Behind the 10-K: The Art of the Pivot | Sharon Grace & Daniel Guillien on non-traditional paths in accounting.

Full Transcript

DANIEL: So, you mentioned this has just been such a good Friday after you filed your 10‑Q.

SHARON: Yes.

DANIEL: What’s been so good about today?

SHARON: The recovery day is key every quarter — even the day after filing or closely thereafter. We take a recovery day because it’s such a sprint to get to the filing day. We filed yesterday. The intention was to file first thing in the morning and then have the rest of the day to finish reviewing invoices and entries and things like that. Of course things came up at the last second — our audit team was new and they had a few last‑second questions — so it took a few more hours.

DANIEL: What did you close?

SHARON: It depends how you define the close. We stop booking entries Day Seven and we stop booking any invoices that come in — we try to do all of our accruals and everything closed by Day Seven. We would like to get it a little bit shorter, but the nature of our business is we have a lot of invoices late and a lot of estimates come in late. So we do Day Seven and then a few days later we reopen the books for items that we catch during our reviews and so we have a couple of things and we’ll reopen the books. You know, we have a lot of access for reopening. We get to a point where we can send a trial balance to the auditors — but inevitably we’ll have at least one more amendment.

DANIEL: So how long is the filing window from, let’s say, sending that trial balance to the auditors to hitting submit in Workiva?

SHARON: It’s about… I wish we had Workiva.

DANIEL: You don’t have Workiva?

SHARON: laughs No. It’s— I want it.

DANIEL: Whoa.

SHARON: In 2026. Don’t tell my boss that my plan is 2026, but I’m going to push for it.

DANIEL: You might be the first SEC‑reporting director I’ve talked to that is not a Workiva subscriber.

SHARON: Yeah, it’s going to be a really big improvement if we can get into a stronger reporting system.

DANIEL: Okay, so what’s your current system?

SHARON: We click the button through RDG Filings. The tool is called ThunderDome.

DANIEL: Is it a third‑party filer? Or are you guys—?

SHARON: Uh‑huh. And they do have some automation that we’re able to use on the linking between an Excel file and within RDG. And then we link the Excel file to all of our Excel footnote support files and all those things, but it’s still very manual.

DANIEL: What’s the worst part about that — the current process?

SHARON: It’s error‑prone.

DANIEL: How so?

SHARON: We have so many of our supporting files still very manual as well, and so we’ll take reports out of our ERP system — usually Excel or PDF — and Excel them. And that’s a very manual process. Then the review is a very manual process. That gets linked to a reporting linked file, but if that file doesn’t get updated in our SharePoint system, and then the linked file doesn’t get updated in time or I’ve uploaded our linked file into RDG, but then through review someone else’s review a number gets changed and I didn’t hear about it in time, so we might end up with a draft that had bad numbers.

DANIEL: So it’s more clerical in essence than technical.

SHARON: Yes. And that’s where the errors come about. Everyone who touches reporting, from the entry‑level accountant through my level and controller level, is very clerical. We have to be so detailed, but that’s where the errors come about — just transferring of data and formatting. We inevitably miss things.

DANIEL: It’d be hard not to, with that level of detail and that long of a document. How many pages is your Q?

SHARON: It was about sixty — around sixty.

Introducing the Guest

DANIEL: Okay, we got a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s introduce. I’m Daniel — I’m with Finrepp. Finrepp is an AI co‑pilot for SEC reporting teams. And then I’d like to introduce my guest today who took the time to come up and talk to me. Can you introduce yourself?

SHARON: My name is Sharon Grace. I am the SEC Reporting Director and Technical Accounting Director for Aemetis.

DANIEL: And what does Aemetis do?

SHARON: They’re into environmental sciences, and so they have a few different subsidiaries that, in different ways, reduce carbon emissions and produce renewable biogas, ethanol, biodiesel — and our India segment.

DANIEL: That’s really cool. Could you give me a rundown of how you started your career in accounting? First of all, what made you choose accounting, or is it something that you found along the way?

