How Finance Teams Can Eliminate Data Errors and Automate Accounting with AI Parker Gilbert
In this episode of FP&A Tomorrow, host Paul Barnhurst sits down with Parker Gilbert, CEO and Co-founder of Numeric, to explore the transformation of accounting through smarter tools and processes. From his background in investment banking to leading finance at a startup, Parker shares the inspiration behind Numeric, a platform built specifically to simplify the financial close. Why the financial close is still so manual, how poor tooling can hinder team performance, and what it takes to modernize accounting. Parker discusses the pain points accounting teams face with existing software and explains why Numeric was designed to meet the real-world needs of growing finance teams.
Parker Gilbert is the CEO and Co-founder of Numeric, a financial close platform designed to make accounting teams faster, more accurate, and more collaborative. With a background in investment banking and hands-on experience as Head of Finance at Hearth, Parker understands both the strategic and operational challenges finance teams face. Frustrated by the limitations of traditional accounting tools, Parker set out to build Numeric, software purpose-built to simplify and streamline the month-end close.
Expect to Learn:
Why Parker and his team started Numeric to solve overlooked pain points in accounting.
How traditional tools like Excel and legacy ERP systems are failing modern accounting teams.
What it means to build software specifically for the financial close process.
Why visibility and collaboration are essential in reducing close errors.
How Numeric empowers teams to understand what’s been done, what’s left, and where issues arise.
Here are a few quotes from the episode:
“The close is this sort of well-understood pain point in accounting, but there's no purpose-built software that helps solve it.” - Parker Gilbert
“We believe the best way to build software is to partner really closely with customers.” - Parker Gilbert
“Accounting is really about trust, it’s about giving your team the confidence that everything is covered.” - Parker Gilbert
Parker delivers a powerful perspective on the role of accounting teams and the urgent need for smarter, more intuitive tools. This episode is essential listening for finance professionals, controllers, and startup leaders looking to improve their close process, enhance accuracy, and make better business decisions. If you’re tired of copy-pasting across spreadsheets and guessing what’s done, this conversation will inspire you to rethink your accounting stack.
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In Today’s Episode
[01:42] - Introduction to the Episode
[03:29] - What Makes Great FP&A?
[05:02] - The Importance of Pricing Strategy
[08:45] - Global Trends in Pricing
[10:26] - Coaching Rugby at Duke
[12:17] - Adapting to Economic Shifts
[15:20] - Challenges in Today’s Market
[21:14] - Winning Big-Name Clients
[24:32] - Unexpected Surprises in Finance
[27:13] - Transparency in Pricing
[32:31] - Why Finance & Ops Often Go Together
[36:17] - Why FP&A Must Understand the Business
[42:44] - Parker’s Time Travel Wish
Full Show Transcript
[00:01:42] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A tomorrow, where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FPA Guy, and I'll be guiding you through the evolving landscape of Faha. Each week we're joined by thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who share their insights and experiences, helping us navigate today's complexities and tomorrow's uncertainty. This week, we are thrilled to be joined by Parker Gilbert Parker, welcome to the show.
[00:02:17] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Thank you for having me, Paul.
[00:02:19] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Excited to have you. So let me give a little bit of background about Parker and then we'll jump into it. Parker is the CEO and co-founder of numeric, an AI driven accounting software for the monthly close. Before founding numeric, Parker led the finance and operations team at Hirth, joining as the company's first accounting hire right after their very first audit. Sounds scary. Directing the accounting function, he experienced firsthand the complexity and frequent inefficiency of the monthly close process, leading him to ultimately found numeric. Since the company started in 2020, they've raised over $40 million in funding from investors like IVP, Founders Fund, AVC, and more, and they've signed notable companies such as OpenAI, Dailypay and plaid as well. So numeric is hiring for roles across the company, so check them out if you're interested in joining the team. All right. How'd that background sound? Is it always weird to hear your own background? I find it is for me.
[00:03:20] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah. I don't think it will ever feel normal or natural, and that's probably a good thing.
[00:03:25] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm glad I'm not the only one. Yeah, it would feel weird if it felt normal.
[00:03:29] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah.
[00:03:29] Host: Paul Barnhurst: That's right. So let's ask you, what does great FP&A look like, according to Parker.
[00:03:34] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah. So I think to sort of expand on my background, you know, I will come at this with a certain set of experiences and sort of sizes and stages that I've seen in many ways. There's a really interesting background to come into, a sort of like the first finance hire of a startup with I mean, I had zero finance background, you know, I had taken one semester of accounting in college. I had never built a model. I had never built a budget. I didn't know how to do any GAAP accounting. So I think it was like it was one just an incredible learning experience to get to go think about sort of holistically, what is a finance function and how would I want to build it in terms of, you know, really approach. Also just awesome to work at a company and a team that's kind of let me have my stamp on, you know, finance function. It didn't have sort of a prescribed way of how they wanted to think about it. I was really fortunate that early in that role, I got to know now one of our current investors, Colin Anderson, who used to be the former CFO, who was the CFO at Palantir. And I used to just make him get a coffee with me or get lunch and just would ask him, like, what must have been such rudimentary questions like, you know, starting and thinking about growing a finance and accounting function. But it was just always so helpful to hear him think about it, because everything always came back to sort of the first principles approach, which was like, how do we help the business move forward, move faster, make better decisions, and sort of how do you think about, you know, really embedding yourself in a way that is impactful with teams and such that they want to have you in the room in conversations, thinking about the things that are going to enable them to accomplish what they want to accomplish, right.
