Insights into the world of a Controller
I sat down with Lisa Tulloch who is a controller at CDR Companies. She has been a controller for over 15 years. She works with financial data and organizes financial reports to help the company make profitable decisions. She has a love for problem solving, that is what draws her to the job of being a controller. Lisa works with a team of people that all work together to handle all the data and to do the right things with that data. Lisa is the backbone of the company she works for and she does it all with her knowledge of data.
Che: Hi, my name is Che Tulloch and I’m here with Lisa Tulloch, and what is your occupation?
Lisa: I am the controller of CDR McGuire.
C: Okay, and what does a controller do?
L: A controller basically manages the day-to-day activities of the finance and accounting department of a company. We also are responsible for reporting the results of the operations to management.
C: Okay, so you’re given, you get data from just the activities, general activities and like transactions that the whole company does, how is that data organized? How do you organize that data to work with it?
L: Okay so the finance department usually has basically let’s say four major functions. So we’ll have a department that does invoicing and subsequently we have to do the receivable. So what invoicing…Whatever it is that you do, for instance, in my company, we are an engineering and we do emergency management and healthcare services. So the invoicing department, which is the accounts receivable, will send out an invoice based on what we perform for the client that month. And we follow up with when the client is supposed to pay us. So that’s one function, the money coming in. Then we have to also pay bills. So there’s an accounts payable department. So when for services that are performed on our behalf, like electric, if we have to pay our staff, we have to pay for supplies and stuff like that. So when those bills come in there’s the accounts payable department that does that, pays the bills. Then we also have the function of reporting, which is very important, reporting on the results. So management wants to know basically if they’re making a profit. So you have to prepare financials to present to them and any other supplemental reports that will dig deeper into, okay, we have revenues of $100 this month, and we have expenses of $50. So after you have all your revenues and you take all your expenses, then it’s a profit or a loss. And management gets these, we provide these reports to management and they analyze and see what needs to be done. Do we need to get more contracts from our clients so we can invoice more? Do we need to cut our expenses? Stuff like that. So they use those reports to project results and also to make decisions whether to make the business more profitable. And also to see where we want to be in the future. Are we doing something right? Or do we need to tweak it a little bit? So that’s what management would use that data, the financial data, which is based on all the different transactions that happen on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis.
C: So this is a question. So this can kind of relate to the class I’m currently in. Do you ever like visualize or does anyone in the team ever visualize any data that you might work with, like put it into a graph or a chart to show to other people?
L: Yes. Yes, we we we when you have to do presentations, you to show trends, whether it’s the income increase over a certain amount of time or so, yet we do utilize graphs in in in presentations.
C: Do you do a lot of math in your job or is it more centered around understanding the numbers rather than like doing a lot of math?
L: Yeah, well for me I don’t necessarily need to do calculations per se. It is really looking at the data and analyzing it to see what needs to be done next.
C: Okay, was there any like hard parts of like working with data and doing stuff for your job that it was just hard to get over understand fully?
L: Yes. And it when it when the volume of data sometimes gets overwhelming because there are so many transactions. There could be 30,000 rows of data. And depending on…what you would need from that data. Sometimes it gets overwhelming. And if you don’t have the expertise to manage that data, it sometimes can get overwhelming because there’s so many items in the data set that, yes, sometimes it can get overwhelming depending on the request. Like I have an audit that I need to do, I need to look at, overtime and it’s over a thousand employees with for a whole year for five days. So it’s a lot and sometimes the accounting system can’t even manage to run those reports. You have to break it up in smaller parts, run a report, then merge it. So yes, sometimes it can be overwhelming and even the accounting system can’t even manage the reports.
C: You’ve told me before how you handle like the payroll and stuff like that. So how does that work specifically? Like do you determine how much people get paid or like what is your role in that specifically?
L: On a day-to-day basis, I don’t interact much with the payroll aspect of it. What I do is after everybody gets paid, I reconcile it to make sure that what is, as I said, back to the first part, we sell time. So we have to make sure that the time that is recorded by an employee is coded to the category because we then use that data to get paid by our clients. So we have to make sure that we everything is in the right place so that we know what needs to be invoiced.
C: Okay. You said you sell time. Is that more literal or figurative?
L: I would say it’s literal because…or figure, so we work for clients that we have a contract. This is what we need you to do from the engineering perspective. We want you to design this road. There are milestones of design, but it depends on the hours that the engineer puts in on that job. And that’s for this milestone and at this rate, let’s say an average of $50 per hour, that’s how we would bill our client and that’s how we get paid. So that’s why I say we sell time. Even though we are designing a road or income or revenue is based on the amount of hours that we spend doing what we were doing.
C: How is your overall like outlook on your job and do you enjoy doing it and what does it mean for you to work in this field?
L: I do enjoy my job. I like the challenge of figuring out problems, finding solutions.
C: Well thank you for your time.
L: You’re welcome. It was good talking to you.
C: Yes, you too.