SHARON: Accounting was something that I, as a teenager, found as a good go‑between. This idea of “business” sounds like a good major — based on “they make money” and I’m good at math — maybe I’ll give it a shot. This family that I babysat for introduced me to the concept of accounting. I didn’t know anyone corporate growing up and so I thought, if that’s where I’m going to go have a solid career ahead of me, better give it a shot. So I picked it as my major and it went really well. It seemed odd that it was going really well for me and a lot of my peers were struggling, and so I started being the one to help my friends with their accounting homework or we would do it together. I became somewhat of a go‑to person. And then in the business department they made me an official accounting tutor for a year. I thought, I might as well stick with this — I seem to be okay at it. I stuck with it through the end of my degree and, getting into the workforce, found people that I connected with in the career along the way. It’s really kept me going. I think there are some parts of me that wish that I could have had a little bit more of a creative role and not get stuck in some of these mundane Excel numbers. The lifestyle of balancing numbers is a little bit different from the lifestyles of more creative people that I’ve known — who’ve written books and done other things — which I’ve also been interested in, but it’s a very solid career that I’m grateful for.

DANIEL: Where did you grow up and where did you go to college?

SHARON: I grew up in San Diego — an area called Chula Vista, very close to the border where you get tacos. I try to get down there. I went to college at a very small school in LA, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. They had a business program there, so it was an interesting way for me to transition from this very small culture that I grew up in into a more corporate environment.

DANIEL: Post‑grad, did you immediately go pursue your CPA credentials? Or did you take some time to work? Did you get more credits? Did you do a four‑plus‑one? Did you get a master’s? How did you get the credits and then make that transition into CPA licensure?

SHARON: It was something that I wanted to do immediately, but I needed to take a little bit of time for myself after — I had some burnout even just from getting through graduation. So I took a little bit of time to just work and figure out lifestyle.

DANIEL: Where was your first role?

SHARON: My first… okay, so this is an un‑LinkedIn thing that I’ll tell you. This is the good stuff, people. It’s not even on LinkedIn. My first role was as a temp at a cardboard manufacturing company in Point Loma. It was so surreal to me because I loved the TV show The Office and every day I’d walk in there I felt like I was walking onto the set of The Office because the personalities were exactly like that. It was about the same number of people. The layout of the office was very similar to that.

DANIEL: Is it cardboard something?

SHARON: Cardboard manufacturing — the name of the company is “Colorcraft.” Cardboard manufacturing plant — basically paper. So similar. And that’s funny. I was very grateful for it. I had a good manager — she wasn’t like Angela in accounting on The Office.

DANIEL: laughs What character were you then?

SHARON: I felt like Angela, if she’s not— (laughs) No way. And so it didn’t last too long because shortly after that I got an offer that I had been waiting on before taking that role, from the university that I went to. So I did finance there for about eight months. Then I got the offer I had also been looking forward to, which was a regional CPA accounting firm.

DANIEL: Nice.

SHARON: So I wanted to get into an accounting firm and then start buying CPA study material and ease into it that way.

DANIEL: So you kind of had a couple of stepping‑stone roles before you landed your regional CPA firm job?

SHARON: Exactly.

DANIEL: Since you went to a small school, it had much less exposure to accounting firms and they just weren’t hiring as much that year. There was still a big recovery period from 2008 and 2009 where a lot of firms were doing layoffs and then rehiring and then hiring fewer people from colleges.

SHARON: Yeah.

DANIEL: When did you graduate?

SHARON: 2011.

DANIEL: Okay, so it was still in the recovery.

SHARON: Yeah. I just missed the small wave of hiring. I always knew I would make it — it was just going to be a roundabout way. I’m really glad I didn’t have a perfectly traditional path. I learned a lot through the little side steps.

DANIEL: I resonate a lot with that. After I graduated I had a couple of internships and a regional CPA firm and then another one that was quite interesting. But my peers that took Deloitte internships straight to their Big Four role — it’s a very clear path and it’s a great path. But for all of us that don’t take that path it’s a whole different ball game, right?

SHARON: It is very different. You learn a different type of grit in taking a roundabout path and then jumping in at a different point or in a different way.

DANIEL: And look at you — what you’re doing now. It’s pretty cool.

SHARON: It is pretty cool.

DANIEL: Shout out Finrepp — the presenting sponsor.

Entering Big Four

DANIEL: So you got into the Big Four?

SHARON: I did. So I went from the regional‑firm lifestyle, which was great — I got to travel. We audited a lot of corporate real estate and apartment complexes and so we would go to all these different states and all these different apartment complexes and audit their books. So I got to see a lot of the U.S. in that experience. Then I got married and decided, “Okay, now I can approach my CPA from a team‑at‑home standpoint.” I took a little time off of work for that job and would just do consulting for my friend’s CPA firm on the side whenever they needed help here and there. At the time my husband’s job moved us up to San Francisco with Cisco, so I was studying for the CPA and then we moved. The job that hired him pulled — rescinded their offer — as soon as we moved up. And then I was like, “Oh, we’ve got to find a job now. It’s probably better to find a job before I’m done with the CPA exams anyway.” I’d already passed a couple of them. Then I met someone who said that KPMG had just acquired RK.

