Sarah Bernauer has been growing with KOBOLD USA since 2001, a quarter century that took her from Administration through Executive Assistance and Office Management to Controller. That path means she's seen this business from nearly every angle, and it shows: her institutional knowledge is a company asset in its own right.
Today she leads Accounting and Finance while overseeing the Office Coordinator and Order Entry Specialist, managing payroll and employee compliance, heading health and risk management, serving as IT services liaison, and working alongside KOBOLD's outside accounting and legal partners. When her work is done well, customers never see it: invoices are right, orders enter cleanly, and the business simply runs.
She also led KOBOLD's ERP implementation end to end, managing the project while personally building the modules under her responsibility and she still works with an ERP broker to keep improving the system for everyone who touches it. The technical skills behind that work (report writing, query building, declarative programming, financial accounting) are largely self-taught, picked up deliberately as the business needed them. Detail-oriented but comfortable zooming out, she documents workflows so knowledge never walks out the door and takes on new responsibilities as fast as the company evolves.
Outside of work, nothing outranks family time with her husband and two kids, especially watching them grow into adulthood. The rest goes to yoga, volunteering at church, and hosting cookouts with friends.
"Good operations work is invisible when it's done right. That's the standard."