Meet our DLC Finance and Accounting Consultant, Kim Brady!
Meet our Finance and Accounting Consultant, Kim Brady! Kim has been a valuable part of DLC Consulting for over 15 years! Get to know her better below!
Hometown: Palatine, IL
Alma Mater: TCU – Go Frogs! / University of Chicago (MBA)
Favorite things to do outside of the office: I enjoy golf, tennis, watching my nieces and nephew participate in sports, and reading with the cat in my lap.
How has your background impacted your experience as a consultant? Early in my career, I was fortunate to work across several industries doing corporate finance, accounting and system implementations. Those experiences have made me a valuable utility player for DLC.
What’s a typical workday like for you? These days I WFH and love it! Aside from that, I don’t really have a typical day. My client’s analytical needs are always evolving, and it requires frequent pivoting between model development, ad hoc analysis and the implementation of a new FP&A tool.
As part of a team that works 100% virtually, what technology or collaboration tools do you use to make your work life easier? Microsoft Teams is amazing! I work with colleagues who are based in Toronto, Chicago, Pittsburgh and San Antonio daily. We conduct everything on Teams, and because our cameras are almost always on, collaboration is relaxed and easy.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work every day? I’ve been a DLC consultant for a long time and am still honored to be part of the team and excited for all the ways we’re evolving. My engagements continue to challenge me, and I get a lot of satisfaction from helping our clients achieve their goals.
What kind of work have you been doing? Right now, I support an FP&A team. My primary focus is serving as the finance lead on a new FP&A tool implementation (Vena), but I also do monthly forecasting and a lot of ad hoc analysis for the executive leadership team.
Where do you see the benefits? I’ve brought a senior level of analytical support, advanced Excel skills and the ability to work with big data to my client. It’s enabled me to provide management a much deeper and more accurate view of business performance than they’ve previously had available to them.
The benefits have been more informed decision making about the products being sent to market and significant direct cost savings. The FP&A team has also benefited from my cross-training of advanced Excel modeling and data management techniques.
Linking data to finance and accounting, explain environments that have had lack of reporting infrastructure/inefficiencies and how have you brought organization and solutions: My client didn’t have visibility into the impact of shrink/theft on their product at retail stores. Because of this, their auditors required full 3rd party physical inventories at the stores every year. It was very expensive, took three months to complete and had a high rate of error. The CFO requested that I develop a way to estimate shrink.
Leveraging data from the ledger and inventory systems, I developed a methodology and Excel model that accurately calculated shrink at the product and retailer level. This methodology was tested and approved by the auditors, allowing the client to discontinue the annual physical inventories. I then cross-trained the FP&A team on the full process, and today they calculate shrink relatively quickly and on a quarterly basis.
Going forward and as part of the Vena FP&A implementation, I will build the shrink logic and formalized workflow into the new tool. The client will then have on-demand reporting of shrink at the product and individual store level and be able to proactively manage the product/store assignments, improving sales and profitability.
