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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\u2019s board. \xa0\xa0\xa0

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. \xa0\xa0

\u201cMake no mistake\u2014this was really my first time, and I was delivering bad news,\u201d recalls Adriana, who perhaps not unlike many of her CFO peers received her first \u201cinvitation\u201d to address the board regarding a sticky issue, rather than to highlight the anatomy of a strategic win.

\u201cA majority of our revenue came from on-premises software subscriptions, and 606 dramatically changed the timing of revenue for these types of subscriptions,\u201d 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.

\u201c606 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,\u201d 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.

\u201cWithin 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,\u201d remarks Carpenter, whose tenure as Ping\u2019s 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. \xa0\xa0

Then came 606\u2019s timing issue and Carpenter\u2019s invitation from the board. While milestones along the path to the CFO office frequently vary as far as time and place go, Carpenter\u2019s arrival inside the CFO office at Emburse within 3 years of having received Ping\u2019s boardroom invitation makes us think that perhaps timing is indeed everything.\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney