Mikola is Finance Business Partner at Merlin Entertainments Merlin – offering some of the most popular attractions in the world including LEGOLAND Resorts, Thorpe Park and Alton Towers. Merlin welcomes more than 62 million guests annually to its diverse global estate in over 20 countries. Before Merlin, Mikola spent several years as a finance director at a fast-growing law firm, where the business tripled in size in just a few years.

In this episode:

• Finance in a law firm - getting from technical finance to business partnering
• Reducing risk as the Ukraine war started
• The business of Merlin Entertainment - from forecasting to cost control
• Working with procurement on validation of costs
• key metrics including attendance, guest spends and promotion
• The power of business partnering: consistency, curiosity and understanding your business

Adam Hibbs has pretty non-linear paths into finance:New Zealand telecom regulator, OfCom, Vodafone, Cable & Wireless, UK Ministry of Defense, and now Global Director of Commercial Strategy at AICPA & CIMA. Financial modeling, commercial contracts, cloud infrastructure, and leadership across blue-chip organizations was preparation for building Josie, that is AICPA & CIMA's generative AI tool for accounting and auditing.

In this episode:

• What makes Josie genuinely different from ChatGPT or Claude for technical accounting work
• Curated dataset of 40,000 pieces of proprietary IP, real-time updates to FASB, PCAOB, and auditing standards
• Josie ($550 per subscriber) named after Josiah Wedgwood and a new form of cost accounting
• CGMA vs CPA
• Where AI and finance intersect in the next 12-24 months

Emily Feinstone is an accounting manager at Eventus Advisory Group and unusually tech-forward in how she works. Emily spends her days building better processes, automating repetitive finance workflows, and making high volume operational data usable. And instead of opting for a traditional CPA first route after 20 years of experience, she is pursuing a degree in data science: “ I want to be the one that teaches the AI and not the one that is replaced by AI. I want to be the one that knows how to use it the best to my advantage.”

Emily also talks about accounting vs FP&A: You don't even see overhead. It's allocated…but you don't know that it took me two, two and a half hours to prepare that entry and another two hours to key it in.”

In this episode:

• Blurring of lines between data analysts and accountants
• The future of the accounting profession in an AI era
• Transforming an Excel based invoice and commission process
• Keeping raceability and controls + automation
• Why I wont trust AI to do my accounting journal entries