Our new Q&A blog series, From Behind the Curtain, provides a glimpse into the lives of the people behind our software. This series features a sit-down with different members of our team who will share unique insights and perspectives about their roles at Visual Lease.  

This week, we sit down with Rosemary Courtney, Technical Accounting Director at Visual Lease, to learn how her role impacts product development, assists with overall accuracy and provides expert insight to our customers. 

Question #1: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

What does the technical accounting function do at Visual Lease? 

Answer #1: Rosemary Courtney, Technical Accounting Director 

The technical accounting function is responsible for many things at Visual Lease, including: 

• Supporting cross-functional efforts regarding technical accounting and accounting operations  
• Providing experience and insight into key traits, behaviors, goals, responsibilities and needs of accountants to influence product development and roadmap 
• Enhancing the speed and quality in which Visual Lease can develop and deploy product, as well as test new designs and features 

Question #2: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

What are some recent cross-functional initiatives you have been involved in? 

Answer #2: Rosemary Courtney, Technical Accounting Director

I am often involved in various initiatives across the business to provide a best-in-class product and service experience to our customers and potential customers. Some recent examples of initiatives include: 

• Supporting Sales with technical accounting expertise  
• Providing quality control to marketing messaging  
• Assisting with internal employee technical accounting training 

We also meet with regulators and research emerging accounting standards and developing markets to ensure Visual Lease remains highly informed. 

Question #3: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

Can you shed some light on your 2022 goals? 

Answer #3: Rosemary Courtney, Technical Accounting Director

Our goals in 2022 revolve around continuing to expand the breadth and depth of our already strong technical accounting expertise  – and in the end, providing the best possible experiences for every one of our internal and external customers. We plan to expand the technical training throughout the team and across Visual Lease. In addition, we would like to assist with cross-functional development of the customer needs and new markets and channels. 

Want to hear more from Visual Lease? Check out our recent interview with Taralynn VanBrunt, Manager of Education and Enablement at Visual Lease to learn more about client training, education and enablement efforts. To read the interview, click here. 

From Behind the Curtain gives an inside look into the responsibilities of various Visual Lease teams and how they work together to ensure the solution is regularly improving and clients are successfully complying with the latest lease accounting standards.

Our new Q&A blog series, From Behind the Curtain, provides a glimpse into the lives of the people behind our software. This series features a sit-down with different members of our team who will share unique insights and perspectives about their roles at Visual Lease.  

Last week, we interviewed David Johnson, Senior Director of Engineering at Visual Lease. He discussed his team’s desire to stay innovative and maintain a quality product. To read the interview, click here.

Question #1: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

Tell me a little about the Visual Lease Education & Enablement Team.

Answer #1: Taralynn VanBrunt, Manager of Training Services

Our team is responsible for creating client-facing release readiness content, such as Release Notes, Release Feature Spotlight Videos and Product Manual updates.

We also curate content for Visual Lease University, which is our on-demand virtual training center, and VL Community, our customer support center where customers can submit Help Desk tickets, read Knowledge Base Articles and more.

We work closely with departments across the business, including Client Services, Implementation and Product to determine and identify opportunities to create new training content and resources.

Question #2: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

How has your team grown to support Visual Lease customers?

Answer #2: Taralynn VanBrunt, Manager of Training Services

Our group is made up of technical writers, instructional designers and training specialists. Over the past year, we have been busy adding more resources to the team to provide additional support for our educational objectives and our agile release plans.

Question #3: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

Can you shed some light on your team’s goals?

Answer #3: Taralynn VanBrunt, Manager of Training Services

Our team is dedicated to providing our clients with a red-carpet training experience. We are creating useful content not just for new users, but for our existing clients that are getting ready to transition to the new accounting standards as well.
Visual Lease has monthly product releases, of which our team provides release notes documenting enhancements to our capabilities and functionality.

In addition, we are enhancing the VL Community for customers to benefit from improved search functionality, more how-to reference documents and an updated, user-friendly Product Manual.

From Behind the Curtain gives an inside look into the responsibilities of various Visual Lease teams and how they work together to ensure the solution is regularly improving and clients are successfully complying with the latest lease accounting standards.

At Visual Lease, our Technology  team houses our Engineering and Cloud Operations groups. These teams are committed to providing the best user experience for our clients, and improving the platform along the way. From building application features to troubleshooting internal and production defects, the Technology team ensures our solution runs smoothly and effectively for all customers. 

Our new Q&A blog series, From Behind the Curtain, provides a glimpse into the lives of the people behind our software. This series features a sit-down with different members of our team who will share unique insights and perspectives about their roles at Visual Lease.  

