My Name is Waldo Pienaar.
I am a Chartered Accountant of South Africa. I have South African and British citizenship and I am based in Cape Town, South Africa.
During my career journey I have gained various experience in my many roles, including
- Business Owner
- Outsourced Accounting Service Provider
- Chief Financial Officer
- Group Financial Controller
- External Auditor
Through my own experience and those of my clients, I have faced many of the common frustrations relating to accounting and the finance function:
- Constantly fixing internal control systems failures
- Constantly running from one reporting deadline to the next
- Missed statutory deadlines
- Paying penalties and interest on late statutory submissions
- Inefficiencies in data storage management causing delays in basic information requests
- Escalating external audit fees
- Internal audits that cost too much and deliver too little
- Software problems, breakdowns and failures
- Unexpected issues during implementation of new software
- Recovering from accounting data loss
- Finance staff with insufficient training
- Incorrect staff recruitments leading painful disciplinary hearings and dismissals
- Frustrated finance team members leading to high staff turnover
Most, if not all, of the above issues can be rectified and avoided.
My passion is to prove that, despite it being generally accepted as the norm, the accounting/finance function of your business does not have to result in
- Stress
- Working overtime
- Running from one deadline to the next
- Feeling like you are constantly chasing your tail
- Not having time to take on additional projects that would benefit business management
- Losing good staff members of your finance team
Working as an outsourced service required me to fully understand the accounting process all the way from invoice capturing and bank reconciliations, to management reporting and statutory financial statements. This enables me to quickly identify the source areas to focus on when facing a challenging accounting cleanup project.
I have also learned to detect certain patterns, indicators and early warning signs that precede these problems. I developed the ability to look at the complete process flow and identify process improvements which can produce significant results in a short space of time. This in turn frees up more time to deal with the more labour intensive improvements. By continuously striving to improve the finance function and not accepting the status quo, the compound impact on the accuracy and timing of your accounting reports and data can be huge.
If you would like to get in touch, please use on the links on the Contact Me page.