This webinar offers a strategic deep dive into optimizing the financial close process while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and compliance. Attendees will explore the CloseStrong Framework, a proven methodology that focuses on smart closing practices, effective financial reporting, event readiness, technology enablement, and team development. Designed for both internal accounting departments and external accounting firms, this session delivers practical tools and strategies to streamline close activities and enhance operational performance.
Led by Shana Cooper, CPA, founder of The Accountability Team LLC, the webinar draws on over 30 years of industry experience, including leadership roles at RSM and BlackLine. Through real-world case studies, interactive discussion, and guided exercises, Cooper helps attendees identify process bottlenecks, improve documentation, define team roles clearly, and implement sustainable changes. Her expertise provides valuable insights for professionals at every stage of the accounting cycle from preparers to reviewers and managers.
Key Topics Covered:-
Your Benefits For Attending:-
Whether you're optimizing your internal accounting team or managing multiple client closes, this webinar provides the actionable insights and tools needed to enhance close speed, accuracy, and team collaboration resulting in a stronger, more efficient close process.
Who Would Benefit from This Webinar:-
Shana is a proven accounting visionary and strategist, focused on leading accounting teams to confidence by protecting their reputation and being ready for anything. She has always been a champion of close optimization, especially through account reconciliations. Couple this with her passion for excellence and you get her signature Reconciliation Strong programs. This program is a culmination of her 30+ years of experience with account reconciliations and is key to Shana’s mission of helping every accountant learn how to do reconciliations the right way.
Shana spent the first 18 years of her accounting career in various audit and controllership roles across multiple industries. Her passion for accounting process improvement and automation led her to BlackLine where, over her 10-year tenure, she created, developed, and led five different teams, including Customer Success and Customer Experience. She was fortunate enough to be part of BlackLine’s successful rise from less than 100 customers to over 2000, and from a private to a public company. Shana went on to help build RSM’s BlackLine practice with an emphasis on account reconciliation optimization.
Shana has had the unique opportunity to influence thousands of accountants and impact the reconciliation of hundreds of thousands of accounts over her career. She has prepared, approved, and audited reconciliations, trained accountants, and optimized reconciliation processes. This expertise, along with her focus on customer experience, makes her ideal to champion reconciliation excellence across accounting teams. Shana believes strong reconciliations lead to overall accounting excellence, which lends itself to her newest program, CloseStrong.
Shana lives in East Tennessee with her husband and kids. When Shana isn’t dreaming about the perfect reconciliation, she enjoys reading, taking walks, finding quality vintage and watching baseball.
