DLC Available Consultant Spotlight
Jay Karas, CPA
Jay is an experienced Accounting and Finance professional with demonstrated history supporting clients in a variety of roles. Coming from a background in public accounting, Jay is a strong utility player with expertise in accounting and financial reporting, FP&A, controllership, and cost analysis. Jay is an excellent team player who is able to provide an immediate impact in an organization.
Jay will soon be available for new client engagements. Please reach out if Jay can support any of your interim needs, projects, or initiatives.
- Controllership experience for manufacturing business units, including full responsibility for P&L, inventory, A/P, A/R, and cost center reporting. Oversight responsibility included two teams of up to 20 operations personnel.
- Led and coordinated month-end, quarter-end and year-end close processes as part of controllership duties.
- Reconciled balance sheet accounts and prepared journal entries for invoice accruals, prepaid expenses, payroll postings and energy transfers. Assured the timeliness and accuracy of data and integrity of reporting in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).
- Developed internal monthly financial reporting package for business units, including variance analysis, budget performance and forecast revisions.
- Coordinated with various functional leaders to explain major variances, make recommendations for corrective actions and implement process improvements.
- Responsible for monthly presentation of financial results to various levels of senior management, including executive teams.
- Developed and prepared activity-based labor, depreciation and energy standard costing components for annual budget of $25M manufacturing business units.
- Administered inventory control procedures including count oversight, SAP inventory movements and adjustments to inventory for a 200 SKU operation.
- Collaborated with accounts payable and procurement team to respond to vendor inquiries and ensure accurate and timely processing of plant expenditures.
- Addressed ad-hoc issues related to inventory and production entries, requiring full understanding of system material movements and G/L accounts impacted.
- External audit background in consumer and industrial products, manufacturing and pharmaceutical industries.
- Experience evaluating and maintaining internal control processes for GAAP compliance following PCAOB guidelines to audit the control environment of both public and private companies.
- Performed control testing through step-by-step evaluation of processes involving discussions and observations with relevant control owners as well as detailed testing over account balances to determine control effectiveness (see below).
- Performed substantive and analytical audit procedures over financial statements prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP involving preparation of complex excel templates for testing procedures, tailoring audit procedures based on each client’s unique business environment.
- Maintained audit plan deadlines and requests from client contacts via SharePoint project tracker.
- Managed calendar, task list and resources for monthly forecasting, annual budget, strategic planning, and quarterly reporting processes with supervisory responsibilities. Coordinated within and across various functions.
- Led process improvement initiative across two cross-functional teams identifying business needs and current deficiencies. Streamlined capital project approval process and delivered more accurate cash flow reporting for management.
- Monitored several capital project costs simultaneously and ensured that total costs remained within established budgets; coordinated the request of additional funds as necessary due to changes in project scope/deliverables.
- Responsible for establishing and keeping to project tracker for audit deliverables in a fast-paced environment.
- Morton Salt ($1.3B privately held salt company, largest salt producer in North America)
- Ventas, Inc. ($1B+ publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trust)
- Deloitte & Touche LLP (External Audit practice, served Franklin Electric ($2B publicly held consumer and industrial products) and Harmony Biosciences ($300M public pharmaceutical company, privately held during audit experience)
- Experience at the corporate and business unit levels in several areas of financial planning, including preparation of annual operating plans, monthly forecasts, long-term strategic CAPEX planning, KPI’s and ad hoc analyses.
- Controlled and coordinated preparation of the annual operating budget for both individual business units and corporate spend areas (SG&A). Partnered with stakeholders from Operations, Corporate Finance and cross-functional business leaders (Sales, Supply Chain, Procurement, Information Technology).
- Managed cost performance for business units against plans and estimates, manufacturing costs and variances, administrative expenses, personnel costs, energy and depreciation expenses.
- Responsible for preparation of company-wide CAPEX budget across 20 business units, tracked spending and progress, forecast accuracy. Typical capital expenditures included purchase or construction of buildings, machinery, and land, as well as growth initiatives such as new product development and capacity extensions.
