793: When Timing Matters | Adriana Carpenter, CFO, Emburse

As we seek to highlight the milestones that mark the path to the CFO office, one of our favorite queries is to ask finance leaders to recall from their career-building years the first time they presented to their company’s board.    

For Adriana Carpenter, memories of that board gathering will forever call to mind ASC 606, the mazelike revenue standard that only a few years ago upended the placid temperament of many an accounting organization.   

“Make no mistake—this was really my first time, and I was delivering bad news,” recalls Adriana, who perhaps not unlike many of her CFO peers received her first “invitation” to address the board regarding a sticky issue, rather than to highlight the anatomy of a strategic win.

“A majority of our revenue came from on-premises software subscriptions, and 606 dramatically changed the timing of revenue for these types of subscriptions,” continues Carpenter, who for 8 years served as chief accounting officer for Ping Identity, a developer of identity security software.

For Ping, the timing issue meant that the company would be required to take a big cash hit on the eve of realizing its goal of selling shares to the public.

“606 distorted our revenue and EBITDA numbers, which really forced us to figure out how to explain to investors what was really happening in the business,” comments Carpenter, who entered the boardroom that day with a portfolio of accounting experience that any board worth its salt would have savored.

Carpenter had arrived at Ping 5 years earlier, just as the company had begun the tricky journey from being a perpetual revenue model to evolving into the subscription revenue mode.

“Within that first year at Ping, I led the complete overhaul of our quote to cash process, which included everything from revamping how we were selling our software to helping to implement additional software modules to enable the business to scale,” remarks Carpenter, whose tenure as Ping’s CAO involved navigating not only the differences between revenue models but also the differences between owners as Ping went from VC to private equity ownership.   

Then came 606’s timing issue and Carpenter’s invitation from the board. While milestones along the path to the CFO office frequently vary as far as time and place go, Carpenter’s arrival inside the CFO office at Emburse within 3 years of having received Ping’s boardroom invitation makes us think that perhaps timing is indeed everything. –Jack Sweeney