DANIEL: What’s RK?

SHARON: Rolf Seam‑Kat. A smaller accounting firm — they had a bunch of real estate clients. And with your real estate experience they could probably pull you in. They needed a lot of help. So I got swept in to that. I got into KPMG, worked on a couple of real estate clients and then I was like, “Hey, you guys have a lot of other cool clients that are interesting to me. I wonder if I could get in with some tech clients that might be pre‑IPO. I’d love to learn and see what that’s like.” They were happy to have help. Not everyone is interested in private‑company auditing and so the fact that I was interested and willing to put in IPO hours and things like that — they swept me in there. So that was a nice entry way into this whole other world. Then I got to do a lot at KPMG — that was actually a pretty good time. Through the pre‑IPO VC‑backed audit practice, I also got to do a project in Bangalore, which is what I told you about on the phone. We had an off‑shoring team who was designated specifically to these clients. So I got to go train them in doing a little bit more with our audit procedures and help them understand more of the accounting concepts and being in India for a few months.

DANIEL: How was that?

SHARON: That was probably the highlight of my accounting career — so far.

DANIEL: laughs It’s not over yet! Come on.

SHARON: Thank you. It was so fun to meet people from all around the world in accounting — people who had really fun, engaging personalities and leaders of big teams — and then make friends in India. So now every time I visit since that experience, I catch up and stay connected on Instagram or whatever and grow up with people in that experience. I was only a couple of years ahead of the people I was training.

DANIEL: What point in your career was that?

SHARON: I was a senior associate.

DANIEL: Okay, so a few years in to KPMG.

SHARON: Yeah — maybe two years in at KPMG.

DANIEL: And pre‑KPMG had you already obtained CPA licensure or was that still in progress?

SHARON: I finished it while I was at KPMG. I think I had finished two exams before KPMG and then finished the last two while there — which was a grind.

DANIEL: I was just going to say we skipped over that part, which had to be the hardest.

SHARON: Yeah, it was worth it but it’s a bit of a blur — kind of a black hole in my memory because it was just such a grind to get the audit work done during the day and then study in the evenings and weekends. I was lucky to be on engagements that weren’t too aggressive early at KPMG — that was the nature of that private practice, pre‑IPO practice.

DANIEL: Yeah — in the real estate practice too. It wasn’t too bad. It’s a little different in public‑company audit.

SHARON: Yeah, I was very lucky.

DANIEL: Nice. So you did your time at KPMG. What made you leave?

SHARON: So that is a whole other journey. Basically I came out of the India experience just kind of on a high.

DANIEL: How long were you there — six months?

SHARON: I was there four or five months — something like that. A lot of people would go over there and spend about a year there, but I was doing a special project and I found it hard to live there. As fun as it was, it was also hard — the traffic and also I was just figuring out my priorities in life. I wasn’t able to go out and do all of the fun stuff I wanted and I was just figuring out family stuff at the same time. So I came back on a work high and wanted to make manager. I thought maybe I’ll make early manager — and then I got pregnant. So, having a kid and starting a family shifted everything. In my mind I was like, “I’m going to still make early manager. I’m going to come back and it’s going to be like I’m not even a mom.” You know, that was my mentality and I was very ambitious. And I think that got me to a point in my life, but then once the baby was born my brain chemistry changed and then it was like, I don’t care about accounting as much as I care about humans. That was the biggest shift for my life, but it also shifted a lot for my career. It made me realize that I think I had been pushing past a lot of my feelings, a lot of my humanity, and getting to this place that I found to be successful in my life. But then having a child forced me to be so much more human. And then I had another kid.

DANIEL: So, another big change.

SHARON: Another very lucky thing for me at KPMG was that they have internal projects that people can do to step away from audit potentially. I got to be part of the Clara project, which is their internal audit software. That was a really good experience. One, because I got to work from home a lot more often and have more balance with my family. And two, I got to spend a lot more time in accounting guidance from literature and also learn a little bit more about how systems and tech work — kind of like how you edit videos sometimes, but you’re also in accounting. So that was a really cool experience. And then the pandemic hit. And because I wasn’t client‑facing, and I asked to still not be for a while, I was part of a round of layoffs. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. That was a huge boost for my life. I felt like this is something that has been pretty hard for me for a while and now they’ve given me this big gift of just a little bit of a push in a new direction in my life. So we moved to San Diego for a few years. I grew up there; my parents are still there, and I had these two little kids. So I got to have a little bit more family support, get a new job in San Diego, go to the beach a lot more often. That’s when I started doing technical accounting and a little bit of reporting stuff as well.

