Shelley Reynolds | Vice President Worldwide Controller and Principal Accounting Officer | Amazon
Shelley Reynolds serves as Vice President, Worldwide Controller and Principal Accounting Officer at Amazon. In her role, she has spent the past 16+ years overseeing Amazon’s accounting function and managing a global team. Before Amazon, she served as a Partner at Deloitte and Touche.
A graduate of the University of Washington, she serves on the Foster School of Business Advisory Board. Shelley has been recognized as one of Puget Sound Business Journal’s Top Women in Tech, on Moves Magazine’s Power Women list, and was named one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology by the National Diversity Council.
An Account Of The Accounting Operations:
The global accounting function at Amazon supports corporate accounting and reporting, new programs, projects, and technology launches, worldwide operations, retail, and AWS.
Corporate Accounting and Reporting:
The Corporate Accounting and Reporting team maintains oversight of financial systems and drives both internal and external reporting of consolidated and local statutory results. It manages intercompany activities, foreign currency transactions, treasury functions, acquisitions, investments, technical accounting policies, and more.
Accounting Programs, Projects & Technologies:
Accounting Program Managers support business teams to launch and scale projects that are impactful and measurable for their customers. It partners with Operational Accounting teams and various other stakeholders such as Product Managers and Finance to see a successful project launch from start to finish. Technology teams are dedicated to delivering system capabilities to address global reporting and operational requirements and are consistently leveraging tools to support automation needs.
Operational Accounting:
The Operational Accounting teams have a controllership function over specific business lines. It gathers data, performs analytics, and ensures the accuracy of financial results to help ensure confidence among its investors. Whether it’s related to customers’ favorite shows on Prime Video or subscriptions to cloud computing services on AWS, the Operational Accounting Team is an integral part of operations and accounting for all Amazon teams.
We have 16 Leadership Principles that guide our discussions and decisions every day.
I spend a lot of time thinking about Invent and Simplify. It helps us think about our
customers, and the company, in the long term.– Shelley Reynolds Vice President, Worldwide Controller, and Principal Accounting Officer at Amazon
Getting The Accounting Role Right:
My career path started with a casual conversation. I spoke with a family friend to compare notes on applying for a Business school. He asked what my grades were; I told him, and he suggested I apply to the Accounting school. When I asked why, he said, “It’s the hardest business discipline to get into and your grades are good enough.” He followed up with, “If you don’t like it you don’t have to stay there.” So, I applied. Accounting classes were essentially a lot of math problems, and no essays, making it a discipline that was right up my alley!
Out of school, my 19 years with Deloitte were all about exploration. I started with smaller companies, and eventually got into tech and worked with startups. After a few of those, I migrated to larger companies, like Boeing. I got the call about Amazon while I was living in New York, and I knew it was a great opportunity, and I wanted to get back to Seattle. I’ve stayed at Amazon because – like Deloitte – the people are phenomenal. We’re a company of owners, and we’re empowered to think big.
An Account Of The Day Of The Principal Accounting Officer:
My role oversees Amazon’s Accounting function, managing a global team. I started in 2006 as Vice President of Finance and Controller. I worked hard to immerse myself in the culture and Amazon’s peculiar ways of doing things, and a year later, I moved into the Worldwide Controller and Principal Accounting Officer role, where I oversee Amazon’s entire Accounting function, managing a diverse global team of professionals around the world shares Shelley.
Balancing The Balance Sheet:
Shelley conveys, As the Chief Accounting Officer, my mission is pretty clear, which is to maintain a well-controlled environment that effectively supports our financial reporting and disclosure requirements. The question I ask constantly is, “Is it right? How do you know it’s right?” Our job is to find the correct technical accounting answer and operationalize the business process that enables us to surface the data we need to support that technical answer. And it has to happen flawlessly – day in, day out.
Tallying the Profit & Loss On The Balance Sheet:
Shelley concludes:
During my tenure at Amazon, the company has experienced incredible growth.
Quickly, I realized that our mission was to reduce manual accounting activity. We set goals to standardize globally, reduce manual accounting efforts, and decrease the time it takes to complete a set of financial statements. We achieve our goals through standardizing processes, introducing technologies, and expanding the skillsets of individuals within the Accounting department.
Technologies and processes are not the only things that need to scale, so do people. We have surrounded our traditional accountants with people that have more technology and financial systems integration skills to promote cross-learning. Differing skills allow us to solve our needs from a variety of perspectives. Inclusion takes work; we all need to develop better listening and understanding skills, and we have mechanisms in place to help us do this intentionally.
For example, this year we sponsored a Career Development Week for accountants that catered to developing our skillsets. We hosted 30 sessions across the globe for our employees, with programming designed to provide insights into successful career development planning, including networking, training, and various learning opportunities. Our goals were to jumpstart skillset growth and spark career discussions and develop mechanisms to keep the discussion going.
I believe making the time to have skillset/career discussions regularly helps us support our team members in their individual growth, and empowers them to contribute to the development of more inclusive activities for all, which creates a richer experience for our teams and ultimately helps create an environment that invites us all to deliver bigger and bolder solutions for customers.
I believe making the time to have skillset/career discussions regularly helps us support
our team members in their individual growth, and empowers them to contribute to the
development of more inclusive activities for all, which creates a richer experience for our
teams and ultimately helps create an environment that invites us all to deliver bigger
and bolder solutions for customers.– Shelley Reynolds Vice President, Worldwide Controller, and Principal Accounting Officer at Amazon