We started the day with another meeting with Lisa Vulinec. In the meeting, Lisa met with people in HR and others in Finance. In the meeting they talked about something that is called headcount. Headcount is an area that overlaps HR and Finance. Headcount is basically determining how many people SAS employs and pays at any given time. Headcount is critical to finance because a company must know the number of people they are paying in order to properly account for their expenses as well as predict their expenses in the future. They showed us the software they use to count the number of people each manager is hiring in order to keep track of their incoming or outgoing employees and the expenses associated with them. They use a software called Workday to account for this. After this, we headed to the office of John Wilson. During the meeting, John and his colleague discussed the changes that are happening in the finance division and steps they are working on to make sure these changes go over smoothly. After sitting in on this meeting, we headed over to another meeting this time with Ashley Gatewood our original host. Ashley was meeting with Caroline, one of the summer interns. The finance division is switching over the software they use to process numbers and data. Ashley and Caroline discussed this during the meeting. They went over a powerpoint Caroline had been working on that simplifies how the changes are going to affect people throughout SAS.
After our morning, new went to have lunch. We had lunch with two interns Caroline and Luke Wilson. Luke is a cary academy alum and Caroline goes to Wake Forest. We got to talk to them about a variety of things from college to our time at sas. After lunch, it was time for our last two hours in the finance division. I sat in on another hour meeting during which people on Ashley’s team discussed training for SAS employees all over the world to help them become better acclimated to the new systems they’re planning to implement. Later, we spent our last hour in finance with two members of the Global Reporting and Analysis team, Lisa Vulinec and Alex Harrill. Lisa and Alex talked to us about what got them interested in finance and their past experiences in the workforce and college. They gave us some tips on what to do in college and which major to pick. It was amazing to see how the finance department worked and was happy to have the chance to see it first person.