Thanks for dropping by! If you're looking for someone to fill a staffing gap in your company, or provide expertise to get a project going, or complete one you've already started, "getting the job done" is my specialty.

Objective oriented means that I love the satisfaction in attaining an objective, of finishing a project, and delivering a fully completed assignment.

Being a self-starter means that I don't require lots of supervision to get going and get finished. In those situations where the answers aren't readily available, my problem solving skills kick into gear and we figure it out.

Give me a call or send an e-mail if you you'd like to talk over a project or assignment you may need help with.

Projects Clean-up, catch-up, difficult or deferred reconciliations, audit preparation, task automation, improved accuracy or timeliness in reporting, complex analysis, simplifying recurring account tracking and journal entry prep, big data analysis, and more.

Assignments Full-time, part-time, fill-in on-site for absent key staff. Temporary placement to bridge staffing gaps. Quick study and self-starter, I easily pick-up procedures and requirements which assures that I'll be effective on the first day.

Ad Hoc Support Remote support providing quick access to answers and solutions for accounting, software or technical questions and problems, by telephone, online conference and live computer-to-computer secure connection.

Finance & Accounting Quickbooks, Peachtree, Microsoft Dynamics (Great Plains), and all other SMB accounting software. Timely and accurate closes. GAAP. Intercompany rec's and adjustments, fx journals, allocations, eliminations. Stock option accounting, revenue recognition, depreciation, prepaid, deferrals, accruals, tax accounting, cap table.

Excel / Access Excel expert! Pivot tables, database, graphs, formulas, macros, automation, menus, named ranges, lookups, sumifs, uniques and dups, VBA, linking, data presentation, reusable workbooks. Access table, query, forms and report design, SQL queries, switchboard and deploy app.

Technology Microsoft Office 2007, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Publisher, Access. Open Office. Windows IIS, Linux servers, Win-ux connectivity. DOS, shell. Windows 95 thru Win 7, Linux, HP-UX, AIX. Network management, routing, security, access control, VPN, firewalls.

Pre-Audit Multi-Year Clean-Up (Online Advertiser)

Preparing for a first-time audit, the C.P.A. firm hired to convert the cash method records to accrual had completed the conversion of seven years of records. But, the work to reconcile and adjust the new accural basis numbers, and prepare the the audit documentation was still ahead.

That's where I came in. The next year was spent preparing reconcilations, analysis and presentations using Excel. Much of Excel work was built so that the workbooks were reusable, meaning the workbook from last month would be opened and the new information was added, or where the reconciliation/analysis required a rollfoward of numbers, the prior month workbook would be distilled down to only the numbers needed for the current month and was then used to complete the work. The workbooks for the more complex reconciliation that resulted in journal entries adjusting general ledger accounts, the creation of the entry was automated in the workbook. Here is a list of the reusable workbooks I built.

Financials For Bonding (Contractor)

Most contractors at least think about public works projects at one time or another. Public works contracts are usually a minimum of mid-five figures for the single job, and opportunities for additional billing from change orders is often counted on. My long-time small contractor client began talking about bidding public works projects, but I saw a problem. Their accounting records, income tax reports and financial statements are kept on a cash method, and bonding companies typically require accrual method, G.A.A.P. compliant financial statements, unless you have the cash to collateralize the bond.

In the conversion of a cash set of financials to an accrual method, more is involved that just adding accounts receivable and accounts payable to the balance sheet. The company must also adopt a method for accounting for job costs, and the method for a small contractor is "percentage of completion." With no job cost system, no coding of income or expense to a job number, my small client had a problem in his plan.

The solution? Patience. We created a job number system,, changed the coding procedures so that all job related costs were segregated by the coding to the job, and let the system work for us. At the end of that year we produced an accrual method financial statement using percentage of completion accounting, which could NOT be published because we knew that the prior year's balance sheet couldn't be G.A.A.P. compliant because the information wasn't there to make it so. Then we waited, until the next year-end arrived. Now we had two years of G.A.A.P. compliant balance sheets on an accrual method using percentage of completion accounting. My contractor friend had the financial statements he needed to apply for bid and performance bonds, and a set of procedures that would let him keep it that way.

