Sefali Patel Email & Phone Number

Walnut Creek, Ca, Us

Seattle, Wa, Us

Seattle, Wa, Us

San Ramon, Ca, Us

-Developed funding strategy for international operations and worked cross-functionally with Legal, Governance, Tax, Treasury and Controllers to maximize flexibility for capital structure decisions, achieved optimal balance between cost and risk in funding decisions. -Partnered with business unit Finance leaders to understand key drivers and support decision-making-Enhanced team’s efficiency and decision-making via improved processes and tools.-Provided critical decision support through insightful data analysis, financial modeling to executive leadership team.-Supported special projects to continuously improve, automate forecasting and reporting tools, processes, and methodologies.-Led a multi-functional team to manage the design, deployment, product strategy and roadmap of a new application from inception to MVP in 4 months. Experienced in continuous delivery, with an additional six product releases delivered within 12 months. -Worked closely with stakeholders, users groups to conduct research, gather requirements, understand pain points, capture user stories, and prioritize backlog. Collaborated with overseas developers to communicate customer needs and complete user acceptance testing.ACHIEVEMENTS:-Selected by leadership team as Digital Champion, educating teams on technology trends and leading digital transformation efforts across the organization. Identified 25 opportunities to improve business processes, and worked with teams to develop solutions.-Developed economic analysis for a $2B transaction to support recommendations provided to CFO and Treasurer.-Automated process with Microsoft Powerapps resulted in 40% increase in efficiency.

San Ramon, Ca, Us

-Managed project team with internal and external consultants, identified efficiency opportunities in work processes of clients consisting of global business units. -Conducted surveys, extracted and analyzed large datasets to understand trends and provide recommendations. Developed and implemented solutions across business.-Became a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on tool to manage account reconciliations within 1 year in role.-Led a network of global SMEs to share best practices and identify efficiency opportunities. Coached and mentored SME network through quarterly calls. ACHIEVEMENTS:-Achieved time saving equivalent to 7 FTEs through project to find faster ways to approach account reconciliations to reduce the burden on our Upstream business units-Provided input into the project design, communicating business requirements as an Upstream SME, and facilitating deployment of the new training solution across Upstream as Business Readiness Lead (BRL).-Gathered user requirements and led delivery and deployment of new tool to 50,000 global employees and contractors.

-Primary finance business partner to establish reporting, forecasting and financial processes for a new business unit at that focused on equity investments and large scale utility projects that consisted of new employees & contractors and a business model that significantly deviated from the traditional model. -Collaborated cross-functionally with the BU leadership, Strategy, Accounting Policy, Tax, Legal, and Treasury, and externally with investment partners to ensure accurate project forecasts and financials. -Responsible for coordinating annual and long-range business plan, monthly close process, creating monthly reporting package and providing analysis for Finance, Operations and Sales leadership.-Drove process improvement and standardization, and provide guidance and mentorship to analysts and responsible for onboarding new team members.ACHIEVEMENTS-Developed financial models to guide decision making on major investments and projects ranging from $200-$500MM-Developed enhanced reporting package for executive leadership resulted in time savings of 2 FTE-Created new standardized process for annual business plan and streamlined overall process by 3 days

-Worked in fast-paced, start-up atmosphere for small renewable energy company owned by Chevron.-Primary finance business partner for Sales and Operations teams, establishing trust and gaining an understanding of relevant business drivers impacting project margins and bookings. -Analyzed project financials, completed monthly variance analysis, and communicated outstanding issue with operations teams. -Collaborated with Project Managers to create bottom-up financial forecasts and provided training on Project Financial Management Tool.-Supported financial planning & analysis processes, inclusive of monthly close & quarterly financial forecasting cycles.-Developed and monitored critical success and business performance metrics (KPIs).ACHIEVEMENTS-Implemented new project management tool that increased reporting efficiency. Reports that previously took >2 hours to generate were created automatically in <1 minute. Monthly revenue recognition process streamlined from 2+ days to <3 hours. -Enhanced and automated scorecard (KPI) reporting from a manual process that took several days to <1 day.

San Ramon, Ca, Us

Seattle, Wa, Us

B.A, Business Administration - Finance

B.S., General Biology