Nancy McClelland was still in her early days of working as a fully licensed CPA, about a decade ago, when she took the opportunity to introduce herself to one of her idols, accounting software consultant Doug Sleeter, at the accounting technology conference he founded and led. Sleeter took one look at her conference badge, which included the name of her firm, The Dancing Accountant, and the next day, McClelland was on the main stage to open the conference, participating in a group routine to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.”

When people talk about what could open doors during the course of a financial career, they might point to education, credentials, and upskilling. But for McClelland, bringing her full self to the job—her “multidimensional character,” as one of her clients puts it—is a large part of the secret sauce.

Being the Dancing Accountant is in one sense two different things: McClelland is a dancer performing with several groups, and she also serves as an accountant to small businesses in Chicago. But The Dancing Accountant is also a singular identity and a way of doing business for McClelland that emerged from her choice to change course in her career and her passion multiple times over 30 years of professional work.

In that same time, she says, accounting itself has changed, to allow professionals to bring more of their personality to the work.

Keep reading.—SW

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Finance professionals plotting their company’s spending on employee benefits have a new trend to consider. Lifestyle spending accounts, or LSAs, which might cover an employee’s spending on items ranging from pet care, to fitness, to cleaning services and salon treatments.

LSAs are now being offered by 51% of companies tracked by benefits platform company Benepass, according to their latest Benchmarking Benefits Guide. It’s a bump from 37% last year, and makes LSAs the most popular perk offered by the companies studied for the report, beating out fitness and wellness perks.

In a sense, LSAs are a lot like offering employees a raise, just with a different name and way for employees to access the money. Unlike health insurance and 401(k) plans, which fall under specific regulations and laws, LSAs are perks that have no legal definition, and so can be used to pay for almost anything an employer decides to cover.

Keep reading.—SW

Coworking is a weekly segment where we talk to CFOs and other leaders in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. Let us know if you are – or you know – a CFO we should interview.

Mala Murthy has been CFO at Teladoc Health, a $3.7 billion remote-health provider, since 2019. Prior to that, she spent seven years at American Express, rising to SVP and CFO of global commercial services, and before AmEx, she worked at PepsiCo for 17 years in various roles. She began her career at Sun Microsystems, after getting a master’s degree from the Yale School of Management and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your company provides remote healthcare services, so you’re surely paying a lot of attention to policies around remote work and hybrid work, and other options. What is your reaction to the broader discussion about these different approaches?

It’s certainly been a journey for all of us. I think the days of “five days in the office” are over. Different companies have taken different strategies and different stances, from a return-to-work perspective. Some have said they’ll go completely virtual. Many I see, based on my conversations with other CFOs, are doing it as a hybrid. And I do think that hybrid is going to be the way it is likely going to be.

You emigrated to the US after getting your MBA. What do you think US companies should be doing to attract top international talent?

At the end of the day, I think all of us, from a talent perspective, look for where we can find the most competent people. What we are looking for is the combination of functional excellence and leadership. What is really heartening for me is if I look back to when I started my career versus now, I think the borders are so much more open today than it used to be several years ago.

Keep reading.—SW

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: $5.6 billion. That’s the estimated economic impact should the United Auto Workers strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers last 10 days, according to the Anderson Economic Group. (Bloomberg)

Quote: “This is the first X-ray into [former Exxon CEO Rex] Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.”—Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, on claims Exxon downplayed scientific findings about the severity of climate change (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: Some UK pubs have adopted surge pricing for beer during times of peak demand — a strategy even Lyft is reportedly trying to move away from. (the New York Times)

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