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Alex Zank

Jill Klindt is in a position that screams 

: she’s a CFO with ESG reporting in her remit for Workiva, a company that develops financial and ESG reporting software.

 and is also executive chair of Workiva’s ESG task force, which ensures the company “tracks a course for consistent ESG progress and excellence,” according to Workiva’s website.

The company’s ESG reporting initiatives “blend in with our external and with our product focus as well, so they are very interconnected, and that’s not the same at a lot of companies,” Klindt told CFO Brew during an interview at Workiva’s Amplify 2024 conference earlier this fall.

Workiva, which employed more than 2,500 people at the end of 2023 and reported nearly $178 million in Q2 2024 revenue, according to SEC filings, uses its own platform for its reporting. (The company will release its Q3 earnings today after the market closes.) This gives Klindt a multifaceted view of Workiva, as both its head of finance and as a user. And as head of the ESG task force, Klindt said she brings together the finance, ESG, and sustainability teams to ensure Workiva’s platform has all the necessary tools for customers.

Previously, ESG reporting “wasn't thought of as something that would need to be auditable,” Klindt explained. But now there are strict reporting requirements

for specific regulations, such as Scope 3 

 in both California’s and the European Union’s regulations, as well as the 

European Sustainability Reporting Standards

 companies must follow as part of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The task force fosters necessary understanding across the relevant teams—the finance professionals learn “the data needs and the calculations…and why it’s important who we’re reporting to,” while the ESG and sustainability teams learn “about data sources…building a control environment, and building processes and procedures that can be audited,” Klindt said.

“That’s the whole point of the task force, is to not only create that synergy between these teams that haven't necessarily worked together that closely before…but also that connection between that integrated report—financial and non-financial data—living in harmony,” she said.

ESG is a growing area of non-financial reporting that’s becoming prominent on financial and reporting teams. According to a Workiva survey of over 2,000 finance, sustainability, and risk professionals, nearly nine in 10 organizations are prioritizing ESG reporting more in 2024 than previous years. A January Deloitte survey of 300 executives at public companies with annual revenues of $500 million-plus found that more than half of organizations have formed a “cross-functional ESG working group” to review ESG reporting strategies, compared with just 21% of organizations in a similar survey in Q4 2021.

Governments at varying levels, from the EU to the state of California, are requiring companies to disclose certain climate information. The regs directly impact organizations operating in these regions, as well as organizations that work with the affected businesses, as CFO Brew 

“If you want to do business in a global economy, you have to do this work,” Klindt said.

Jonathan Johnson, former CEO of Overstock.com and a board member of JM Smucker Co., said at the Amplify 2024 conference certain aspects of ESG reporting are becoming “table stakes.”

“The boards I sit on talk about, ‘how do we do what’s right for the planet, for our suppliers, for our consumers? A lot of our customers are demanding it,’” Johnson said. “So it’s more than just, ‘OK, we’ve got to check a box.’ It’s, ‘We want to do the right thing.’”

The same goes for Workiva, according to Klindt.

“We want to do this because of all the reasons that our customers want to,” Klindt said. “There's a lot of stakeholders that are interested in this data. We want to provide them [with] very valuable data. We're putting in place science-based targets that we need to track over time the progress that we're making, and we're reporting into different reporting agencies; we're putting our data into multiple frameworks.”

Here’s how Workiva’s CFO builds synergy across finance and reporting teams

Jill Klindt heads up the company’s ESG task force to create cross-departmental synergy.

Understanding history helps us navigate the future—and the history of finance is no exception. From the days of pen and paper to today’s AI tools, few job functions have transformed as much as finance. To prepare for the future, it’s important to understand how we got here and where today’s trends began.

, co-authored by senior finance leader Anders Liu-Lindberg et al., explores finance industry trends and examines how CFOs can use AI to make strategic, informed decisions. Learn more when you get the e-book.

How today’s trends can help CFOs make strategic decisions.

Natasha Piñon

Move over, quiet luxury. When DoorDash, the delivery giant and Wall Street darling, reports earnings, it offers a telling glimpse into the state of “

,” the technically unnecessary spending that indicates a robust economy.

Right now, spending looks solid-ish. In its Q4 2023 report, DoorDash said total order value on its app climbed 22% to $17.6 billion. That’s because more orders were coming in: Total orders on the app jumped 23% to 574 million. Order frequency, the amount of times people ordered on its app, jumped to an all-time high of more than 37 million.

On the back of those solid stats, revenue jumped to $2.3 billion, marking a 27% year over year increase and beating Wall Street expectations.

Not everything was sunny on the delivery front, though. DoorDash’s net losses didn’t narrow as much as Wall Street expected. It lowered its net loss to $156 million, compared to $642 million in the same quarter of 2022. Analysts expected the company to narrow its loss much further, to $61 million.

And labor struggles weighed on the delivery company. Late last year, a New York law required companies to pay delivery workers higher wages, eventually reaching $20 an hour in April 2025. Major players including DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber said the law will unfairly target food delivery services, but an appellate court denied their appeals.

 with investors after the earnings report, 

 noted that the company was “absorbing some of the regulatory costs in Q1,” but said he expected those costs would eventually decrease.

