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Catherine Delaney, CA, CMA, Senior stock manager, Nails inc.
Photo: Harry Tudor
FOR LOVE OF THE GAME
Jocelyn Perreault, CMA, an associate with McCarthy Tétrault’s Bankruptcy and Restructuring Group in Montreal, has also linked accounting with law, but not as a crime fighter. “I work either on the side of a debtor or a creditor when a company is insolvent,” Perreault explains. “For instance, on the debtor’s side, our role is to propose a restructuring plan that will be acceptable to all the creditors. Our goal is to maintain the business as a going concern.”
His job combines accounting and law to come up with best business solutions. “The legal and accounting knowledge help you to be a better business negotiator and litigator, because you’re able to explain and defend your point better.”
After completing a bachelor’s of commerce with honours in accounting at McGill University in 2002, Perreault enrolled at McGill’s Faculty of Law, where he obtained a Bachelor’s of Civil Law and Common Law in 2006. He began articling at McCarthy Tétrault in 2006 and was called to the Quebec bar in 2007. “I don’t know many lawyers who also have an accounting designation, but it’s an asset to have this background,” he laughs.
In addition to his work as a lecturer at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill, where he teaches business law and accounting courses, Perreault is involved with Friends of McGill Hockey, an organization supporting the McGill Redmen hockey team. In fact, his passion for hockey contributed to his decision to pursue a law degree. “While I studied accounting, I played for the Redmen for three years. Normally you play four or five years, and I really wanted to continue, so I started a law degree.”
Perreault ended up taking a sabbatical because he’d received offers to play professional hockey in Europe. “I went to France for a year and then came back to complete my law degree.”
Perreault recounts that, while studying, he already saw the link between accounting and law. “There are so many legal aspects to accounting. Now that I’m working on the law side, I see how useful it is to have a background in accounting.”
FASHIONING HER OWN PATH
For Catherine Delaney, CA, CPA, accounting has been a perfect fit for retail management, merchandising and consulting. As senior stock manager at U.K.-based Nails Inc. since March 2008, she wears many hats. “I do accounting, supervise our warehouse, ensure that orders are sent to our stores and wholesale customers in a timely fashion, place orders and negotiate with suppliers, decide what stock our stores need every month, make sure our customers pay us and work on loss prevention,” she says. “I do a little bit of everything!”
Delaney got her Bachelor’s of Commerce at HEC Montréal in 1999, followed by a graduate degree in public accounting, at the top of her class, in 2000. She obtained her CA designation in 2002, then received her CPA designation in Illinois in 2003. She says she always knew she wouldn’t end up working in an accounting firm. “You need to do a two-year internship as an external auditor, and the logical progression would be to want to become a controller in a company, but I wasn’t attracted to that. The management part of my background was more exciting to me.”
After a couple of years doing external audits at Ernst & Young in Montreal, Delaney travelled around the world from 2002 to 2003, performing internal audits of large companies. “Then I went back home and decided I wanted to work in an industry I was passionate about: fashion. I got a job in the United States as a retail consultant for a company based in Montreal. After that, Le Château’s head office hired me as a merchandise consultant, along with two other CAs.” Delaney eventually switched over to the operations side of the company for a year before deciding she wanted to live in the U.K. “I started off as a merchandiser and now I’m a stock manager,” she says. “This job is a combination of all the experience I’ve gained.”
Delaney finds this job her most rewarding yet. “I’m very good at managing relationships and solving problems, and I get to do that all day. I save the company money with every phone call or e-mail. The results are very tangible, and I’m proud of what I do.”
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