[00:04:55] Guest: Parker Gilbert: And so, you know, a lot of work at certain times is all about return on ad spend. You know, it was getting deep into the marketing world to understand, okay, how do we spend more money on advertising? How do we move faster? How do we think about where we should stop spending more? And a finance function has such an incredible amount of data and insights across the business to help equip those types of decisions, right? Similarly with how we think about pricing products, how we think about new product launches, how we think about ramping sales reps and sort of hiring plans, right. The cool part about the finance function is you have context across the business, and it's really a question of like, how do you equip others to utilize that data in a way that is most effective? Right. And so I think I have lots of thoughts on where teams are sometimes just kind of underwhelming. You know, I think in their impact. But so much of it comes back down to like contorting the finance and accounting function to fit the questions of like, how do you make the business make better decisions and move faster, and not having a sort of prescribed set of ideas of like rigidly what it should look like?
[00:05:50] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. Something we came back to a couple times and it really stuck out to me when I heard it said really succinctly by Stu West, the former CFO of Grammarly. He said finance and I take this to be FP&A . But he used broader finance, helps the business make better, faster decisions. He's like, and I really just like that because it's just so succinct. And I never quite heard it captured that way. But I heard you, you know, say that a couple times of, you know, faster, better helping them improve the decision making. And to me, that's really what FP&A should be doing. And like you said, that can be anything that could be marketing one day, could be product the next, where you're helping in different areas of the business as much as you can.
[00:06:31] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Totally. And I think what's important is like, if you think about that as your sort of mandate, right? I think you have to think very critically about how you go meet those stakeholders where they are. Understand their language, their metrics, their the things that move the needle for them. And, you know, your ability to earn credibility and trust in that business. Stakeholder partnership is by like trying to learn as quickly as you can what makes a marketer successfully hit their goal. And it's not about saying, hey, here's your gap. You know, correct accrual based accounting. It's like, you know, okay, what is the decision you need to make this week about the marginal $100,000 you want to spend on advertising today? Like start there, you know, and back into okay, how do we think about the systems design, the data exhaust, the things that are going to equip you with that decision? You know, not coming in with a framework being like, I need this budget line for you. You know, it's trying to start with the problem first.
[00:07:21] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I agree, I still remember, you know, we had a couple businesses where we were having a lot of accounting adjustments. And you get into variance and leaders are like you got to segment this. That's why I had to, you know, work with the team on. It's like, hey, here's things that will work themselves out or have to do with accounting. We'll put those at the end or we'll quickly explain them. Let's focus on what you can actually impact and has to do with business results. I was trying to figure out, you know, how we segment those because there just have been a lot of them. And, you know, if you're not careful they can take up the whole time of the call and there's nothing they can do. Most of the time. So it's like why you're not helping the business by. Well, we have this accounting adjustment and that account. Okay. Whatever. Like tell me how you can help me.
[00:08:00] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Totally. I think one of the challenges that the CFO suite faces is like, I don't think we really have a set of grounds up sort of data systems that have really been designed for this. So you see a lot of contorting of systems, right? You see a lot of accounting team working in their ERP and their accounting systems. You then see finance teams working in their planning tool that are disjointed. And you sort of like you have this sort of ecosystem of lots of disparate systems that I think make it actually quite painful to kind of do this translation from business activities into projections and back into business activities. And I think, um, yeah, there's a lot of sort of friction and kind of fighting to, to, to get to that point where you can really be, you know, action oriented.
[00:08:37] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Correct. I mean, it's a real challenge because, you know, ERP does things in one way. Marketing looks at stuff differently. You have all your SaaS metrics or whatever metrics depending on the business. So it becomes really tough. And then if you've been around a while, you have lots of data gaps. You have data quality issues more than likely. I mean, every company does to some extent. And so then it's trying to massage it. And you get in those meetings where everybody has a different number and it's just like, okay, how can I make sense of this? So you have to be really good at helping reign that in and guide the business in a way that it can be on the same page and that the data is beneficial and that everybody can work together. So don't reign it in. It can get pretty messy in a hurry for sure.
[00:09:22] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Look, and I think, I think, I think to that exact point. I mean, in many ways, like that's what led me and our team to start numeric. You know, I think I had so much fun building a finance function. And I think I loved spending time with our department heads, you know, thinking about the future of the business, but then the amount of pain and friction that we would get into then on the data plumbing side of things is the information correct? Can we deliver it as quickly as we want? How do we do that with this little manual input and activities required? It's just hard. And it just, you know, the bigger we grew, the more complex we got, the more entities. We added the new business lines. You know, you just started to see how much system weight there was on trying to deliver. You know, the outputs, the better decisions, faster kind of question. And I think that's what really motivated us to try and focus on the accounting market and saying, cool. Like how do you think about this a layer deeper than the sort of planning tool, right. And in many ways, like I would think our almost mandate is to like tee up planning tools to go have better, faster, higher quality data so that those can be leveraged as effectively as possible.
[00:10:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yep. And we'll get a little bit more into that numeric here in a second. But I want to ask the question, something I saw on your resume that just kind of I wanted to ask about you helped coach men's rugby at Duke. You know, I'm we'd love to hear a little bit about that experience. I've always been, uh, always followed rugby more reading about it in the paper and know people who played and never got a chance to watch a lot of the sport. But I always found it interesting, so we'd love to hear a little bit about that experience.
[00:10:48] Guest: Parker Gilbert: I loved coaching rugby at Duke. I, uh, you know, for context, I grew up in London. I spent my whole childhood in England and played a lot of rugby growing up, and I think it is just such a wonderful sport, not only because of, you know, what it looks like on the pitch and sort of the but also just everything that surrounds it the culture, the camaraderie, the sort of like, you know, it has a really wonderful. Yeah, sort of like team spirit to it that I think sometimes is very lacking in like professional oriented sports. And so it was just so much fun to be a part of. Yeah, I actually so I when I was a student at Duke, I ended up coaching the team for, I think, my junior and senior years there, um, maybe as well as my sophomore year. And that was, uh, just a privilege, you know, it was great to get to coach a team in an interesting dynamic, candidly, of like, coaching a team of my peers. In many ways, these were also students. But I learned a ton, you know, it was it was like an awesome learning experience for me to sort of step into a role in which, like, I don't know, there's probably some similarities to thinking about sort of managing a company where it's like many of the people at our company are more senior and more experienced than their domains, and they're way better at what they do, you know. And it's not my job to be the best at any particular function in this business, but it's my job to hopefully help steward the team in the right direction and enable those people to be successful and the most successful they could be. So it's just awesome. It was such a great experience. It was a wonderful group of people. I think there's a lot you can learn from sport, you know, that you can take into into kind of, you know, startup world and, and building companies that that are really good, healthy lessons that in many ways I oftentimes reflect on.
[00:12:14] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Sure. Now it makes a lot of sense. Right? I mean, teamwork and coaching and all that goes into that. It translates to business. It's just you're doing it in a different way, a different area. But there's a lot of similarities, ones on the athletic field, ones in the corporate boardroom or whatever you want to call it.
[00:12:32] Guest: Parker Gilbert: I also, I also think, I think rugby too, like has a, you know, as I was mentioning around the culture, I think there's like such a great spirit which is like, you know, it is a very physical sport, you know, And and when you are playing, you know it is game on, right? And you are trying to go, you know, you want it to hurt when you tackle someone you know and you are trying to go, you know, you know, within the rules of the game, obviously sort of get every advantage and compete. But what's awesome about rugby is like one. It's like, you know, it is a highly respectful game. You do not talk back to referees. You are respectful of one another. And then when you get off the field, you know, you share time and spend time with your opponents and your team. And you know, there's sort of that really nice moment where it's like you cross the line and like, you shouldn't take things too seriously, you know? And so I think, like I think about that in the context of, you know, competing with numeric, it's like we have some wonderful competitors who we see in deals all the time, and we have a lot of respect and appreciation for what they've done and, and building and sort of defining a market that we operate in. But we should compete for every single deal. You know, it's like we should put our best foot forward and we should think critically about how we communicate as effectively as possible and sell as effectively as possible and highlight all the wonderful things that are amazing at generic. We should also take a step back and not take any of this too seriously at the end of the day as well. You know, we should be respectful and appropriate and kind. And so I think there I think there's there's a lot I think there's some things about rugby too, that's very unique and special about the sport that they do really, really well, that I hope we sort of take into into how we run numeric.
[00:13:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Love that. And I like what you said there, hey, look, we got to compete. But you can also have respect for others. You know, I uh, my undergrad was BYU and they had a really good rugby team. I'd always remember reading about them and Highland here in Utah. They had a coach that once they won 16 national titles. So I always remember reading about that in the paper growing up about, you know, just some of the rugby and had a good friend who had some good Polynesian friends, which you see a lot of them playing rugby, Samoans, Tongans.
[00:14:25] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah. I remember showing up for a USA age grade camp and, you know, it was like in my position it was me. And then, you know, 4 or 5, you know, Polynesian folks. And it was like everyone was six foot three and, you know, had 60 pounds on me. And, you know, I was there at, you know, 510 and it was just so much fun. It was such a wonderful culture and team.
[00:14:45] Host: Paul Barnhurst: You know, I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, Mormon. So I did a two year mission, and I had a companion that was Samoan, and he was about half an inch shorter than I was, but weighed 290 pounds. It beat me in a sprint. His dad was the heavyweight boxing champion of Samoa. So it gives you an idea of his size.
[00:15:03] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:04] Host: Paul Barnhurst: One night, he's like, I want to wrestle and nobody would wrestle him. And I'm like, fine, I'll wrestle him. And I'm like 130 pounds by soaking wet. At this point, he just picked me up, threw me on the ground and jumped on me. I'm like, all right, I'm out. And that was it. We never wrestled again. I was so sore. Yep.
[00:15:19] Guest: Parker Gilbert: That's hilarious.
[00:15:20] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, it was pretty funny. All right. So you talked a little bit of kind of how you founded numeric a lot of what you've seen, you know, with your first startup and wanting to fix some of that. Anything else you can kind of tell us about the founding stories? Been what, three and a half years now?
