This is a transcript of a NetGain webinar (YouTube) hosted by Raina Robinson with speakers Adam Riches, CPA and Nicholas Boucher. The session introduces the topic — why financial close processes fail and how AI and automation can fix them — and opens with attendee rollcall, speaker introductions, and background on the presenters' auditing and corporate finance experience.
Welcome, everyone. We're just waiting a minute or two as people trickle in. And we'll get started just in a few minutes. Okay. And if you want to post in the chat where you're logging in from, that's always fun to see where everyone's coming from.
I'm. I'm. I'm logging in from Denver here. We've got a beautiful clear day. I think it's starting to warm up here in the spring.
Spring.
And so anyway, beautiful Denver. Probably not as nice as South Florida, though. Today.
I am very excited about spring. Spring is officially hitting Utah. I think.
I'm coming from Europe, so I don't know if other people are coming from Europe here in Germany, but as you can hear already with my accent, originally French.
We got Bangalore, another Denver. Houston, Texas. I'm originally from Austin, so big fan of Texas. Okay. If you're just now joining, go ahead and throw in the chat where you're coming from. It's always fun to see where everyone is from. And then we'll just get started here in a couple minutes. We've got Boston, Orlando. Orlando sounds nice. That is a place I would like to be right now.
Me and Nicholas were talking about the international language of accounting. It's always cool to see people from all over the world with all the cultural differences, all the language differences. It feels like when we get into, like, deep technical accounting, that we were speaking exactly the same language and we all kind of come together. So anyway, it's cool to see people from all over. Next time we should ask, what is your accounting language? Which gap do you took? Yes. Yes, I did. Interesting. This is a long time ago, before the mass adoption of ifrs. My final paper in one of my graduate courses was on ifrs and the adoption of a single standard globally. And after all my research, my conclusion was there's no way, like, the cultural differences are too wide. Like, there's no way we're all going to come onto a single standard. And it's been interesting to watch over the last 20 years how dead wrong I was. And I think there's a few holdouts, but not very many. Everybody's really adopted ifrs in the US Here, we're one of the holdouts, obviously, to moving on to ifrs and keeping off of this global standard. But it's been fascinating to see everybody come together on the accounting front.
Definitely.
Good.
Okay, well, let's go ahead and get started. So welcome, everyone. My name is Raina Robinson. I'm a product marketing manager here at Net Gain Super Excited about today's webinar. It's all about why financial closes fail and how AI and automation can fix them. If your month end close feels like a stressful marathon, you're not alone. I hear it a lot. But with the right technology, companies can close faster with fewer errors and less manual work. So we have two amazing speakers today. Adam Riches, CPA CEO and founder of NetGain, and Nicholas Boucher, founder of AI Finance Club. Adam and Nicholas, I'll let you both introduce yourselves here in a second, but just as a little background, they are both ex auditors and they both worked in the corporate world. They worked with a lot of companies on their close processes and with that experience, they've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. I'm sure you can talk more about that. But when it comes to the close, they've kind of seen it all. So they're going to share their experience on how AI is transforming the close process and what the future of accounting looks like. Adam, Nicholas, do you want to say hi, introduce yourselves?
Yeah. Thank you, Raina. Yeah. Very excited for today's session. It's always great to have a conversation with Nicholas here. And so a little bit more about my background. So I was in the mining industry for about seven years after I was an auditor. And mining companies are public companies. And so we were listed on the Canadian exchange, the Australian exchange, the US Exchange. We had all the regulations that came along with that, all the complexities of a global operation. But these were smaller businesses and so we were budget constrained and so dealing with, I imagine a lot of people on the call like have construction constraints on budget and how you deal with some of these complex problems. And so was really exposed to that closed cycle during those seven years. And then I went and moved into the technology side. I worked directly for NetSuite and where I got to work with hundreds of different companies all around the world.