Last week, we spoke to Todd Worms, Manager of Customer Support at Visual Lease. He discussed his position and what clients can expect when working with his team. To read Todd’s interview, click here. 

Question #1: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

 Tell me a little about the Visual Lease Technology team. 

Answer #1: David Johnson, Senior Director of Engineering

 Our Technology group is comprised of our Engineering team, which is organized into several smaller, cross-functional teams. These teams design, develop and test new features and products in two-week iterations called “Sprints.” In addition, they find and fix defects while striving to innovate our platform to best meet the future needs of our clients. Also, in the Technology group is our Cloud Operations team. This team is fully responsible for our hosted infrastructure, as well as our environment monitoring, performance, provisioning and deployment processes and tools. Additionally, CloudOps is always available to investigate and resolve any hosting issues. 

Question #2: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

 How does the team ensure quality while developing features in such short iterations? 

Answer #2: David Johnson, Senior Director of Engineering

 In the last year, we have made a significant effort to drive quality into all our processes in a “Shift-Left” initiative. This initiative has resulted in code review of all changes, hundreds of automated tests running daily and manual regression and performance tests executed every two weeks. We also focused heavily in 2020 on resolving all known defects. The combination of frequent, automated tests and low numbers of defects has enabled us to shift from a quarterly release to a monthly release with robust quality.    

Question #3: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

 You mentioned innovation, can you share a little more about that? 

Answer #3: David Johnson, Senior Director of Engineering

 In the last year, we have successfully migrated from a private cloud vendor to AWS – the leading and most secure public cloud provider! Our CloudOps is fully scaled and ramped up on all related technologies. They have put in place comprehensive monitoring and automation for operational consistency.   

Moving to AWS has paved the way for several future innovative steps. In addition to growing our engineering team in size and capabilities, we have undertaken several important projects that have or will soon provide benefits to our customers. A few months ago, we introduced a new API along with our new Integrations Hub application. We are progressively rebuilding our application using new technologies and following scalable design patterns to dramatically improve performance and provide a modern user interface, as well as advanced BI capabilities in the future. Stay tuned for future updates in these areas! 

Along with gauging each client’s level of interest, the team offers an unparalleled customer experience that tailors its services to meet each company’s unique organizational structure, ledger accounts, borrowing rates and more. 

Our new Q&A blog series, From Behind the Curtain, provides a glimpse into the lives of the people behind our software. This series features a sit-down with different members of our team who will share unique insights and perspectives about their roles at Visual Lease.  

This week, Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy at Visual Lease, sits down with Todd Worms, Manager of Customer Support at Visual Lease, to discuss his position and what clients can expect from his team. 

Question #1: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

Tell me a little about the Visual Lease Customer Support team. 

Answer #1: Todd Worms, Manager of Customer Support

Absolutely! Our group is on the frontlines with our clients each day fielding how-to questions and helping customers solve any problems they may encounter while using the platform. We’re in a unique position, not just because of our direct face time with our clients, but because we get to collaborate with so many other departments including Engineering, Product, Account Management, Customer Success and Implementations. 

Question #2: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

What are some of the recent changes you have made to the team? 

Answer #2: Todd Worms, Manager of Customer Support

Obviously, client satisfaction is our top priority on the Support team, and this past year we really wanted to find a way to capture and measure that. Last October, we launched a Customer Satisfaction survey that is sent out every time a support case is closed. It’s a very simple survey in which clients can give us a thumbs up or thumbs down based on their experience. I’m happy to say that since we launched, over 90% of the responses we have received have been positive. 

We also took a hard look at our processes and asked two key questions: 

1. Can we improve the client experience? 
2. Are there any process gaps where we can create efficiencies?    

While that’s always a work in progress, we shifted the structure of the Support group to streamline communications to our partners in Engineering and Product, to not only reduce the number of duplicate requests they get, but also standardize how that information flows into their departments to maximize their efficiency.  

In addition, we launched a Virtual Call Center to improve the way we serve clients that request or require phone support. 

Question #3: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

It sounds like you’ve had a busy year. 

Answer #3: Todd Worms, Manager of Customer Support

That’s for sure, and there’s more coming!  We are always looking for ways to either improve the customer experience or find new ways to support them. For example, we are exploring chat functionality as well as improving our support community so that clients can better leverage our ever-growing library of knowledge articles. 

From Behind the Curtain gives an inside look into the responsibilities of various Visual Lease teams and how they work together to ensure the solution is regularly improving and clients are successfully complying with the latest lease accounting standards.