[00:15:35] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yep, yep. Been been about three and a half years. It's been the privilege of my career to get to do this. I feel very fortunate. It started with two former classmates of mine at Duke, as well as former colleagues, Andrew Beal and Anthony Alvernaz. Yeah, I think I think we very much think that there is such an exciting opportunity to, to try and redefine some of the bounds of how we think about these data systems and processes by which you sort of take all of the financial data and activities that, you know, a company generates. And how do you then most effectively, most quickly, most auditability, you know, leverage those to create your financial statements and then to use those to, again, go back to like better decisions faster. And so we think so much of this pain runs through the month end close process today. You know, it is a process and a workflow by which in many times in many companies we throw bodies at a problem. You know, we're asking people to manually compare, you know, this document to that spreadsheet. You know, we're doing it on a computer screen. We're taking screenshots of bank statements. We're preparing a new Excel file this month to capture the changes from the last Excel file. And I think there's just like there's so much there's so much value. I think you can add very quickly in this space, which is just so motivating and so exciting to feel like you get to run a product and deliver something to customers that you can make better every day, that can improve, you know, finance and accounting teams life in a really material way, as well as sort of a space where you can really principally rethink, I think, some of the foundations of, okay, what is this tech stack looks like upon which we build, you know, a lot of the downstream activities and, and insights and, and drivers that, that really make a business, you know, hopefully as effective as possible.
[00:17:13] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. You know, one of the things you mentioned earlier is, you know, helping with clothes, obviously reconciliation, managing a lot of that you said is, you know, kind of helping to make sure the data is in the right place and you really have good reconciliation for the planning systems and the software. Why did you say that? How do you think about that? Is it because, you know, a lot of what you're doing is the reconciliation part, right? Versus maybe the actual journal entries or things. So what are the key things that you think might help FP&A from what you're doing, from kind of where.
[00:17:45] Guest: Parker Gilbert: We do a lot of reconciliation work with folks. But I think about our mandate a little bit broader than that. And I think it's, you know, sort of how we build the best tools to help proactively address errors, issues, whether those are data hygiene or compliance related or otherwise. So people will use numeric to more proactively flag things like, hey, we think we missed something that should have been capitalized, or there's missing metadata on certain transactions. You know, I think you often see a lot of those processes actually happen when the FAA comes in and they come back to the accounting team and they say, hey, like, here's 20 transactions that are missing departments or classes or product codes or these need to go to that department or this account. And so I think a lot of the goal is like, how do you pull that work forward and into hopefully the current period and enable kind of better rules and monitoring and sort of anomaly detection almost right to make sure that the underlying transaction data is ready to be used by the business.
[00:18:39] Guest: Parker Gilbert: You then get into sort of the completion of it. Right? How do we make sure everyone knows what needs to be done? We do a lot more posting of journal entries now. So actually helping teams book the adjustments themselves, make sure all the adjustments are booked. Obviously that flows into the kind of, you know, auditability the reconciliations. And then we do an increasing amount of just helping teams now produce their financial statements, you know, run analysis on those, understand some of the insights and use those. And so I think I think, you know, my goal in many ways is to hopefully be the best partner product to an FP&A product. You know, and we don't want to, we have no interest or sort of in plans to go build projections or forecasts. These are complex, hard, hard software to build. And uh, but but we want to hopefully make sure that, you know, when the data is getting into that system, you know, as much of it is correct and as useful as possible.
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[00:21:00]Host: Paul Barnhurst Yeah, I think you're in the right spot. I think where you're at is probably a little less crowded right now than the planning market. And, you know, there's a whole just a different level of complexity. So it makes sense to me as one who's seen well over a hundred, uh, planning tools at this point.
[00:21:06] Guest: Parker Gilbert: So I've not seen 100 closed management products.
[00:21:10] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Nor have I, but I don't want to see that many. I'll be honest, I have seen a few though for sure. Alright, so I'm curious. You've only been around a few years. I think you just raised a series A if I remember right we did. You landed some really, you know, big names out there. Open. Ai, plaid. Brex. What has that been like? How has that experience in a young company to land, you know, some really high profile companies. What's that been like?
[00:21:37] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah, boy. I mean, so, I mean, coming into this company, I had never had a sales background. Uh, I think I made every mistake in the book as our sort of first sales rep, uh, learning and growing. And that's like, one of the fun reasons to go join a company like this in an early stage startup is, like, you just get the opportunity to, you know, try new things. And if you're learning fast enough and keeping ahead of things, you know, uh, it's just the most fun environment, I think. I think we found that, uh, our product is increasingly an excellent fit for a sort of high growth late stage to even now, public companies, because of how we've approached this problem, you know, are certainly our first sort of handful of customers. We're earlier stage companies think about like Clearbit was an early customer that got acquired by HubSpot. Heap was an early customer that got acquired. And a lot of these sort of like b, C sort of series stages where they've got a couple hundred employees. Things are getting complex. And, you know, because of our sort of intense focus on the data plumbing, on the transformation of that data, you know, we started to get a lot of interest from folks up market and increasingly sort of large enterprises.
[00:22:40] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Now, this is not a market where people are just early adopters. I think by default, you know, I think finance and accounting teams, I think the office of the CFO at large, they want to know products are ready and battle tested and can be trusted and are going to be around for the long haul. You know, everyone has been burned by implementations that have gone wrong or sideways, or they bought something and then it didn't meet their expectations. I think many folks now have been, you know, have worked with startups that didn't make the next turn, you know, and their products were acquired or shut down. And so I think so much of like getting to the next stage and selling into the next size and scale of company was has always been sort of trying to take an approach of like, how do we communicate transparently where we are as a business and let people make the most accurate decisions with the most full data about what it looks like to partner with us, figuring out the different ways that we can make people feel comfortable, you know, introducing them to similar companies that have made those decisions and are really excited about the product, you know, and have good things to say.
