Karen Pool

• Prepare and analyze daily cash investments, forecasts and cash projections for daily liquidity/investment requirements.
• Monthly bank statement analysis and management of products and services.
• Implemented weekly cash reconciliation processes and improved AP subledger reporting as a result.
• Banking relationship management and account oversight to keep information current on signers, products and system updates.
• Planned and executed weekly payment plans to bring our portfolio company’s AP aging’s current and build better relationships with suppliers.
• Built better controls around vendor management and correspondence through daily, weekly and monthly check lists to ensure all processes were completed per company standards.
• Managed team of 4 in accounts payable and provided training and structure to group and reduced backlog of invoices from 6 weeks behind in entry to 2 days from receipt of material.
• Grew team to shared services group of 12 individuals over whole portfolio company.
• Lead accounts payable testing and implementation of new ERP and cut over from old system.
• Implemented productivity benchmarks across all entities in company portfolio to maximize accuracy in financials.
• Worked with purchasing team to create a location of “barge” and “rail” to allow for receiving of owned inventory on river and rail transit, which reduced delays in paying invoices from non-receipt of inventory at warehouse.
• Implemented Jira program for invoice tracking to create KPI’s and SLA’s for AP team to be accountable and aid in their oversight of overseas resources the team used.
• Created weekly and monthly ABL’s for borrowing base compliance to determine weekly credit availability.
• Provide AdHoc analysis on inventory, cash, unvouchered receipts in order to effectively manage cash and agings.
• Maintained frequent interaction with senior management to measure goal achievement and determine areas of improvement.
• Presented forecasting and financial reports to corporate executives and clients

• Prepare and analyze daily cash investments, forecasts and cash projections for daily liquidity/investment requirements.
• Provide reconciliation and explanation for variances in month to date and year over year analysis of cash flows.
• Perform monthly euro hedging and ad hoc FX spot requests.
• Analyzed 12 month rolling budget projections across 25 divisions.
• Processed estimated market valuation for private placement investments and prepared yearly private placement interest disbursement.
• Monthly bank statement analysis and management of products and services.
• Advised on long term capital funding needs based on cash flow available and projections of future infusions of cash.
• Research and resolve reconciliation variances in financial statements.
• Developed more accurate cash in transition process that brought accuracy of budget to 91%.
• Prepare, consolidate and analyze annual interest budget.
• Banking relationship management and account oversight to keep information current on signers, products and system updates.
• Opened and maintained divisional bank accounts and coordinated set-up of automatic posting logic and clearing.
• Develop robotic process automation to create efficiencies to streamline repetitive human processing.
• Data scientist and business intelligence pilot team member which helped develop new software for use within company ensuring that data warehouse was accurate and sustainable as company grows.
• Created process documentation to map databases created with Alteryx and Tableau.

Accomplishments

• Planned, presented and transitioned treasury shared services restructure which centralized all daily bank reconciliations from divisional responsibility to corporate control.
• Through use of cutting edge technology available on market, store cash reconciliation process was taken from 5 hour process per division daily, to 30 minute process for reconciliation per division per day.
• This provided significant cost and time savings (from 462.5 hours to 200 hours/32 people to 7) and increased accuracy and productivity.
• From proposal to pilot, this restructure took 1 year for 25 divisions.
• Designed implementation as the SME for transition from check to ACH payments which lead to implementation of auto reconciliation of ACH payment transactions and a cost savings of $250,000 per year.
• Guided development to connect proper NACHA required files from bank to Aldi’s proprietary data transfer system.
• Created corporate and divisional level reporting using Alteryx and Tableau (interactive data visualization) with visibility into cash loss/gains and executive level overview of daily activity.

• Responsibilities include capital requirements, U.S
• Canadian debt covenant compliance (monthly, quarterly, yearly), banking relationships, cash flow projections, U.S
• And Canadian borrowing strategies, and insurance / risk management
• Bank account management/ opening/closing accounts with large corporate banks and small community banks to service local bookstores
• Streamlining and managing third party provider of BAI transmission data, accumulated savings of $2,025 a month by removing closed stores and accounts from work list
• Bank Fee Analysis-upload and analyze bank fees from 13 relationship banks and negotiate pricing based on Hecht Blue Book and other relationship bank service fees, resulting in decreased fees of $1,800 a month
• Improved visibility into 3rd party software for reconciliation by unlocking access to online banking for stores and providing that information for login to vendor
• This allowed cash accounting to bring current several small store accounts previously unreconciled for 10 months and lowered risk of exposure
• Organized yearly insurance renewal for casualty, auto, cargo, EPL, cyber and workers compensation insurance
• Also handled filing claims, monthly headcount file update and data collection for any insurance claims
• Account opening/closing/maintenance through our key bank relationships and developing community bank relationships in over 100 domestic banks with over 1,200 accounts
• Shareholder administration on a daily basis as determined by the movements of shareholders in the company
• Including: monthly reconciliation, correspondence, share price valuation, exercises and redemptions and quarterly dividend process
• Canadian concentration bank migration to realign store accounts with our credit facility bank holders
• Daily processing of domestic and international wires, ACH, drafts and FX contracts
• Process improvements of the cash management files from an eight hour process to an hour using formulas and consolidation of information
• Consolidated small regional banking in order to improve the speed to open/close accounts and garnered a savings of $10,000 a year
• Managed the review of all department procedures and updated the information and created new procedures as needed
• Completed a migration of 2 acquisitions to our banking platform and implemented our AP and AR processes remotely
• Set up ACH payment, positive pay and all testing of the banking services while moving the business units into our ERP.
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• Instituted a global bank management system of 145 bank accounts in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia/Pacific to 68 key accounts in 21 countries thus creating a cost savings of $80,000 a year in fees
• Prepared debt compliance and commercial revolvers for $52 million borrowing base
• Supported the centralized cash pooling for eight countries with two currencies and a daily balance of $20 million
• Developed regulatory filing and internal procedures for FBAR reporting
• Processed the regulatory compliance documentation for “Know Your customer” requirements for 68 global accounts
• Monitored FX exposure for 625 currency pairs through trading and intercompany lending resulting in a savings of $35,000 per year
• Invested over $200 million dollars globally in nine currencies and managed the liquidity based on capital needs of the business
• Implemented two global corporate card programs and monitored the administration and policy audit for 250 cardholders in 18 countries and generated a rebate averaging $50,000 per year
• Audited and maintained vendor database of 3,400 vendors in accordance with internal compliance and created a paperless workflow and warehouse system for all global vendors
• Applied cash receipts for US and European bank accounts with volumes averaging $1.5 million daily in eight different currencies
• Analyzed the quarterly cash positioning and forecasting for the executives and board members and created a dashboard of high level analytics for cash and investment by region and currency for review
• Implementation and company training of a treasury workstation (GTreasury) and the creation of procedures
• Implemented the electronic funds transfer system to seamlessly extract data from ERP (PeopleSoft and Microsoft Dynamics GP) to the workstation for all worldwide accounts on JPMorgan and Bank of America
• Migrated vendor banking to be SEPA compliant which resulted in account analysis fee savings
• Supported Internal Audit with the Logical Access and Change Management process and remodeled the process for Logical Access
• Participated in the design and set-up of a new ERP system for finance, purchasing and sales teams.