We are thrilled to highlight our Junior Accounting Manager, Anu Iyengar. Anu has been a valuable part of Kranz Consulting since September 2021. Read the full interview to learn more about Anu’s expertise, her passion for her work, and how she helps her clients thrive.
What is your hometown? San Ramon, CA
What is your alma mater? St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous) – Kolkata, India
What are your favorite things to do outside of the office? Outside of the office, I love volunteering for non-profits, organizing and helping with fundraisers, traveling, watching movies, and spending time with my family and dog!
How has your background impacted your experience as a consultant? I used to work for another consulting company before I joined Kranz and volunteered at multiple non-profit organizations. This has helped me to work and communicate effectively with clients, cross-functional teams both internally and across clients and manage multiple deliverables.
What’s a typical workday like for you? Every day is interesting! There are the usual day-to-day accounting tasks along with scheduled meetings and deliverables – but there are always issues to resolve and troubleshoot that come up, and ad-hoc and urgent client needs to meet, which make my work exciting. It is very important to be able to multitask, take ownership and be flexible. I always plan my work ahead of time as much as I can.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work every day? I like being challenged and learning new skills and software! Working with multiple clients who have different platforms and software gives me the opportunity to pick up new skills all the time. I am always being challenged with resolving or troubleshooting something on the various platforms they use. I am also exposed to different industries, and I am learning something new all the time.
What kind of work have you been doing? I have been working on keeping the day-to-day accounts current for multiple clients, managing a full-cycle AP process, month-end and year-end financial close, flux analysis and reconciliations, 1099 reporting, supporting with transitions within client accounting teams, and supporting integrations of new ERP systems.
Where do you believe you deliver the most value to your client? I deliver the most value by being on top of day-to-day transactions all the time, troubleshooting and resolving issues as they arise, streamlining and documenting processes to make daily tasks more efficient, keeping good records, and communicating effectively with vendors and internal teams within client companies.
How do you organize environments with a lack of reporting infrastructure or inefficiency? I have migrated a small client from their obsolete accounting system to QBO online to improve reporting and simplify accounting. I have also built and used Excel templates and spreadsheets to reconcile accounts and report financials and prepared consolidated financials for a client when their accounting system did not support consolidation of multiple subsidiaries.
What’s your process like? When I took on the role of the accountant for a non-profit organization, I soon realized that there were no internal processes, that accounts hadn’t been maintained for months, there were no controls on spending, and there was no reporting. I started by first completing the accounts and reconciling with the bank and filed and saved records and receipts for large transactions. I then reviewed their accounts for past years and prepared reports showing fundraising and spending trends. I wrote process documents with good internal controls and drew up future budget plans to be discussed with the board. I presented my findings to the board and explained the need to budget their spending to keep up with the fundraising and the importance of internal controls. During my time there as treasurer, I used to regularly report the financials to the board, made sure internal processes were followed, records and receipts were saved, and taxes were filed on time. My biggest satisfaction was that the organization also went through a successful audit.