DANIEL: That’s such a cool story.

SHARON: Thanks.

Transition to Director Role

DANIEL: That’s neat how the family side of your life kind of shaped your career in a sense. You had this partner‑track mindset within KPMG and then something like starting a family completely changed how you were thinking about that.

SHARON: Yeah. I think the part of my mind — that ambitious mindset of “I could be partner track if I really focused on that” — was denying this other side of me that felt really uncomfortable with it. I think there are some people who are more— the way that they work, the way that they collaborate with team members, is a lot more suited for partner track. I think forcing myself into this mindset and this person that I thought, “That’s the most successful, that’s the most— if I’m truly focused and ambitious and good at what I do then that means partner track,”— that’s the definition of what success would look like in that field. I was afraid of any alternative — what would that say about me, that I’m not as good? And maybe there’s some truth to that, but that’s okay because having those little side paths and those little pushes in other directions can open up a whole world of opportunity. I’m still marketable because I have KPMG on my résumé and then I had all this other stuff that I was learning. I was reading all these child‑psychology books and it was really connecting with some of the trainings that I would do at KPMG. Coming into manager level at KPMG you have manager‑level trainings — how to work with your staff, how to work with your partners. And then I was learning how to help your baby with their development. There were a lot of parallels.

DANIEL: That’s so interesting.

SHARON: It was so fun for me because it made it so much less scary to me to talk with a partner or a CEO when I saw them as a baby. I love it. They’re a baby one day and they did a lot of random moments one day, and then now since then too I really felt like, no matter how far we’ve gone in our career, no matter how good we are at writing a memo or presenting something to investors, we’re all still children at heart. We all still love to laugh. We all still make mistakes. We don’t like being scolded. We like being coached. Kids are the same way.

DANIEL: I love that. That’s such a cool perspective. Partners in video is really cool. They don’t like being— you know, no one does.

SHARON: And it’s so much more effective when you come in as a team in every environment — at home, at work.

DANIEL: I love it. So let’s pivot into your career now as a technical accounting and SEC reporting director.

SHARON: Yeah.

DANIEL: So you’re moving back to San Diego, now you’re back in SF and you’re a director of SEC reporting. Let’s bridge that gap.

SHARON: San Diego was great and I had my favorite possible time at this company. I worked for a Raytheon subsidiary called Collins Aerospace, and I worked for just the coolest accountant I’ve ever met. She’s got tattoos and so many piercings and she’s not afraid of anyone.

DANIEL: I love the “cool accountant” title.

SHARON: Yes, she gets the job done. She was a great coach for me for that period of transitioning from Big Four into this environment because I was going from client‑serving mentality to being an internal team member. I think the way that I spoke — and this still happens now — the way that I try to get some stuff done, especially when working on a deadline, is “Here’s what I need from you.” I’m sorry — cut and dry. And then people are like, “Are you auditing me, or are you holding me back from getting my job done because of this rule or this guidance that you’re talking about?” I had to shift my tone back into this: “No, we’re one team. I’m just trying to help you be compliant before it gets too late.” That kind of thing.

SHARON: On that note of little side journeys, I think I’d waited a little bit too long to take some time and focus on just being a mom. One of the questions that you sent me in preparation for the interview was, “What was the role that most prepared you for today?” My answer to that was: being a mom. I know that’s not traditional accounting speak at all, but I think it goes back to the personality stuff — just letting us be people first. That’s huge for me. If I’m going to be in accounting — a topic that’s typically very dry; it’s hard to stay up late reading accounting guidance without falling asleep, or wake up excited to read accounting guidance for a technical accounting memo — what keeps me in this role is the value of connecting with people. It takes a team to file a 10‑Q. How well are we going to work together and respect each other and study each other out for the best success? How can I help the people who are doing work that feeds into my work? How can I make their work good? Being a mom now has been the best experience I could ever have. It’s tiring — so that can be a challenge to balance filing a 10‑Q with helping the kids get their homework done or helping them in the middle of the night. But we have grit in accounting and we get through it. So I took a little bit of time off to focus on being a mom for a year, and then we as a family moved back up to the Bay Area. I had a couple more little side steps. I had a job offer that I moved back up for, and then they rescinded the offer as soon as I moved up here again.

DANIEL: No.

SHARON: That day that I got that news I was like, “Maybe this is my sign. Maybe I need to get out of accounting.” I walked over to Starbucks and I was like, “Are you guys hiring?”

