Tag: Finance

My day started with another meeting. This time Saavan and I went to a meeting with Lisa Vulinec. In the meeting, Lisa met with people in HR and others in Finance. The meeting was centered around something 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. John was meeting with one of his colleagues in Mckinney Texas over Skype. 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, Saavan and I 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 this, another summer intern, Jaime, came in and discussed what she has been working on. Jaime has been working on organizing data in software called SAGA that they are going to use to train employees on how to use the new finance system. She has been working to make the online classes and help people acclimate to the changes.

After our morning full of meetings, it was time for lunch! We had lunch with 2 of the interns–Caroline, and Luke Wilson (a CA alum). Caroline goes to Wake Forest and Luke goes to UNC. We got to talk to them about a variety of things. Everything from what life is like in college, to how they’ve enjoyed working at SAS so far.  But as lunch came to a close, it was time for our last two hours in the finance division, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about finance so far, its that they have a lot of meetings! Saavan and 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 Vulinedec 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.

I have learned a lot about finance in the past 3 days. Tomorrow, I will be working with the group of CA SAS interns on an app called Gather IQ, and after that, we will begin our shadowing in the Business Operations Department of SAS.

My second day at SAS started out with something very common in the corporate world– a staff meeting. Saavan and I sat in on the staff meeting of Lisa Vulinec. In the meeting sat Lisa’s team of around 6 employees and 4 interns. During the meeting, the team recapped a trip a few of them had been on to Vienna last week and then began to discuss various projects they are currently working on. The biggest project the team is working on right now is unifying SAS finance across the world into one efficient and effective system. They call this goal “One Finance. One SAS”. Interestingly, there are SAS offices across 60 countries around the world. Which means that the team at the Cary HQ is currently working to consolidate and unify all the finance people in SAS offices across the world. After the meeting, we were able to talk with Jim O’Brien and Heather who spoke to us about the way SAS consolidates all of their expense reports into an efficient system. They also talked to us about the technology used in finance today including a SAS designed financial software called FM (financial management). They also told us about the many different divisions under finance.

After that, it was time for lunch. We went to lunch in the SAS cafeteria with 4 college summer interns. 3 of them go to NC State while one of them goes to UNC. They began their internships in mid-May and will be working in finance the entire summer. We talked to them about a variety of topics, everything from what college is like, to what made them decide to major in finance. It was great to talk to them about their experiences especially because in only 4 years I will be where they are, having already selected a major in college, and almost ready to enter the workforce. After lunch, we got to learn more about the Tax and Treasury department in SAS. I talked to two Public accountants who work in the international tax field– Meg Deal and Adam Neal. They talked to me about the variety of things they do, including helping SAS employees all over the world file their tax returns and making sure SAS complies with all federal tax regulations. Meg and Adam also shared with me what lead them to be interested in accounting, and why they enjoy their jobs.

Finally, to close out the day, we met two more interns. We then had a round table discussion with the 2 interns and one of the interns we had met earlier at lunch. Mostly the discussion centered around college, and what lead them to decide to go into accounting and finance. Overall, it was a very informative day and I enjoyed learning more about finance at SAS.