The systems and the stories behind them.

There was nothing in place. The sales team was flying blind. To understand their own performance, reps had to piece data together from multiple systems on their own time — most didn't, and leadership was making calls without a shared source of truth.

I built a dynamic, interactive pivot tool that pulled scattered data into one place. Reps could see how they tracked against YTD sales versus the last two years, break down their book by customers who were new, lost, grew, or reduced — quantified in dollars and percentage — and roll the same view up to team or individual level for goals, timing, commissions, and run rate.

The tool became more than a way to track performance. It surfaced friendly competition between reps, gave management a decision-making reference in weekly meetings, and — through the prior-year baseline — let the team understand the why behind the numbers, not just the what.

When I joined OneTogether Solutions, there was no close process and no checklist. The books were still run on cash basis. There were no deadlines — close happened whenever it happened, which was typically 30 days after month end.

I'd run close checklists in Excel before, and that would have worked. But Excel meant rebuilding the list every month, chasing status updates, and confirming what was done.

I built a Monday.com board for each entity with assignees, business-day-specific due dates, and a step-by-step order. When a task is marked complete, it automatically rolls forward to the next month — no rebuilding, no copy-paste, no constant follow-up.

Close became routine instead of reactive. The system eliminated back-and-forth communication, removed tedious repetition, and made onboarding new accountants and clients a non-event — they pick up an existing checklist instead of inheriting someone else's process from memory.

It also created an audit trail of close activities — who completed what and when, who approved what and when — built into the workflow rather than reconstructed after the fact.

Langston was billing client work in milestones — and recognizing revenue when those milestones hit AR. The trouble: their work didn't happen in milestone-shaped chunks. A campaign billed at kickoff might take months of effort to deliver, so revenue was lumpy, expenses didn't match the periods they belonged to, and the financial story you'd tell from the P&L wasn't the financial story of the business.

I built a per-project revenue recognition workbook in Excel. For each active project, formulas calculated percent-complete, generated accruals when work ran ahead of billing, generated deferrals when billing ran ahead of work, and produced reconciliation schedules that tied directly to the GL.

The math ran itself. What I drove monthly was the judgment layer — confirming percent-complete with project leads, flagging anomalies, adjusting for scope changes. Automating the calculation freed up time to actually think about the revenue, instead of recalculating it.

The financials finally told the truth about the business. Revenue and expenses lined up to the right periods per GAAP, audit went smoother because the schedules tied cleanly to the GL, and the monthly process took a fraction of what it would have without the automation.