Lucia Dubna, Financial Manager
Numbers reveal a lot about company's life
You took over the Financial Manager position just throughout the peak of the crisis. Moreover, at the same, the time the company was completing a takeover of financial agenda from an accounting company. What was the complex crisis-streaked cleanup like?
The takeover process was up and running, it was necessary to finish up a number of details. There is always room for improvement, since people realised that they are, indeed, interested in seeing the outcomes of their work from a different perspective - the perspective of numbers. And that is very positive. Because they can see their accomplishments and failures translated into money.
As to the crisis - the measures that the company's management took during this time came to fruition, although they were not popular and did not go down easily. But without them we might not have been able to say that last year was a business success.
As a relatively new member of company management, what did numbers reveal to you about the company's life to date? What will your financial perspective add to the company's twentieth birthday?
When I saw the company's business results for the first time, I thought that it may almost not be possible for one company to have such positive results for such a long period of time. Of course the company, as any other company, went through its life cycle, but at the end of the day it never had problems, always represented stability and was a reliable business partner. Such results are not automatic and they don't come around by themselves. There is a great chunk of good, professional and efficient work of those, who contributed to the fact that the company is now celebrating its twentieth birthday. Of this numbers give a very clear evidence.
You joined an IT company, coming from the automotive industry, a predominantly production sector. What are the main differences in the financial work between these two sectors?Is there anything that surprised you?
The bottom line of financial work stays the same, because it is always numbers that show whether a company effective or not. The basic difference, however, is that while in an industrial company one of the most important inputs is goods or machinery, which you are able to replace to a certain extent, in an IT company it is different. People are the key to success and the basic input, which requires a different approach to understanding numbers. Instead of the numbers it is necessary to imagine people, whose added value is not measurable against a tangible input, since people are able to achive whatever they set out to achieve.