DANIEL: No way.

SHARON: laughs This would be fun. It would be great — interacting with people. But I worked in food services as a teenager, in high school, and I know that that wouldn’t last long for me.

DANIEL: Yeah, I did too, all throughout college, working in restaurants. It’s fun for the first three months and then reality sets in and that’s why we want to be accountants.

SHARON: It’s a different grind and I have so much respect for people who are in hospitality, the restaurant business, and who are still pleasant.

DANIEL: It’s no small feat.

SHARON: Exactly. So I did a little bit of consulting with a Bay Area company for a few months and then I got this Director of SEC Reporting and Technical Accounting role.

DANIEL: And that was a year and a half ago now?

SHARON: It was about a year ago.

DANIEL: Awesome. So this 10‑Q we filed yesterday was your fifth SEC filing?

SHARON: Yes. We filed yesterday — my fifth SEC filing.

DANIEL: Any comment letters?

SHARON: I have not dealt with any yet.

DANIEL: Good job.

SHARON: Thank you. You’re killing it.

DANIEL: True. Congratulations. Too soon.

SHARON: Yeah. But the company has had a couple in the past. I think when they became public we had a couple rounds of comments here and there and they got through them. I’ve read comment letters for other companies and we have a couple of unique situations that are new — some credits that are available to our companies or environmental — and there are very few companies that report their credit accounting publicly. So we’re a little bit wondering if we can pave the way with the accounting that we want to do on those things. We have to be very careful in hoping not to get a comment letter.

DANIEL: Let’s go a little bit deeper on that. Across industries everyone is different. What do you use as far as a tool to figure out how to write these disclosures for a new area of disclosure that’s specific to your industry? If you’re going to pave the way, you’re going to look to guidance, I would assume?

SHARON: Yeah — or ChatGPT.

DANIEL: laughs

SHARON: No kidding. That was a dumb joke because I have asked ChatGPT and compared it to my findings on the actual tool that we use, which is Intelligize. And it’s wild. This is why I know our jobs are secure for a little bit longer, because AI is just not there yet with getting accurate results or thorough responses. ChatGPT— well, Finrepp is getting there. I’ll have to show you after the show. But it can definitely help you do your job even better across the board. A few things that would take longer — like if I’m looking for that one particular guidance and my eyes are tired and I keep losing it, I’ll use AI to ask, “What is the exact one?” Sometimes it’s still wrong on the exact reference but it gets me a little closer. Saves me a few minutes.

DANIEL: Do you find yourself looking to the authority of guidance from FASB or the guidance from Big Four handbooks more often?

SHARON: I like to look at both every time. You don’t have to know the FASB guidance first. I like to read that first — what’s the foundation for the guidebooks? But the guidebooks just give so much more color and interpretation. They’ll say, “Typically, we’d usually…” or something along those lines. Or even they’ll give statements or updates after the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed this summer — some of these credits were discussed in some of these updates that the firms publish. So I’ll read those and they’ll say, “We don’t like to see this, but this is typically what we’re going to do.” That kind of conversational language is helpful for me and it helps prepare us for conversations with the auditors.

DANIEL: So specifically, can you give me an example of something in the past five 10‑Qs you filed where you’ve had to implement a new disclosure? Maybe an example of looking to peers to see how it’s been disclosed in the past and then an example of starting from scratch or paving the way for a new disclosure. What does that process look like for you?

SHARON: It depends on how complicated the activity is. We did have a new disclosure this 10‑Q, and this was something that was caught at the very last second. This is the one that I was telling you about where everything seemed a little bit too good to be true. I love a new set of eyes coming into things because we love making these better. It will probably not be at an ideal time, which is the challenge and which is what happened. So the night before filing this question, “Hey, this agreement — there is no paragraph where I am in the debt,” but then these auditors were very nice and gave us some examples of disclosures. Then I can go into Intelligize and do another search, and the research team with Intelligize is very helpful — I get people to help me do different searches in different ways. I don’t understand Boolean web searches and all that. So they gave me examples, the audit team gave me an example, and then the adrenaline of trying to push that button and file got me through. Here’s what I think it should be. Then show it to our legal team, show it to the controllers, the CFO, show it to the audit team; everyone agrees; add a little blurb to the MD&A, and we go on. If it were something that required a technical accounting memo and a disclosure, we probably wouldn’t have filed yesterday, but that can happen as well.

DANIEL: Have you had to deal with any extensions or amendments?

