Linda is an Accountant with Defense Finance Accounting Service, the largest finance and accounting firm in the world. Being the financial services firm for the U.S. Department of Defense, Linda’s organization is responsible for paying all U.S. war fighters and civilians alike. Linda’s direct role is to analyze payment data and prepare financial reports, all the while trying to make the process more efficient.
Transcript
My name is Linda Graham and I'm an accountant. What we do at my organization is pretty much everything, we are the... I work for DFAS, which is defense, finance, and accounting organization or services. And we are the largest finance and accounting organization in the world. So anything that falls on the Department of Defense, we pretty much handle, whether it's paying our war fighters, paying civilians, and I produce financial statements for the government, so that's my direct job title. A lot of what I'm working on now is to just pretty much go through making our work more efficient. So a lot of things we do in a process improvement project, so somebody who could be in project management would be a great success at our company because we're trying to make programs more efficiently, have systems that are more audible-friendly and more user-friendly. So that's probably the biggest thing, is to make our department run more efficiently. We collect a lot of data. Clocked a lot of data, then we take that data and there's usually a team of us, and we go through pretty much steps where we measure the data. We try to predict where's the problem at, where's the issue, because a lot of times, you may think it's one thing when it's something completely different. And we take that information and we may create a micro app which is usually access database that's able to compile data, spit it out faster to make sure it's more audible and things like that. For instance, working with, we work with other defense organizations, so that's anybody that falls under Department of Defense, and they submit their monthly data where it could've been, they working on building this building. All money is already appropriated and allocated for certain things. So once they send it in, depending on when you send it in, it may hit 2013, but it was really completed in 2014, just how things work out. So all that information will be on a file. How much money they spent, where, what they're building. Everything has a place. Like we could read a specific line of accounting and know exactly what it is. So those are the files that are coming in, and they can have thousands of lines of data on it.
Download transcript