Loan Draw Controls (Real Estate Developer)

The call I received from the C.O.O. had a ring of urgency bordering on desperation as she asked me what was the earliest I could meet with the managing partner. That afternoon I learned they had asked the staff C.P.A. accountant to clean out their desk, and that subcontractors on a large facility under construction hadn't been paid in nearly two months to the tune of almost $750,000, because the now departed staff accountant had not been able to produce the draw request against the contruction loan.

They knew without asking I would take on the assignment because we all knew how much we enjoyed working with each other. And I did take the assignment, first focusing on organizing the contract files, verifying the draws that had been funded, and preparing a single schedule detailing all the commitments, what had billed, funded and paid against those commitments. By the end of the third day in their office I had a draft of the single large draw request to catch them up, and it was easy for them to decide to send it out, after removing a few items without complete documentation to be included on the next draw request. The bank acted swiftly, the auditor arrived late in the afternoon a couple of days later, and within a week and a half many ruffled subcontractor feathers were smoothed down and the office staff weren't any longer holding their breath.

Being not anxious to repeat the experience, my client asked me to stick around and handle two or three more draw applications for them, and, "by the way, could you just fix the problem?" "Sure." The way it was fixed was by ending the segregation of the loan draw function to an area apart from production accounting, putting in place new job cost codings, changing Yardi to collect the information, and using that information to fill an Excel workbook that presented A.I.A. standard formatted G701/702 document attachments, which delighted the bank because that was what they were used to seeing.

Enterprise ERP/MRP Conversion(Tech Manufacturing)

There are three major conversions of accounting software that I've been involved with during my career. All have been conversions from familiar shrink wrap packaged off-the-shelf applications to full blown ERP and ERP/MRP installation requiring some amount of customization and coding for the product to deliver what was promised and expected. Both of the ERP/MRP ("Enterprise Resource Planning"/"Manufacturing Requirements Planning") installation I initiated and managed. Both conversions were completed well before the deadline and cost less than what was budgeted. Two factors were responsible for the cost savings. First, I pre-trained and prepared all who would be impacted by the conversion, and implemented a program of recurring reviews used to identify who wasn't getting what they expected, so that any such problems could be corrected quickly. Nobody panicked when things didn't seem to be going well for them. We short circuited the problems, and this cut our implementation time. Second, none of the budgeted "consultant" dollars needed to be spent. The data extracts, conversions, loads and verifications were performed by me and my staff, who really understood how the new system worked because of this experience. And, I (and my I.T. manager) in the bigger installation) did all the needed formatting, re-formatting and coding to customize the installation to our specifications and needs. We were able to provide a response to our own internal customers that would have been difficult for a consultant.

Standard Cost Systems (Tech Manufacturing)

Construction costing is a snap compared to costing manufactured products. The management of the manufactured product bill of materials alone can be enough to leave a materials manager cross-eyed. But, before MRP systems existed at an affordable price for a small company, my staff was managing and working off of a standard cost system, perpetual inventory, and a database/spreadsheet that forcast six month forward the parts and assembly requirements based on current order backlog, current sales forecasts, and inventory quantities on hand. Having that spreadsheet and flat file database system already in place made the transition to company-wide MRP as easy as construction costs.

U.S. Financials To Euro Standards (Gaming Tech)

The request was to create a solution that would allow the newly purchased subsidiary of a public European company to report results to their parent in European financial statement format (at that time significantly different compared to U.S. standards) without modifying the financial reporting layouts that were part of their Macola ERP/MRP software. The solution was simple. Build the parent's financial statement formats in Excel, and add account codes to every account description. Dump the Macola general ledger working trial balance en masse into another worksheet in the workbook. Then correlate the parent's European account numbers with the U.S. account numbers, and write the lookups. This simple solution was used to report current month, quarters and annual results, and was changed to also provide budget plan and actual to budget reports to the parent.