SHARON: I have not yet. I know before I joined, one of the 10‑Ks had an extension because the audit team needed more time. So we try to meet with the audit team with enough time to catch new things or give them our technical accounting memos with enough time. I think that over time our team has improved some of our documentation so it’s more easily auditable.

DANIEL: How do you navigate that internally? Do you have your own schedule you’ve built to track the flow of documents from team to team to ensure everything is on time, or is there a different system you’ve used in different companies to track the flow of documents from all these different teams?

SHARON: I would like to use a tool, but right now it’s very much, “Here’s our calendar, here’s what we know needs to get done,” and then we monitor how that’s going and review it as it comes through. That is a big one because the company is leveraging debt — they’re still in the startup mentality and there are so many constructions and capital assets going on. So that’s a lot of monitoring and a lot of looking at capitalizing — capital expenditures.

DANIEL: How much time do you spend on capex?

SHARON: Capex and cap tables, yeah, it’s very detailed and tedious.

DANIEL: To what extent do you think your company is embracing this new age of technology? There’s a startup optimizing almost any facet of accounting at this point. It’s just a matter of picking which ones are good and which ones aren’t really helping anyone out. To what extent are you guys embracing that and trying out new software versus sticking to what works and what’s been around — a legacy product?

SHARON: The nature of the work that we’ve been doing within our lean team is very much in survival mode. We’ll have the thought, “By the way, wouldn’t AI be nice for this?” but we don’t have a lot of time to meet with potential vendors or even do our own internal process improvement — rumble, slap it all against the wall, reform. I think there’s a lot that I’ve learned, especially at the Raytheon company; they’re really big on process improvement. If we had more time to sit together as a team and start with the messy process, we could do a lot of work on our own. But I’m finding that we can’t, and it would be very valuable if we could sit down with a company who can help us with AI tools that would be process improvement, but also new tools to work with.

DANIEL: I mean, it could be someone’s full‑time job to go through different companies and figure out where AI can improve because that’s the hardest part about it — figuring out where it can help you and where it takes more time trying to figure out how to use AI to solve some problem. Sometimes it just simply takes less time to do it yourself.

SHARON: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting balance that we have to navigate and it changes so fast. From when AI first came out and I was in undergrad using it to try and do my accounting homework — it just couldn’t do it — to now I can snap a shot of a question and I get the journal entries; they’re correct 95 percent of the time in a minute. And only what, two years? So it’s changing fast across all industries, and accounting is one that we’ve started to see the effects. For example, I know that Big Four analyst classes were down this year — 30‑something percent. I think that’ll come back, but we’re starting to see employment go down because of AI optimizing certain roles. So we already spoke about this a little bit and you said, “Okay, ChatGPT is not taking my job.” I think that’s because you have 10, 12 years of experience; you’re a CPA. For someone coming up in accounting right now, what advice would you give to them to navigate this changing world? AI is never going to take an accountant’s job from the aspect that we have to be ethical. CPA is a huge ethical proponent. But there’s still a lot of work that can be done by AI, right? People shouldn’t be manually reconciling credit cards in 2025. AI should be doing that. So what do you think? Give me your thoughts on someone starting out a career in accounting now in this age of AI?

SHARON: AI can also replace artists and actors in movie‑making and books. But I think there’s still a very human element to accounting and having an accounting team that partners with what the CEO’s vision is. There’s still so much that humans should retain in understanding the guidance as a human rather than giving it to a machine — knowing the “why” instead of letting machines decide the “why” for you. I don’t know — I’m not in an analyst position anymore, so it’s hard for me to step back. If there’s someone who wanted to be an analyst level for the rest of their life as a rock‑star analyst where AI can now take a majority of that work off of them, then maybe there’s a way to pivot their career. I don’t know. But I know at my level, the way I look at accounting is still so human‑oriented that a machine could never do that.

DANIEL: How do you do your job better or differently than maybe someone who’s purely technical, with all these people touch points every day in a filing?

SHARON: Well, for example, if I have to write a technical accounting memo, I can’t just be handed a list of bullet points and write a memo. If I could just do that, then AI could definitely take it. But there are so many conversations to be had with leadership about where this aspect of the organization is going — what’s the intent? It’s a long‑term intent because we might need to use this accounting conclusion for years from now. How do the operations work now and where is it going? You have to talk with the operations‑level people. You can’t just rely on what the accounting team understands and turn in your accounting memo. You have to understand the nature of the business and people on site working with our vendors and working with our new renewable biogas sites where they’re building digesters or working with dairy farmers. You have to understand what’s happening with those agreements — how they work and the psychology of all that — and that feeds into why we’re doing what we’re doing and what the nature of our business is going to be and what the accounting should be today and from now on. Those conversations and knowing how to work as a team to meet a deadline — not be seen as compliance and still be friendly along the way and seen as a team member along the way — I don’t think AI could ever be seen as a friendly team member, as much as it tries to sound like one. It’ll be a human. It never will be. So I don’t know what else to say about all the unknown of what is going to change about the nature of the work, but we still do need cab drivers and food‑delivery people even though Waymo is out there taking people without drivers. It’s not such a scary change to me. I know that humans will always be needed and will always need each other, as much as tools help us.

