Team: Finance
Mission: Managing finances to facilitate ecosio's continued growth
My role is Head of Finance. Basically, most of the topics concerning figures and money end up in my department! Thankfully I currently have two great people in my team to help – Raffaela, who handles accounting, and Anastasiia, who deals with controlling.
Well, what’s great about ecosio and my job is that there’s no typical week to be honest. From month to month priorities change. For example, in the third quarter my focus is largely on the budgets for the upcoming year, while at the end of the year my focus is more on closing the yearly accounts and chasing down any open issues.
On a day-to-day level too, my schedule often changes. Thankfully ecosio very much supports flexible working, so it’s easy to arrange work around personal commitments.
At the moment I work mainly from home. As I joined during the pandemic this was initially the only option, so I quickly got used to it. As I live in Vienna, I also have the possibility to work from the office, which I am trying to do more as it’s great to see people face to face… particularly those I don’t see very often.
What I really enjoy is thinking out of the box. In most companies processes are rigid and there’s not much room for innovation. At ecosio, however, there was no Finance department when I started. As a result, we didn’t have internal accounting, consolidation software, or a good procurement system. Introducing new systems and optimising processes has been very rewarding.
What is your next big challenge?
We recently implemented internal accounting for Austria, so the next big step for us is to implement internal accounting for Germany. Another big interdepartmental project at the moment concerns data pool analytics tools. The aim is to make detailed financial information accessible so that people can make data-based decisions moving forward.
The biggest benefit for me is that people are really receptive to new ideas. If an idea is good and it helps the company pursue common goals, you’ll get all the resources you need to implement the action plan you set up. You just have to present your idea, explain how you think it would help the company and come up with a plan of action. This attitude is something that is pretty rare in many businesses in my experience. Often people actively resist change and processes stagnate over time. At ecosio it’s the complete opposite! Processes are constantly being honed and people are always questioning the status quo.
I definitely feel like I’ve learned a lot since being here, yes. I was working in a different industry before, and EDI was a completely new subject for me. Plus building a department from scratch has been very enlightening. I’m sure I’ll continue to grow along with the company as there are always new challenges to be overcome!