DoorDash credit card being swiped in card swiper

DoorDash reports jump in total orders, revenue

The delivery giant’s earnings offer a glimpse into the state of discretionary spending. 

Courtney Vien

Yeti posted muted fourth-quarter and full-year 2023 earnings, as it continues to recover from a product recall that cost the company more than $170 million over 2022 and 2023.

. For the full year, its adjusted net sales were 

 over 2022. Its drinkware category sales rose 8% for the year, topping $1 billion. But its cooler and equipment sales were down 2%, partly because it stopped selling the recalled products.

Yeti did show some signs of rebounding from the recalls: Its gross margin reached an “all-time high” of more than 60% in Q4, president and CEO Matt Reintjes said, stating the company ended 2023 with its “strongest balance sheet to-date.”

, and Yeti may still be bitter about it. No one uttered the 

 during the most recent earnings call, and even an analyst asking a question only made reference to “the competitor.”

But, as Reintjes observed, “Competition brings awareness to a category and creates market opportunity.” This may have been true for Yeti, as its drinkware sales for the quarter were up 12% over Q4 2022. Yeti began offering a “broader range of color options” for its cup this year, CFO Michael McMullen said, and introduced a 

of its Rambler cup in November, perhaps in an attempt to steal some thunder from . . . you know who.

The Stanley Cup spillover effect

Yeti’s stumbling recovery.

Climate, China, hacking, AI, interest rates: You could fill a macroeconomic bingo card with recent headlines about Duke Energy.

The utility company, which has some 8.4 million electric customers in six states and 1.7 million gas customers in five states, posted its 

 last week. Its full-year adjusted earnings per share was $5.56, about 6% higher than in 2022, but its Q4 EPS was slightly 

. Its reported earnings for the year were $4.2 billion for electricity and $519 million for gas, up from $4 billion from electricity and $468 million from gas in 2022.

The earnings growth was driven by a lower tax rate, lower operations and maintenance expenses, and “contributions from rate cases” (read: 

), the company said in a statement. Duke also gained a record 195,000 new customers last year, largely in the Sunbelt states of Florida and the Carolinas.

Headwinds the company faced in 2023 included high interest rates, depreciation, and what it referred to in an earnings call as “

.” The weather —which most of us thought of as, well, 

—cost Duke Energy’s electric utilities segment around $245 million pretax and brought its EPS down by 25 cents.

The company reiterated its forecast of 5%–7% adjusted EPS growth between 2024 and 2028.

 Following pressuret from Congress, Duke Energy agreed to remove energy storage batteries made by Chinese manufacturer CATL from Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune, 

. It will stop using CATL batteries company-wide by 2027 due to concerns that hackers with ties to the Chinese government could use them to infiltrate the US power grid.

 with major tech firms about paying them to use their generators to power data centers during times of high demand, Bloomberg reported. Tech companies’ demand for power has grown recently because of their adoption of generative AI.

 Duke Energy earnings rise as it contends with China, AI

 More customers, higher rates boosted its earnings.

Graison Dangor

Eli Lilly got an even bigger injection of revenue from its new weight-loss drug, Zepbound, than Wall Street was expecting when the drugmaker announced its fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday.

Years after launching clinical trials for the weekly injection and its identical twin for diabetes, Mounjaro, Lilly expects its bet to pay off with revenue growth as dramatic as the weight-loss results it touts in its wonder drugs.

Despite Zepbound’s arrival on pharmacy shelves in early December, with less than a full month left in the quarter, it brought in $175.8 million—$100 million more than analysts forecast, 

. That’s just a fraction of the $2.2 billion sales for Mounjaro, whose spring 2022 approval gave it an 18-month head start on Zepbound.

In October, Goldman Sachs projected that the market for anti-obesity drugs like Zepbound could 

 a year by 2030, a 16-fold increase from 2023. Seamus Fernandez, analyst for Guggenheim, 

 that Zepbound and Mounjaro’s active ingredient, tirzepatide, could become “the best-selling molecule of all time in the pharmaceutical industry.”

Lilly expects the dramatic results to continue from both Zepbound, its challenger to Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, and from its diabetes drug Mounjaro, whose revenues grew nearly eightfold from 2022. Mounjaro is Lilly’s rival to Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic.

Lilly forecast its 2024 revenue will be $40.4 billion–$41.6 billion, up from the $34.1 billion it reported for 2023 and is expected to be "largely driven by New Products,” according to its earnings release. That category does include three other drugs, but only Mounjaro and Zepbound are major sales drivers. Earnings per share and net income of $2.2 billion 

Had the pharmaceutical giant not been dealing with the decline of Trulicity, the Indianapolis drugmaker would have even more impressive earnings and forecasts to share. While Trulicity closed 2023 as Lilly’s largest driver of revenue, its $7.1 billion in sales represented a 4% fall from 2022, and its fourth quarter revenues shrank 14% year over year as Mounjaro surpassed it as the top earner. Lilly reported that Trulicity, which has been selling fewer units at lower realized prices, will continue to suffer sales declines in 2024.