DANIEL: I think that was a big scare when computers first became everywhere. There was a lot of fear and superstition and paranoia, but I don’t think it ever takes away from the fact that organizations are run by humans — good ones at least.

Teamwork and Stress Management

DANIEL: All right. I like how much you talk about teamwork when it comes down to a filing. Talk me through your tips for when it’s really bad — when it’s coming down to a deadline and everyone’s stressed. How do you make sure to keep the communication open and honest and clear and make sure the team is still functioning as a team? Because I think that is so important.

SHARON: I think a lot can break down when people are very stressed and maybe the deadlines are a little too tight, when mistakes come up. That happens to us every quarter because of the nature of when our invoices come in and when I try to get my draft to the controller for review. There’s so much to review; so many of those analytics numbers can change and feed into the draft. It’s just very tight at that point. The tool that I use to organize our close calendar now is Planner in Teams. We used to use just an Excel file — every row was a new deadline for a different team — and that worked, but when you’re in that stressed‑out mode you can’t digest that as easily. Planner is a tool where I can put it in little boxes and milestone columns and assign team members and then it sends automatic reminders, which is nice. Then I can roll forward the plan every quarter. So we’ll meet once a week as a larger accounting team and we’ll go over the plan — “This is the deadline; this team needs to get their recons and BlackLine done by this day; these are all the little bubbles we have to check off along the way.” It gets very stressful. I think because we have people in off‑site locations not working in the same offices, I can come off as looking like this taskmaster. I’m living in this nice corporate office when they’re working on the ground with their farmers and doing their accounting in that mode. I try to keep it friendly with conversations outside of that mode too. These are very likable people and I don’t want it to be cut‑and‑dry — “Give me this; I give you this; we’re done.” So we have conversations; we talk about our kids; we talk about lifestyle. Some of these people buy their kids livestock and the kids are raising livestock — that’s really interesting. That gives me a level of interest in another way the world works. I’ve never raised livestock. I know we’ll never buy a pig for my daughters, but we have touch points like that. Then when the deadlines are really tight, the way I maintain my humanity is to remind them — to give people an example of, “This is a mistake that I made; this is my learning point; and this is what I’m doing to improve this process next time.” So let me know what you’re struggling with. We can work on it together or you can give us your update. So it’s never “Because you made this mistake my life is harder now,” which sometimes it can feel that way in those tight deadlines, but that’s not how I’m going to lead a meeting when we’re checking in on progress. I try to build that level of safety and humanness in the team. Then in between quarters, too, remind them, “We’re doing our best to improve these processes with the time that we have in between quarters.” Being as consistent as I can with that type of communication. We have the weekly meetings with the larger team and then the controller that I report to holds meetings with me and all of the managers together as well. We just keep up the progress. If there’s a hard point, then we take the time and deal with it as a team. We never want anyone to feel stranded and handling a problem on their own.

DANIEL: If you could go back and listen to advice that you had been given from a younger age, what would you pick?

SHARON: I think I would have benefited from the people who told me to slow down or do less at the time. It’s great to take on side projects and do a newsletter on top of audit and CPA or whatever, but I think I would have benefited more from taking extra time to focus better on one task at a time and then do some kind of meditation in between tasks. That idea of mindfulness — I think it would have given me a better sense of accuracy in the work that I was doing and I would have retained a little bit more of the technical knowledge from the tasks. In the memo mode, writing, if I did that one thing at a time, did some kind of meditation. That’s what I’m trying to embody now and I’m really benefiting from it a lot.

DANIEL: So splitting your tasks and being fully devoted to what’s in front of you and not being distracted by what you’re going to do next or what you just did before.

SHARON: Yeah. And then in between, instead of being on the phone or taking brain breaks on social media, which feels like taking a little break from work, disengaging so that you can cope with the dryness of the job at hand — instead, just taking some time to be in your body, go for a walk, be in the quiet and do literally one thing at a time instead of barraging yourself with more other kinds of engagement. Taking that time to slow down — taking a little bit more of a Mr. Rogers, talk‑slowly approach instead of the fast cartoon. Again, bringing it back to a kid analogy. There’s a lot to be said even for adults now in the age of TikTok and faster engagement.

