I will start with my education. So I pursued a double major through the business school at the University of Utah, where I completed an accounting degree and also an information systems degree. So I had a lot of opportunities coming out of school in both technology roles and accounting and finance roles. When I first graduated, I was very interested in taking a technology role so I ended up working as a technical project manager for Wells Fargo. It was really fun. But it was kind of in a niche where I was just focused on very specific server configurations and work became to be a little repetitive. So I started looking for other roles within the technology space. So I joined the company in Lehi, Utah, called MaritzCX, and they provide a SaaS tool. They sell a SaaS tool that's more or less a data collection tool for companies to use to gather information from their customers. There I was an implementation engineer so another technical role there I would interface with clients who are trying to integrate the MaritzCX software into their own homegrown applications or their own CRM tools. So I really liked that role. The client-facing job was fun. However, I learned through working in the business that I really wanted to try and make a bigger impact on the business. I was really good at my job. I provided a lot of help to my teammates and made my team better, which was obviously contributing to the greater good of the company. But I started to realize I was very interested in making a larger impact, like, how could we save a lot of money if we switch to this or that. So that's when I started to explore the accounting and finance roles within my company and lucky for me, there was an FP&A, financial planning and analysis analyst role that opened up and I was chosen for that role. And so that's kind of how I went from doing the double major in college to a few technical roles to ending up in a very traditional financial planning and analysis role. The great part about it is that I got to analyze all of the technology-related costs. So this was great for me because I have an information systems degree and I had worked with server technology and storage infrastructure, did some high-level scripting in HTML, PHP things like that in my implementation engineering roles. So it was awesome because I felt like I already knew a lot of what the software engineering DevOps groups were already doing so. It was a lot of fun to look at their spending, see what tools they were using, understand how different vendors charge for different software licenses or things that we would use. So that's pretty much my walk on how I landed in my current role today.

So my responsibilities as a financial analyst, here at Carbonite are to essentially oversee all of the technology-related spend, specifically around our cost of goods sold so that's going to include our customer support organization and it's also going to include kind of our we call them operations, but really, they are infrastructure operations. So these are the people that run all the data centers our physical data centers and then also all of the folks that run our public cloud infrastructure, like AWS or Microsoft Azure. So my job is to basically help the leaders of those two groups execute their budget. I run a monthly forecast cycle with them where we tweak things throughout the year constantly just comparing back to what we set out to do initially in that year. I plan everything from the headcount so if we need to hire three new people, I put together an analysis, understand the full financial impact of that relay that information not only to the budget owner to the person running that team but also up the finance chain to the CFO and so that's pretty much my day to day is just compiling reports for these business partners of mine and depending on what time of the year we're in, we might be working on their annual budget for the upcoming year or if it's any given month, we will probably be working on re-forecasting and fine-tuning those numbers for the remainder of that current period.

There are a few main tools that the financial planning and analysis team uses. The first and most important tool that we use is called Host Analytics. It's actually they just change the name they've rebranded it's now called Planful and basically what it is is it is a web-based application that is a budgeting and planning tool. So I guess a good way to describe it would be, think of it like a web-based version of Excel that's tailored very specifically to financial planning and analysis folks. So whereas historically financed teams like mine had to do all of their budgeting, analysis and keep everything in Excel documents, flat files, static files for the most part and there was a lot of risk with people changing those files, there is until recently, a lack of an audit history and things like that financial information is very sensitive. We need to take care of it so I think, thankfully for us, these tools are now available to us, so that's kind of our main tool that we keep the budget. We do all of our forecasting updates, we still utilize Excel to do analysis outside of that tool. However, at the end of the day, the end resulting numbers get loaded into that system to kind of locked down on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis, depending on what cycle we're in. The next very important tool use is Tableau. It's a business intelligence tool that I'm sure many people have heard off, it's a big name. We do a lot of revenue related reporting in that system. We partner with the business intelligence team, where they manage a lot of our data models and the whole data warehouse, and we more or less are consumers of the data sets that they produce. So they're doing more of the back end data manipulation, cleansing, getting it ready for us to then take and chart create dashboards, create further analyses, etcetera. Before finance started utilizing Tableau, it was pretty much all Excel related charts, which, as we all know, are not necessarily the best and most dynamic and flexible. Tableau produces many pretty charts with many pretty filters and things that just look a lot better and not to mention just the back end functionality that the business intelligence team uses. Then, of course, like every finance or accounting person, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet tool is very, very important. I don't see it ever going away. I think that there's still a lot of use cases where excel comes into play because not everyone with accounting has access to our FP&A tool which is Planful so we try to utilize Excel, to share information with accounting, get information from accounting to, then load into that system and we also have a few month-end related processes that we've automated utilizing visual basic for applications, which is the back end scripting language in Microsoft products so those were the main tools. I will say that I do prefer certain tools more than others. Absolutely. I'm a nerd at the end of the day, and I'm very picky about certain features or functionality and what makes things easier? So, in my last role, we utilized a tool called Domo. It's a Utah based company, it's very similar to Tableau. Where I think that it's a lot better is that it's 100% web-based, Tableau, you can have them hosted for you, however, it's much more cost-effective if you host it yourself on your own infrastructure. However, I would say that the performance depending on the infrastructure, will vary. So Domo is my favorite business intelligence tool I've used so speed because of it being hosted on their infrastructure in the cloud. I would say it's much easier to consume large data sets because they have built a ton of APIs that connect to various products. For example, they have a sales force API that makes it very easy to pull in your company's sales force records directly into Domo and so the data will come in raw maybe not that meaningful layout, and what Domo can do then is you can create what are called data flows and really just think of that as twisting and turning the data to get it to look different, feel different if you want to add calculations to certain fields you can do that, and basically you can run it through a data flow, have it twist and turn, and then set it up to where it can be put into a chart and dashboard that's much more meaningful. So Domo takes, I believe, MySQL is the language that's used to write those data flows also for the less technical user who might not know any SQL. They have a dragon drop functionality, where you can combine data sets and kind of do some of those same advanced SQL data manipulations just by clicking and dragging buttons. So for those reasons, that's why I like it. It can handle a lot of data. It's easy to pull it in and manipulate and then charted, all within the same tool. Whereas Tableau, there are a few different features of Tableau that you kind of have to utilize to get that same result.