[00:23:34] Guest: Parker Gilbert: And yeah, trying to build a sales and marketing motion in perspective, which in many ways is all about trying to be useful, to be a great partner, to add value in different ways. And it has taken time. You know, this has not been something which just like, you know, you snap your finger and, you know, like a million sales show up, you know, the next day. It's like it takes building real relationships and building those connections and building trust. And I'm really proud of the efforts that myself and our team have put forward to sign up some incredible companies. And it is just the coolest thing to get to work with some of the most innovative and fastest growing businesses out there. And I think it just puts us in a great position to continue to think critically around how we develop the sort of next generation of product that speaks to these companies. And, you know, it's just something they hopefully can't get anywhere else?
[00:24:21] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Got it. And I was hoping to snap my fingers and get a million in sales.
[00:24:24] Guest: Parker Gilbert: But you know, so was I.
[00:24:27] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. So you're kind of going back to your first finance role. What was the maybe most surprising thing when you started in that role in finance that you weren't expecting? What was something that just kind of surprised you? You're like, oh, wait, I got to deal with this? Or why is finance doing that?
[00:24:43] Guest: Parker Gilbert: You know, maybe, maybe the sales tax liabilities that we didn't know we had accrued for, uh, for a while and had to go file for. You know, I think it's kind of like a rite of passage for a first finance person to realize that there's, uh, some sales tax pain to deal with. Uh, you know, I think, I think the, the biggest surprise was, was, you know, I showed up and had no real understanding of what the job was going to be beyond being excited to join a great team and some great people. Yeah, I was immediately told I showed up, you know, the first week of January and was told, okay, we have a hard deadline on when we need to produce audited financials for a number of state regulators and hell or high water that needs to get done. And they're showing up soon. Like, go figure it out. I had no accounting background, and that was just a kind of fascinating way to go get a crash course in learning accounting. I was doing it with the auditors in the room all the time. And so that was that was like a really awesome experience and one that certainly I did not expect coming in was was going and going through a process of building out policies and schedules and, and figuring out and even just producing GAAP financial statements, which, you know, I did not realize how difficult that would be, you know. Uh, so, um, was getting to go through that process, uh, you know, with, without a lot of context and learning and kind of growing in that, element and kind of thinking through how that then sort of teed up how we thought about the business.
[00:26:00] Guest: Parker Gilbert: So that was just kind of candidly, a left field thing that I did not know, even in the interview process, was going to be part of part of the job, was doing nearly as much accounting as I ended up doing. And I think I look back and I wouldn't have it any other way. You know, I think I think, you know, obviously. So it is so fundamental to how we understand our business is understanding, you know, how things move through the financial statements. How do you understand them at the lowest level? And then think about how that rolls up. And I do think I think while the accounting profession and sort of day to day jobs are going to be really different, you know, as we think about the coming years, I think having that deep understanding of accounting itself and is just so fundamental to being excellent at any role in the CFO suite, whether it's on an accounting team, on a finance team, on a strategic finance team, doing corp dev, right. It's like all of these things, you know, if you don't principally understand the fundamentals of accounting, you are at a serious disadvantage. And to being able to be the best at your job that you could be.
[00:26:55] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. I remember we had someone in a role that didn't have accounting experience at all, had come into a planning role, and it took a couple of years for them to really understand. There's times where things got booked wrong. It's like, oh, this is how the revenue works versus the sales and making sure you time it right. And all those challenges. So it is important and you're always going to have to learn some things because every business has its nuance. But the better you understand accounting the financial statements, the better. It helps you do your job and get the forecasting and the planning right and have conversations around what the options are, because sometimes, you know there are options around how you recognize revenue and what that mean for the business. It's not always black and white. There's definitely some gray areas where you need to pick a method and, you know, move forward. And if you don't understand it at all, it makes it really hard to add any, anything of value to that conversation.
[00:27:48] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah. And it's like you can get so much leverage out of how you set up these systems, right? And how you think about the data flows and what you're pulling and how you're structuring the information. And so much of that, again, is in order to go facilitate the planning and the analysis work. But if you don't understand the systems and how those decisions you can make and, and those trade offs like you end up with, with a less actionable data set to go make decisions on.
[00:28:11] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Here first data flows matter data. So I'm curious what advice you would offer to someone if they're considering joining a company as the first finance hire. What advice would you give them?
[00:28:24] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah. Great question. I have a lot of opinions about this. I think I'm going to come back to the point I made earlier. One, I think with any role where you're coming in at the first of a function, number one is to build momentum. You know, in many ways I actually don't think it's critically important what you are doing, but those first days and weeks are so important to setting yourself up as someone in the business, as a key member and a stakeholder to your peers. Like there is no alternative for just showing people you are going to be proactive. You're going to go help them do their jobs better. You're going to go be a resource for them. And so I would actually even almost throw out like, what are the first things you tackle? Like who cares? You know. But the goal should be like you got to look back and, you know, weeks not not months and have people thinking of you as someone who is supporting them, working closely with them, moving the needle and not sort of sitting and waiting around, you know, to go be asked of things. Right? Like the finance function needs to be a proactive function and a proactive leader and going out and looking for things to do. You know, I think a lot of people have some expectations of what it looks like to work with the finance function, which are more limited than they should be.
