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CPA Philippe Senecal working at dining table
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From Pivot Magazine

Philippe Sénécal, 26

The manager of transformation, finance and operations at Intact earned his designation in 2018

CPA Philippe Senecal working at dining tableSénécal says his job at Intact is less about traditional accounting and more about planning and reviewing (Photograph by Rodolphe Beaulieu)

I was born in the south shore of Montreal, in a suburb called Châteauguay. That’s where I got my first accounting job, working at a small firm in town in 2016. I had to do a lot of redundant manual tasks, like sifting through hundreds of emails and documents during an audit. It felt more like clerical work than analysis. That experience made me examine ways to improve the workflow, to do things quicker and reduce the hours we were spending on data entry.

In 2018, a fellow CPA told me about a position at his company, Bitfarms, which operates blockchain computing centres. I didn’t know much about blockchain before that, but I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be involved in the crypto space. 

At Bitfarms, I was responsible for bringing in automation tools that would save the company time and money. One of them was an app called Certify: you take a photo of an invoice, and it uses optical character technology to pull out the relevant info. We also implemented automatic payroll technology; before, employees would have to create spreadsheets to track their own hours and get everything approved by their manager. Once we eliminated those mundane tasks, we had loads of extra time for data analysis.   

“I think we’ll see more jobs like mine, because more businesses are adopting new technologies.”

Bitfarms’ computer centres “mine” bitcoins, a process that uses powerful computers to solve complex mathematical problems. Using data analytics, we were able to pull data on the electricity consumption of each Bitfarms facility and figure out how many bitcoins were mined. Once, when we extracted reports, we saw that there was a time when electricity consumption was high but we didn’t mine as many bitcoins as expected. We flagged this with the operations team and they discovered that some of the machines were not running at full capacity. Even though it’s not our job to maintain the machines, we were able to use the numbers and flag an issue. 

After a year and a half at Bitfarms, I took a job as manager of transformation, finance and operations at the insurance company Intact. I was excited to execute implementations at a larger scale. Intact is growing quickly and acquiring other companies, and one of my roles is to integrate their legacy systems and ERPs into Intact’s systems. I have a team of former business analysts, and we interview finance folks to understand how new technology will impact their work. Then we develop a plan for integration, test it to see how it delivers, then execute it. Each integration project might take anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years, depending on the size and scale of the new technology. 

These days, my job is less about traditional accounting and more about planning and reviewing. It’s different from typical CPA work, but my accounting background is essential to understanding my users’ needs. For example, if we’re introducing a system that automates how records are checked and compared, I need to know how accountants will interpret the data. It’s important to have people who understand both accounting and IT. And it’s easier to train an accounting person about IT than it is to teach an IT person about accounting.

I think we’ll see more jobs like mine, because more businesses are adopting new technologies. In a world where everything changes rapidly, CEOs want their financial results as fast as possible. The best way to improve that speed is by implementing efficient systems.

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