Convert Consolidation Method (Consumer Products)

Though a publically traded company, the monthly, quarterly and annual consolidation of parent and multiple subsidiaries, including exchange rate translations, continued to rely on a home grown, automated Lotus 123 set of spreadsheets. That is, until the enterprise abandoned Lotus in favor of becoming an all Microsoft shop. Working alongside the Senior V.P., we converted as much of the Lotus workbook into Excel as was possible through conversion routines and copy and paste. Then, we began the process of coding the functionality and menu structures that were part of their Lotus solution into Excel, which required a knowledge of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The V.P. was a quick study, and after a few short weeks we had reached a point where my job was done.

Worker's Comp Reported By Task (Contractor)

The contractor's worker's compensation premium was skyrocketing to the point that the owner began looking seriously at ways to get a handle on this cost. Reviewing the reports the company was submitting monthly, then examining the kinds of work the crews were doing, it was clear that a large part of the problem was that all payroll was being reported as one class of work, the highest cost class, while more than 50% of time spent was performing work classified at much lower rates, like painting, plumbing and concrete tasks. After presenting a proposed solution, the timecards kept by the crews were discarded and replaced with a timesheet form printed out of Excel with columns for the date, time and description they were accustomed to seeing, and adding columns for job number and a worker's compensation "task" code. While waiting for the first payroll using the new timesheets, an Excel workbook was built that would collect the employee, pay, jobs, tasks and hours by job/task. After each payroll is cut and released, all of that information is entered into the workbook which dynamically applies lookups to a rate table computing worker's comp premium and summing the amount by class. The project paid for itself twice in the first year of use. The technique used and documentation has been accepted in two annual audits, and one special review audit conducted by the regulatory body responsible for defining the code classes.

Bank Collateral Reporting (Parts Distributor)

The agreement covering a large bank line of credit collateralized by inventory and accounts receivable required the daily preparation and delivery of a "bank collateral report." The report was straight-forward enough, but took a lot of time every day for the staff to print and analyze the IBM AS/400 sourced reports to derive the numbers entered into the blank Excel workbook opened every business day, and saved with a name containing the date. This procedure accumulated around 250 of these single use Excel workbooks every year, each of which was e-mailed to the bank.

Using named ranges, formulas and "reusable" workbook formatting, the 250 workbooks were replaced with a single workbook containing a flat file database that could be analyzed, compared and graphically presented inside the workbook by entering date ranges and other coded selections. To further streamline the process, A "Showcase" query of the mainframe DB2 database was created to extract and summarize the sales, receipts, ageing and inventory categorization disclosures required to populate the collateral report. The information extracted was copied and pasted into the Excel database. In the meeting with the bank where this new approach was introduced, the bank representatives were very complementary toward the company for implementing this solution.

Multi-State Sales Tax Reports (Parts Distributor)

Inventory, sales order entry, customer invoicing and accounts receivable resided on an older IBM AS/400 running DB2. And, every month a series of reports were printed which were analyzed by hand to extract the information used to file about a dozen sales tax reports in various states. It took the staff accountant a couple of days every month to get the job done. Using the IBM "Showcase" tool to define an extract of sales and tax information, the formatted digital file was copied and pasted into Excel, which contained formulas and lookups that distilled the dozen sales tax reports into a dozen worksheets. The presentation information in each tab was organized to follow the layout of the sales tax report where the information would end up. The preparation of the sales now takes a couple of hours each month.

Simple CRM Lead Tracking (Contractor)

Within a year of selling one business, and starting another, it became clear that the lead times from first contact to signing a contract for work was going to be a lot longer than was anticipated before the business was started. The question put to me was, "How do I not lose track of the contacts I've made, and how can I be reminded to periodically follow-up with each person to keep in touch with whether their plans have changed?" The answer I offered, and implemented, was a simple contact data base containing built on mySQL, using PHP and the Windows IIS server that ran on a Pro version of Windows on one of the computer in the office. Access to the information and reminders was through a web browser and a link placed on every copy of Internet Explorer took care of the problem of providing a URL.