[00:29:33] Guest: Parker Gilbert: And so it's on you to kind of push for, for okay, how can I go help the product team and the marketing team and the sales team as opposed to showing up and saying, okay, who do people want from me? Two I think, is then deeply understanding of the business, right. It's like, you know, the goal of the finance function is to help the business do a better job. And you can't do that if you don't understand the drivers of the business. If you don't understand what our goals are, how are we trying to get there? What are the key constraints? What are the things that the CEO is obsessed over and why? Right. And how do you sort of take those big chunky things which need to be true to hit our goals for this year and next year, you know, and start with that. And I think sometimes you see there's sort of like a lack of context that people have, either because of how business is set up or just because of how they think about their role. That is, again, also detrimental to their ability to prioritize effectively and think critically about, okay, what should we prioritize, right. Like numeric for instance. Like we care so much about hiring today.
[00:30:28] Guest: Parker Gilbert: So much of the job is how do we bring on, you know, another 20, 30, 40 incredible people who can help us grow into the business that we want to be someone coming in in a finance role. Like, are they going to be responsible for all the recruiting? No. You know, but is it really important that they understand? Okay, how do they think about contributing to the various places in which we can get more leverage? How do we think critically about whether we should hire another recruiter? How do we think about, you know, are there places we should just be more considerate about working with different agencies or different places? Right. It's like go, go to where the go to where the leverage can be had. And uh, and do it in the sort of language of those business partners. Right. You know, don't try and force the marketers to think about something in a certain way. Think about it the way the marketers think about it. You know, don't force the sales team to, you know, the sales commissions ramp period structures in a certain way. Understand why they think about it in a certain way? Learn the language of the stakeholders and morph the finance function to it. Those are a couple of thoughts that if I were joining day one, I would be really preoccupied with.
[00:31:24] Host: Paul Barnhurst: A lot of great advice there. I mean, if I just kind of boil that down, it's first and foremost, be proactive, get out, talk to your business partners and help them learn what their pain points are. Address them. Number two, you said learn the business. Really come to understand the business. Understand the strategic, what people need, how the business works. And then that kind of third thing that you seem to emphasize in there is really speaking the business's language, making sure you're talking to them in a way that you can have conversations that are meaningful, whether it's around sales commissions or revenue versus, well, here's what GAAP says. What does that mean to me? Like why is that important? 100% makes a lot of sense. So the other thing I want to talk about is it's very common in smaller companies. I think we're even seeing it sometimes in midsize. You've seen a lot more CFOs also become CEOs nowadays. Often those roles are together. I've seen a lot of first finance hires. Obviously, early hires are doing a lot of everything, especially, you know, if you're one of those first five, ten people, it's almost like, hey, here's your title, here's what you really do. In some ways. But talk about why you think finance and operations are often together. I know you ran some of both, especially in an early stage company. Why does that seem like a common fit?
[00:32:41] Guest: Parker Gilbert: It's a good question. You know, I think one I think, you know, the sort of COO role is one that, like, is very unique to every business. There's like, I don't think there's a right or wrong way to sort of structure that role. You see CEOs with no direct reports. You see some CEOs with every direct report, you know. Yeah. So a lot of that probably is like, you know, what is that sort of partnership with, you know, the other execs on the team. And where are their strengths and skill sets and where can you go, you know, kind of fill in those gaps. And right, in many ways, it's like if you think about sort of, you know, early to mid stage, you know, tech companies in the world, I know it's like you often see very technical founding teams. You know, you see folks where they really want to go, you know, spend as much of their time in the product with the engineering team, right. And so you're looking for folks who can kind of be that foil and that sort of partner who can have strengths in owning and sort of supporting the other functions of the business. And so, so I don't think there's a, I think the many times that, sort of that, that first finance hire and that leader, oftentimes when they're doing great work is, is very entrepreneurial themselves, you know, it is someone who has a lot of that DNA of, again, seeking out the problems and just obsessing over how do you build the best company possible and not limiting themselves to one place but getting their tentacles everywhere.
[00:33:54] Guest: Parker Gilbert: And so I think there's I think it makes a lot of sense to me intuitively that those roles oftentimes get bigger and bigger because they if you prove out that you can be a successful sort of financial business partner to folks, I think there's oftentimes very little reason to believe that you can't expand upon that relationship as well and and be a great business partner to those folks in other ways as well. But generally, I would sort of just push a perspective at large with, with early stage businesses, which is I mean, even at numeric, we have someone else on our team who joined and he joined as our sort of first finance hire. You know, like he joined in November. And, you know, we made a decision in January that we were actually going to completely change his role. And he's now running our solutions team. And so he's running, you know, sales engineering onboardings and training. He's running, you know, customer success. And that was less because there's maybe a natural tie between finance and, you know, post-sale work and more of just like when you get people who are really entrepreneurial, who are really in for driving a business forward and kind of just have the sort of qualities that really make a huge difference quickly. You're really lucky to work with those folks, you know, and you want to make sure those people are spending the time on the things that are going to make the biggest difference to the business at the end of the day.
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[00:36:06] Host: Paul Barnhurst: It makes a lot of sense. So I want to ask one more question. Then we're going to move into what I call the FP&A section, where I have some standard questions we ask guests. So understanding operations, how does that make you better at FP&A from your experience? Why is that important that FP&A understand not just the business but the operations of the business?