- Developed and reviewed capital spending requests incorporating cash flow analyses and the valuation techniques of NPV, IRR, and payback period.
- Facilitated strategic Capex planning utilizing cash flow analysis (above) and input from various stakeholders to prioritize business needs and present these findings to management.
- Utilized Tableau dashboards for financial and operational reporting metrics to supplement reporting and analysis to executive management and make recommendations for process improvements.
- Experience building, improving and refining budget and forecasting models.
- Familiar with various financial models and analytical tools including DCF, option pricing model, CAPM, NPV, IRR, EVA, growth model, moving average, trend analysis, ratio analysis, multiples, regression analysis, statistical analysis, sensitivity analysis and scenarios modeling.
- Reviewed and audited SEC Forms 10-K and 10-Q including complete footnote disclosures and MD&A. Reviewed company’s quarterly earnings release, analyst script, annual report and underlying financial data.
- Responsible for coordinating communication of necessary changes as well of resolution of those changes in a timely manner to Corporate Controller and CFO for SEC filing.
- Performed research on accounting and GAAP issues such as general revenue recognition (ASC 605 Revenue Recognition) and lease accounting (ASC 842 / IFRS16 – Lease Accounting) during audit of public company undergoing growth through acquisitions of formerly privately owned companies to ensure proper application of guidance in compliance with US GAAP.
- Worked closely with external auditors and bankers for preparation of financial information related to the sale process of a business in accordance with SEC requirements.
Microsoft Excel
- Advanced Level Excel User including pivot tables, Power Pivot, charts, formula building (IF, V-LOOKUP, H-LOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, SUMIFS, GETPIVOTDATA, array formulas), text to columns imports, data validation, filters, grouping, subtotals, drop down menus, graphing presentations (charts, trend lines, axis scales, multiple charts), conditional formatting, hyperlink creation, usage of analytical tools (Goal Seeker, Crystal Ball and Solver), financial functions (PMT, FV, PV, NPV, RATE, and IRR), logical and nested functions (IF, AND, OR, and NOT functions in formulas), string, date, and time functions, statistical functions (MIN, MAX, MEDIAN, STDEV).
Microsoft Access - Basic usage including table design and development, importing/exporting data, creating tables using various joining properties, and report creation.
Microsoft PowerPoint - Advanced Level PowerPoint User including, creating slide masters, working with templates and layouts, inserting objects (pictures, symbols, charts, sound), creating graphs and organization charts, working with embedded and/or linked objects, slide transition and animation as well as creating and running slide shows.
Microsoft Word - Advanced Level Word User including embedded objects, linked spreadsheets, charts, tables and form design and organizing files (Table of Contents, Heading, etc.), co-editing files (Tracking Changes and Markup, etc.).
SAP ERP & SAP BW - Advanced Level SAP user with 3+ years of extensive user experience working with SAP ERP (ECC) and SAP-BW (Business Warehouse).
- Advanced functional user of FI/CO module including journal entries, report pulling and data file processing within the system.
- Familiar with various transaction codes and reports to review information like standard cost, bill of materials, cost center reporting, G/L account balance detail, document lookup, inventory balance and movements, vendor invoice management, vendor payment history, purchase orders, fixed asset ledger, production data, sales data, etc.
- Created SAP extracts and mappings to Excel files.
Tableau - 3+ years of Tableau desktop experience creating dashboard for financial reporting purposes.
- Knowledge of report creation and data manipulation, specifically working with data from SAP and Excel and joining files/reports within Tableau.
- Extensive experience creating clean data for compatibility with various data types and formatting necessary for dashboard creation.
- Created various dashboards for cost reporting KPI’s used by executive level management.
Power BI - Experience reviewing and working with financial reporting from the system in an end-user capacity.
Other - Working experience with the following packages: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Infor, Workday and ADP.
- University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business
Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Accountancy - Certified Public Accountant, IFDPR (Current License in Illinois)