Interview with Janik, our Controlling Wizard

Janik, please tell us what you do at rebuy and how your role has evolved over the years.

Sure! I started as a working student working for both the Controlling and Accounting departments, but I pretty soon realized that I really enjoyed building financial models most.

Starting as a working student, then being a junior, and now a “normal” controller led to me seeing almost every relevant PnL line. Also, I changed from a more financial controlling function as a working student to the operational/logistics side after my graduation

Now I’m in charge of all possible aspects of planning & reporting with regard to our sites in Poznan and our Automated Grading Center in Berlin-Spandau, our Carriers, packaging, and refurbishment, also the Customer Support, and a lot of smaller topics that keep flying around in the Controlling-Team.

A considerable part of the evolution of my role has been to automate more and more work. I remember when I started, there were some files where we had to manually enter some numbers from a PowerBI report each week or month… nowadays, we can just connect our BI landscape via automated data loads to our financial models, which in turn are connected to our reporting slides where we just have to click the refresh button — that’s awesome!

What has been your favorite project in the last 2 years?

Difficult to say! Although, in hindsight, it’s probably the build-from-scratch of our Poznan logistics planning model and reporting tool. Understanding all the different processes and putting them into a comprehensive planning & reporting tool provided a steep learning curve for me, and the level of detail that we are now able to analyze has improved a lot. What I also liked about this project was the possibility of working closely with our colleagues from the Poznan site and considering what they needed for their reporting. The collaboration has been amazing!

Imagine you’re pitching a movie about your role in Controlling at our company. What’s the plot, who would play you, and what’s the movie's climax?

I’m confident that a movie about me working on financial models might not receive the best IMDB and rotten tomatoes ratings. Maybe an arte documentary would do, though.

But if we want to look at our whole controlling team, then the actor representing our team would obviously be Jason Bateman because of his role as Michael Bluth in Arrested Development because, as you know, “he is keeping it all together” 🙂 but any good movie needs an antagonist, of course, and that could be Katy Bates embodying a not maintained mapping spreadsheet that frequently occurs to Jason Bateman in his nightmares.

Haha, hilarious! Can’t wait to watch the movie!

Let’s take a look into the crystal ball: what’s one tool or piece of technology you use in your role that you think will become obsolete in the next 10 years, and what do you imagine will replace it?

Sometimes, I’m surprised how many emails have already been replaced by Slack. And that happened very quickly! So it could be a lot, and I am sure there will be even higher levels of automation in reporting in the next decade — and the significance of creating tables in Excel/Google Sheets will likely decrease.

Can you identify a project or moment that shows how the role of Controlling has evolved at rebuy during your time with us?

Back in 2018, we had a lot of tasks in our team that weren’t the focus of actual Controlling work — I remember a lot of massive yet highly fragile mapping tables in local Excel sheets and the time it took to work on them. We also gave a lot of more Accounting-related tasks, such as month-end close consolidation, to our dear Accounting colleagues, and last year we were finally able to automate the procurement process across all departments, all of which gave us more time to focus on our core tasks.

With many companies out there, what made you stay with us for the last couple of years?

I believe it is the unique combination of a start-up-like ability to be able to work in a fast-paced and dynamic environment with tons of learning opportunities and never-ending possibilities to extend your role into new areas on the one hand, combined with a more grown-up work atmosphere where everyone can be themselves, where we have tons of social connections aside from work (like our Mallorca workation or visits to the Olympiastadion with colleagues) and where you can be sure that you are being treated not as a corporate number. Also, the level of internationality in HQ is impressive, and I’ve also enjoyed learning a lot from working with so many people from different backgrounds.

If you had the power to change one financial process or policy at rebuy overnight, what would it be and why?

I like to automate any manual tasks as much as possible. We have come a very long way since I started in 2018 (a time during which we didn’t even have Power BI or Looker!): we have an entirely new PnL structure, all of our reporting is almost fully automated, we recently received a brand new procurement system — how impressive is that? Of course, there’s always room to improve — for us, this would be our new planning tool, which we will hopefully implement very soon!

Thank you very much for all of these insights, Janik!

My pleasure!