[00:36:26] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah, I think your ability to do any FP&A work entirely hinges, again, back on the understanding of the business at large, your ability to model it, to project it, to forecast it to under the constraints. You know, it's oftentimes very easy to be overly academic about modeling and miss the real world constraints of the fact that it's way easier to hire one sales rep a month than a hundred a month. You know, if you don't understand the sort of practical realities of recruiting times and ramping and whatever the sort of like pieces are, you're never going to be accurately as nuanced as you would like to reflect, you know, the actual constraints on the business, you know. And so I think, I think that that ability to go deeply in a very practical sense, okay, what's going on and is foundational to to being an excellent, you know, FP&A partner to the business.
[00:37:18] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Makes a lot of sense. I like how you, particularly in operations, focused on constraints, because I think anyone who's worked in FP&A long enough has seen those plans where it's like, how did this get approved? It's not possible to hire that many people or not possible to implement this many products in that time, you know, we assumed a sales number that the rest of the business can't physically support or ramp quick enough to support.
[00:37:40] Guest: Parker Gilbert: And that's been something where it's like, you know, I think I did some great work in my last role, but the amount of time I've now spent with our engineers, with our product team, I mean, I have so much of a better nuanced perspective of how to think about planning products, releases, timing, you know, constraints, like all those pieces. Like, I look at my work in my last role and there was a big gap there that I didn't do as well as I could have. And, uh, it's been, you know, if I were to move into a, you know, a sort of strategic finance world, I would be so much better equipped. You know, thanks to, you know, just getting in with the various teams and more deeply understanding, you know, the real world challenges and constraints on how to grow.
[00:38:18] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I totally agree with you. Having run my own business, I'm like, I'd be better at FP&A today, even though I'm not running a team. It's not of that size or scale, but even just running my own business, having to do the sales in the marketing and seeing all that, it's very different than just reading about it and hearing somebody talk about it and maybe seeing it for a couple hours, but not actually doing it when you're like, oh, that's why that makes sense, or that's why that's a bad idea. You really gain a much deeper appreciation when you have to be more hands on.
[00:38:48] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Totally completely agree.
[00:38:50] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. So a couple of standard questions we have here. First one, what do you see as the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals need to master?
[00:38:57] Guest: Parker Gilbert: I think I think it would be between Excel and SQL. Today realistically it's one of those two if not both of them. It's going to depend a little bit on the business, the size, the stage. But you need to be able to take your thoughts and articulate those in the financials at the end of the day.
[00:39:14] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I like it. No, we definitely get spreadsheets a lot. I've heard, you know, people mention the importance of SQL. It helped me a lot in my career because I did SQL report writing before I joined FP&A , and it was incredibly valuable. So I can understand both of those. What about soft skills?
[00:39:28] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Soft skill? Great question. Probably underrated potentially for for some teams. And folks, what is the most important soft skill for someone in FP&A ? You have to work across such a breadth of different people. You know, it's like you're the way that your sales leader works is probably very different than the way your engineering counterparty works, like, you know, and you don't have a choice. You don't get to choose who you work with and who you don't work with. Right. You are serving a broad set of people across a business. And so, you know, your ability to You communicate effectively with different people, different priorities, different stages in their careers. Is is is paramount for success?
[00:40:09] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. Make makes a lot of sense. That ability to work with people definitely helps. Being able to collaborate and understand you know, the communication, emotional intelligence, all that comes with managing different people of all different roles, different titles, different parts of the business. Yeah, they're they're going to be you're going to deal with those from super detail to just give me the big picture or I hate working with finance. What do I have to do and get out of my way to get a little bit of everything? At least I have.
[00:40:36] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Totally. Yeah.
[00:40:37] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. What do you see as the biggest opportunity for FP professionals moving forward? You know, there's been a lot of change going on and there continues to be a lot I you know Covid all these changes. So what do you see as that big opportunity for FP&A.
[00:40:51] Guest: Parker Gilbert: I think there is such an opportunity for, I think, a trend that is continuing to take place and I hope continues to take place, which is this, this push of how do you think about finance as a real business driver for the business? What do you think about it? Someone who is propelling the business forward, how do you not think about it as a function that is saying, no, you know, and just shutting things down and penny pinching, right. It's all about, you know, I think what has been a good forward evolution of the function at large into, uh, being, uh, being really sort of, you know, a value creator and driver for teams. And so I think there's such an opportunity for people to think about finance and their roles in operationally impactful, potentially broader ways than maybe they think about it. And it was something in my last role, which I think I kind of benefited from not having context. It's like I showed up and didn't have a sense of like, where should the line be around my role? Um, and I look back and I think that was awesome. I think that was like such a good thing, because I didn't show up and sort of feel like there were natural constraints of where my role should end. And I would push people to, to, to continue to, to try and push on that, you know, you should be seen as someone who people want to have in the room when they're working on a hard problem. And if you're not and you don't feel that way in your role or on your team, you should be thinking critically around what it take to do that?
[00:42:04] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Agreed. You know, you need to be in the room when those important decisions are made and be that benefit to the business. I agree. Lots of opportunities to continue to create value. All right. Next section is to get to know you section. So we have a couple personal kind of fun questions to get to know you a little bit. Favorite hobby or passion. What are you doing when you're not building a startup?
[00:42:23] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah. Well, the.
[00:42:24] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Hobby recently has been, uh, cycling. You know, living in in SF, uh, it is about the best place, one of the best places in the world to get on a bike. And my partner just keeps kicking my butt uphills, and, uh, I'm trying to get in shape and get invited to more, more cycling rides on the weekends.