DANIEL: No, it’s like ruining our brains for sure.

SHARON: Even at this level, I always imagined when I was younger that when I’m this age and at this level in my career, I wouldn’t struggle with what feels like a childish thing like that. But even — I see my own parents struggle with that, with everything that’s available to them on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook. Even for me now, task‑switching and context‑switching from work to home or task to task — or getting calls and Teams messages in the middle of a big task that I’m trying to do — those interruptions are going to be inevitable. But as much as we can control, taking time to be in the body, doing some kind of meditation, come into a space, welcome yourself into the space and sit quietly — it makes a really big difference for being present and staying who you want to be even in the hardest moment.

DANIEL: That’s really good advice. How do you manage exactly what you’re just talking about? You’re trying to sit down and work on some tasks that require you to think deeply and really focus and be accurate. Because you’re a manager, you’re getting these pings from all the analysts and all these other people needing your information. How do you manage your time to make sure that you’re getting that hard work done but you’re also there for your team and able to guide them and help them out?

SHARON: It is hard because I also very deeply value sleep and I don’t want to be up late into the night doing those things. So it is always a game of “How do I make sure each of these important things is getting done? If something is inevitably going to slip, let it not be the most important thing.” What I like to prioritize is my team because I know that the team members that I work with can more easily slip into a state of overwhelm and there’s something I can do about that. So long as my team is level, then I can leverage their strengths and it saves more time in the long run to handle those little things with a team as quickly as possible and then put my work around that. Inevitably for me, when I’m writing a technical analysis memo, it takes me a long time because I want to do it well and write like a human. Now I have this challenge of not sounding like AI.

DANIEL: That’s something that’s so powerful right now. I think people can really easily identify at this point when someone’s writing and expressing ideas clearly and when it’s AI slop — which is kind of all you see on LinkedIn these days. It’s just AI slop after AI slop. So when someone can really write in an efficient manner, it’s powerful.

SHARON: Right. AI doesn’t know how to be compelling yet. It can make an arrangement, but especially with accounting when there’s so much gray area and so much nuance — even though it seems like there should be a black‑and‑white answer for everything — there never is. There’s always a “depends.” And then what does it depend on? And how do you handle all those nuances after nuances? The nuance tree.

DANIEL: The nuance tree.

SHARON: So inevitably, I’ll end up writing late at night or early in the morning. Once I find that quiet space where I know no one is even going to try to interrupt, that’s when I do my best writing. Then the other stuff — the Excel balancing and pulling reports and those things — that’s a little bit easier for me to do around my team, but the writing is the more challenging thing that will pull me into the late night or early morning.

DANIEL: So you prioritize your team and then the deep‑work things — those happen after hours, essentially, when you don’t have anyone coming after you for information.

SHARON: Exactly. We’ve had to rewrite a lot of SOX narratives this year and that’s always a challenge. So the bigger challenging things that I really don’t want to do, I’ll leverage a team — we’ll do it with someone, an accountability partner. When the India team needed to write their SOX narratives and we were just not able to do it in those small windows of time — in my evening or their evening; it’s really hard working with the time difference like that — it was easier just to get on the plane and go over there and bust it out in a week. But then I had to deal with a little bit of burnout and jet lag for a while after that. So then you have to just make time to recover — building in recovery time is really important.

Closing Thoughts

DANIEL: Nice. Let’s close it out. We’re running out of time here. Thanks for joining me. Really productive conversation. I think you’re a super interesting person and really, really enjoyed this.

SHARON: Hey, everyone has their own perspective. In an industry that — we both know — is quite dry sometimes, it’s all about the people you work with. People make the place.

DANIEL: So closing remarks: What would you say to your peers, and what would you say to someone like me starting out a career in accounting?

SHARON: I would say for you starting out, if you’re anything like I was, it’s easy to look at what’s next or look for the next thing or look for that ambitious opportunity. Try to be present and take in everything that you have now and use it as a tool and a foundation because it will be usable. You might not see it now, but it will be usable and helpful at some point in the future. What I’d say to my peers is: help me with the tools. What are the things that we can do to not get overrun by AI, but take away the tedious stuff? Yes, please.

DANIEL: Perfect way to end it. Thank you so much, Sharon. This has been amazing.

SHARON: Thanks for having me.

DANIEL: Until next time.