An Interview with Wendy Van Donkelaar; CFO at MAKE Technologies

Last week, we were talking with Cheni Yerushalmi, co-counder of Sunshine Suites, about Measuring What Matters.  I think the main takeaway, from an Indicee point of view, is that the company’s Financial Reports were deemed much less important to the running of the business than were Operational Measures.

Today, we’ll move away from some of the broad philosophical implications of the question, “How do you measure success?” that we tackled with Cheni and move into the practical side of what measurement tools are being employed in mid-sized businesses and what measures are considered important in a conversation with MAKE Technologies CFO, Wendy Van Donkelaar.

MAKE Technologies Inc. is a Vancouver based software solution provider that analyzes and modernizes all three aspects of legacy enterprise applications: business processes, source code and data. MAKE’s modernization platform, TLM, helps their global customer base to reduce the cost & risk required to maintain and modernize their mission critical systems.

Wendy Van Donkelaar is a Financial Executive and Chartered Accountant with over 20 years experience in the technology sector.

I was interested in getting her take on the role of I.T. Systems for keeping tabs on the health of the business through the use of reports and KPIs.  What I found was, 1) she is strapped for time just like every other Finance Manager I’ve met over the past 10 years, and 2) she employs a number of tools to get the answers she needs to effectively manage the company’s finances.

So, here’s the Q & A:

1. How do you analyze operational performance? We use SFA [Salesforce Automation], SA [Simply Accounting] and excel spreadsheets to analyze performance.
2. What are the critical operations KPIs? Net new license and services revenues, Sales Funnel growth, Professional services utilization and G/M [Gross Margin], # of partner deals, # of presales presentations per quarter.
3. Do you analyze results on a project-by-project basis? Yes using an excel spreadsheet we are currently evaluating project management systems.
4. How is the Finance function changing/evolving with the onset of new technologies? The function has changed from one of historic information gathering to one of predictive analysis.
5. How do you view the role of spreadsheets in your line of work? Used for summarizing weekly Dashboard metrics and Board reporting.
6. Has your view of spreadsheets changed over time? How so? In my past, spreadsheets where often used for gathering and collating data so that analysis could then be performed.  It now seems like that step has been taken care of by SFA, SA or ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] tools and I focus on smaller sets of data for analysis.

What does it all mean, man?

I’d like to highlight a few things in Wendy’s responses that, in my view, have a profound impact on all of us.  Call them sweeping generalizations if you must, but I see these responses as indicative of the typical situation for those of us working in mid-sized companies doing the accounting.

First, we’re living in a multiple-systems world.  By and large, when we are producing reports we are doing so by gathering data from various systems and collating that data into a cohesive picture of the enterprise.  The systems tend to operate independently of each other.  And inevitably, excel becomes the default aggregator.  Is this your experience? Make a comment!  What systems are you running and how do the systems integrate?

Second, inside the business, operations reports trump financial reporting any day of the week!  Check out the answer to question #2.  Of seven measures given, only one is truly a GAAP number.  Compliance dictates spending a great deal of time on Financial Reports, but these don’t provide actionable data in the same way that things like capacity utilization, or net new business, or sales pipeline does.  Share some of your operational measures in the comments!  What’s the focus in your workplace?

Third, predictive analysis has become mainstream.  There was a time that this topic was reserved for B.I. technicians, I.T. analysts, and academics.  More and more it’s becoming a practical requirement from management.  So, how do you management your predictions?  What oracle are you consulting? How many tea leaves must be read?  How can we know the future?

Let’s get some comments going!