Red Carpet Ask Me Anything: Amie from Lochmueller Group

Customer Success
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Hi, everyone! I’m Amie (not ‘Amy’… neeever ‘Amy’), the CFO of Lochmueller Group. This is my Prophix Red Carpet Ask Me Anything!

I live and work in Evansville, Indiana. Evansville is home to The West Side Nut Club Fall Festival, which is the second-largest festival of its kind in America. The Evansville Otters play at Bosse Field, our country’s third-oldest professional ballpark. Only Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago are older! Production crews filmed A League of Their Own at Bosse Field in 1992.

I’m happily married to my husband, Chris. We have three girls and one boy: Katlyn (25), Collin (23), Karlie (19), and Jayden (18). We also have two pups, Gabe (a beagle / boxer mix) and Gus (a pit-bull / boxer mix). They’re both rescue dogs and the runts of their litters.

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Prophix asked me to tell you what I do in my spare time. Spare time?! I drink Diet Coke to keep me going. We love to golf. We watch the Chicago Cubs and NFL football. We take long weekend trips to baseball or football events, or drive to visit the kids at college.

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I worked at a few accounting firms when I was in college and got hired by Lochmueller Group. That’s 21 years ago this month! I’ve been very fortunate to work with great leaders and further my education – all while staying at a company I love.

Lochgroup is a full-service planning, engineering, and environmental firm. Some of our notable projects are the I69 interstate highway that connects Indiana from north to south and now goes into Kentucky. We also work to help endangered species; a recent project helps bats. We’re growing quickly in the Midwest and strive to become a firm of 300+ employees by 2022.

I run most of the Prophix admin functions at Lochgroup. Our managers use the software for budgeting, and our accounting staff use Prophix to produce and distribute reports. We generate forecasts and re-forecasts during the year. We also use ADP employee data to identify real personnel costs and understand the precise impacts of staff utilization.

Recently, we worked with Prophix’s Product Adoption Team (via the Continuous Success Package or CSP) to rebuild our reports from scratch. In time, I’d like to use Prophix to track our full project backlog and integrate this with our pipeline forecasting, to project demand and outline costs more accurately. In this area – as well as cash flow forecasting – we’ll probably leverage the CSP.

I have a poll question for you!

Do you use Prophix for CapEx planning?

  • Yes

  • No

0 voters

Do you track your staff’s licensing, training, or CPE credits using Prophix?

  • Yes

  • No

0 voters

Now it’s your turn to ask me anything! Shoot me a question about Prophix, the Continuous Success Package, Larry Bird, my dogs, the Chicago Cubs, or life in the Midwest.

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Hello! Are you the only Prophix Administrator in your organization? If so, do you have a plan for training backups?

I am currently the only one in my organization and I know that makes our leadership team a little concerned. As CFO, what are your concerns as Prophix admin?

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Hi Amie! How as Prophix helped you network and connect with other accounting professionals. And what is your favorite experience at a Prophix conference (hoping it’s something from Toronto).

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Hi Amie. How often do you pull data from ADP to get real personal costs? and what are some example of some reports. Thank you.
Aaron
amills@mkdelectric.com

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I’m hoping it’s fried bologna in Nashville!!! :wink: Looking forward to Miami!

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I am currently the only admn. Yes, we need to cross train as well! I hope to do this during 2020. My concerns would include being sure the admn fully understands all calculations and is able to reason thru any changes and how they effect all values.

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Prophix always has great events and leaves plenty of time for networking. I always love asking questions to learn new ideas from other companies!

New far away friends are the best part of any Prophix event :wink:

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Are you using the data directly from ADP for your financial reports or are you using data from an erp system for the financials?

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I pull from ADP for budgeting and forecasting, so I do it a few times a year (you could add a process In Prophix and do more often). Reports include Income Stmt, Balance Sheet, personnel benefits enrollments and utilization goals, etc

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ADP data is only used for budgeting. Our ERP pulls financial data nightly thru a process in Prophix.

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Looking forward to same!! :blush:

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How many reports did you have the Product Adoption Team help you rebuild and approximately how long did the process take? What do you think was the best piece of advice they gave when it comes to building reports?

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What are a couple of template design tricks that you think are not well known by your Prophix Peers?

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use named sets as much as possible. these are good so that you only have to update information in model manager one time vs changing all reports as data changes (ie a new year starts). use the format painter!

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we had to rebuild multiple financial statements. I think I spent an hour or two with CSP to ensure I didn’t miss anything, not too rough! :slight_smile: not to repeat from other reply, but use named sets! way easier to update than formulas in each report!

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Hi Amy! I’m curious if you layer your Prophix data with PowerBI or if you only use Prophix for all analytics?

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We did not use power BI at this time, however it is something I am interested in learning more about in the future! I think it would bring value to our reporting!

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I’m a Mariners fan, so know a thing or two about baseball fan misery - any reassuring words you can give as a Cubs fan who has now seen that there is hope?

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@amie.roach and @lauren.painter, we have lots of customers who’ve integrated Prophix with Power BI. If you’re interested in connecting with one of them, just let me know!

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stay true to your team! always remember 'someday; :wink: haha