[00:42:42] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Nice. So I like it. If you could be born at any other time in history, when would you be born and why?
[00:42:51] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Can you pick the future or only in the past?
[00:42:54] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Um, I'll let you pick the future. Sure.
[00:42:57] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Oh, I think yeah, I think, uh, I think I'm so curious about how the world will look in, you know, let's call it like 100, 200 years. Maybe that's not forward looking enough, but, man, it just feels like the rate of progress today in terms of the curve of like, changes to this, to the world, you know, in terms of how we live, how we work, just even the sort of like precipice it feels like of, you know, robotics and the fact that we could have androids working for us in the short term. Like, I just feel like it is we sort of have this really interesting moment where we're starting to see glimpses of what a very different future could look like than I think any of us imagined even five years ago. And so, so I would probably push the forward button and want to see what what do things look like.
[00:43:38] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And I'm going to send you a DVD called The Jetsons. Should give you a good idea.
[00:43:43] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Right, right. I feel like I feel like myself, as many folks are just, like, spending a lot more time wondering about what the world is going to look like.
[00:43:50] Host: Paul Barnhurst: It's crazy. The rate of change we've seen the last few years and what we're talking about now, and it'll be fascinating to watch. So I'm with you. It would be fascinating to fast forward 100 years and see what the world is like, how different it is, what the homes are like. Do we have robots doing everything? How much are we doing? The economy, so many things. All right. So this is a fun one. I'm curious to see how you answer this. These are some new questions I haven't asked before, so we'll see how this one goes. What's one thing you believed for way too long before finding out it wasn't true?
[00:44:26] Guest: Parker Gilbert: What's one thing I believed way too long before finding out it wasn't true? Great question. I think, I think one of the things which I've had to learn as part of this, this process of building a company, is, I think, you know, I think myself and my co-founders took a very analytical approach to a lot of questions, and I think it's probably not uncommon for folks who come from a finance or engineering background where, you know, I think we really wanted to meticulously break things down, be very structured about our thinking. And in some ways, I look back and I think we trusted our instincts like too little in many circumstances. And so something which I have found to come to believe a lot more and to just get a lot more comfortable with is, you know, when you have a gut instinct about something, you know, moving more quickly than not, oftentimes to act upon it. And I think that's something, you know, in all walks of life, that has been something that I've learned, I've learned is I think oftentimes we can kind of hear the voice in our head and not act upon it as opposed to, you know, going with your gut. So I would go sort of, you know, kind of following your gut instincts many times is actually maybe more valuable than, than we give it credit for.
[00:45:29] Host: Paul Barnhurst: But I thought it was, you know, in God We trust for all else, bring data. I know, you see, there's definitely something to be said for trusting your gut and finding that right balance, I appreciate that. Alright, lastly get to know you question. Then we'll wrap up here. If you had to choose one condiment to put on all your food for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
[00:45:51] Guest: Parker Gilbert: I think it'd probably have to be ketchup. I like ketchup, you know. Who are we kidding? It's it's it's the condiment of condiments at the end of the day. You know, probably ketchup. Although there are plenty of places that obviously come to mind that would probably be unpleasant.
[00:46:04] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. Hence the question, would there be like, oh, that's great there. Oh, do I have to do that? All right. So if you could offer one final piece of advice, anything you haven't said so far about being a better business partner for FP&A . Any last parts of advice you could offer?
[00:46:23] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Push back more. Push back on. Why can't we go faster? Why can't we grow faster? What do we need to do to change? You know some of our assumptions. You know, I think so much of working in a finance function or just generally in a high growth business is pushing on the question of, okay, well, how do we double that? How do we triple it? And I think oftentimes getting there's no substitute for getting in a room and just asking almost unreasonable questions. That causes you to rethink some of your assumptions about how you're growing the business. So I would push harder on, you know, if your goal is to, you know, grow to, you know, X million run rate, you know, in nine months time you should be pushing on. The question is, well, what would we do differently if that time frame was three months?
[00:47:05] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I like that. So basically being willing to push the business and ask those tough questions to help move us forward.
[00:47:11] Guest: Parker Gilbert: That sometimes feels ludicrous or impossible. And it's okay if they are, but sometimes you don't spend enough time asking the question, which is like, okay, well, why does that feel impossible? And would you make different decisions if you had to do it, you know, faster.
[00:47:21] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. So last question. If someone wants to learn more about you or get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that?
[00:47:27] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Yeah, the people should always feel free to reach out to me at Parker, at numeric, IO or our team. You can find out more information online at numeric IO. We are hiring for a whole host of roles across, I think, every function today, and have plans to at least double the team in 2025. So we really love what we're building and think we have a wonderful group of people to tackle some really big, thorny problems. And if you're interested in joining or learning more about the business or the product you know, please do reach out.
[00:47:53] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Great. Thank you. Parker, I appreciate that. And if this podcasting and this whole influencer thing or whatever I call it doesn't work out, I might just give you a call.
[00:48:01] Guest: Parker Gilbert: Awesome. Sounds like a plan.
[00:48:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. Thanks. Thanks for listening to FP&A tomorrow. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating and a review on your podcast platform of choice. This allows us to continue to bring you great guests from around the globe. As a reminder, you can earn CPE credit by going to earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app, taking a short quiz, and getting your CPE certificate to earn continuing education credits for the FPAC certification. Take the quiz on earmark and contact me the show host for further details.