examples apply to districts, like, an outsourced accountant or a fractional CFO, as well as that in-house accountant that wants to be more, more strategic and impactful for the team.

[00:32:19] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. My, my favorite part there was the subtle tie into about, like, making sure finance accounting, they’re not, not just here to say no, so when you go to the head of engineering and you say, “Hey, why is, why is our AWS bill so much higher than it was before? What are these new line items?”

[00:32:33] It’s not to say, “Hey, we need to get rid of these four line items. It’s just to get the context, so that,” it’s not a “no”, it’s like, “Okay, great. I’m glad there is a correct level of context moving on. Our AWS bill is higher now. That is totally fine. That’s how the business grows,” and, you know, it’s nice to see here, like, a world example of that, that collaboration and that sort of, like, proactive communication happening.

[00:32:56] 

[00:32:56] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah. And That’s what a strategic, you know, accountant does. You know, if you can break down your, your CACs and lifetime values by marketing channel and see that a particular lead source is generating really, really attractive lifetime value you should invest more in that, you know, and be proactive about saying, “Hey, why aren’t we shifting money here?

[00:33:16] Like, doubling the amount of spend with this vendor?” So it’s not about saying no, it’s not just about, you know, savings, it’s about optimization.

[00:33:23] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, for sure. Love all that. I just learned so much on these chats about what the role should be like, ’cause, you know, rolling this back to what we started with, this is so far from those stereotypes, those terms you, like, there’s no bean counting in this conversation,

[00:33:38] like, it’s just, it’s really cool to hear, like, how a role can, can sort of transform like this. I think it’s been an under-appreciated role for so long. Like, it just seems like every other department had its sort of Renaissance of a transformation, it’s finance and accounting turn and it’s just cool to about all that. But, all that’s to say, you know, we’ve been talking for a bit and I just want to leave you with one last question we ask every single person that comes on, is selfishly I think my favorite question, because, you know, it takes us a little bit out of just the tactical, like, finance accounting. but What is something you know now that you wish or you would tell somebody at the start of their career to sort of get a step ahead?

Finance Career Advice from Howard Katzenberg

[00:34:19] Howard Katzenberg: Yeah, great question and I’ll tailor my response to maybe start, someone starting off in, like, a finance role. I focus a lot on getting the numbers right, you know, either from a financial reporting perspective or modeling and of course that’s important, but I felt like my job was done once I had the model or, like, the financial report,

[00:34:37] and as I progressed through my career I started to realize, like, “No, my job has just begun actually.” Finance isn’t just about giving the answer, but it’s much more about asking the questions, questions like I just brought up, like, are we investing our marketing dollars in the optimal way? How elastic is, like, our, our pricing strategy?

[00:34:59] How do we test, you know, work? How do we experiment more with, with pricing? Can we outsource certain functions that are in-sourced today and be more efficient that way? So that’s the learning that I always viewed, you know, early in my career, I was like, “Hey, model’s done, my job’s done.” But no, that was just the beginning.

[00:35:15] Howard Katzenberg: What is the model telling us? And, what’s the implication of the business? And I think that really fits with the theme around, like, strategic finance administration, strategic accounting that we talked about today.

[00:35:24] Joe Michalowski: Oh, another great answer. I think one of these days I’m going to collect all the answers we get to this. We’re going to have, like, a, a career book for early finance and accounting people because I think that’s just a really great starting point, like, you always have that mentality, like, you’re going to be ahead of the curve for this kind of future of strategic finance, strategic accounting,

[00:35:43] so I really like that. That’s great. But, you know, I’ve kept you here long enough, Howard, so I’ll start to wrap up and, you know, as we come up on time, just simple question, where should people go to learn more about you, to learn more about Glean and, and keep up with all the work that you’re doing? 

[00:35:57] Gleancompany.com. We’re on LinkedIn and our URL is gleancompany.com. There is another glean.com. It’s not us so don’t get confused. 

[00:36:06] Beginning of March we’ll rebrand against glean.ai because so much work we do is, is driven by awesome machine-learning models.

[00:36:14] Joe Michalowski: Gotcha. Awesome, we’ll encourage everyone to follow along with Glean, follow along with Howard. Just want to say thanks again for joining, really appreciate you taking the time. I think there’s going to be a lot of great clips we can take out of this and a of stuff people can learn just about kind of elevating their role.

[00:36:28] So yeah, just want to say thanks so much for being part of The Role Forward. 

[00:36:31] Howard Katzenberg: My pleasure and maybe the next time we can eat some hotdogs and watch Die Hard too. 

[00:36:35] Joe Michalowski: Oh, we’re getting more casual the next time for sure. I love it. Well, thanks again, Howard, and we’ll talk again soon. 

[00:36:40] Howard Katzenberg: Thanks, Joe, this was great.