Many years before generative AI reignited efforts worldwide to speed up routine financial processes, Moonsun Park helped slash the monthly close time at Sharp Electronics Corporation USA to roughly two days from seven.
The initiative took place in about 2009, well before Park took the CFO seat in 2018. Back then she had a young family and Sharp enabled her to work part-time in a consulting capacity. Among her projects was the one that looked to accelerate the close time by applying common sense and logic.
The project reviewed all the activities that had to happen before the close, such as determining the volume of sales for the period, and figured out what balances fluctuated materially from month to month and what could be estimated.
“This was way before AI,” Park told CFO Dive in a recent interview. “It was met with so much resistance at the time. They just kept saying, ‘well, we can’t do it, we need the extra time.’ A lot of it was change management, and thinking about things differently.”
The project is just one of the many ways Park has helped shape and modernize the Montvale, New Jersey-based organization’s financial operations over her nearly 30-year career at the U.S. subsidiary of Japan-based Sharp. The company makes everything from office copy machines and equipment to consumer electronics like microwaves as well as components used by auto manufacturers in dashboard monitors and LCD screens.
CFO Dive spoke with Park, who recently received a 2026 Executive Excellence Award from NJBIZ, about her career, accomplishments and business outlook. The following Q&A was edited for brevity and clarity.
CFO Dive: Can you talk a little bit about how you got to be a CFO? I saw that you didn’t major in accounting and weren’t planning on going this way.
Moonsun Park: That is correct. I graduated with an international relations and Asian studies degree. So I had to be proficient in foreign languages so I took Japanese while I was at college. I speak Spanish, or I did somewhat fluently, so I took Spanish in college as well, even reading literature. And my first language is Korean and obviously I speak English. I love languages, that really was my passion. I studied in Japan for one summer.
I graduated during a time when the market was just terrible and it was very difficult to find a job that I could see myself doing for many years. So I went back to school and got my MBA. They have something called accounting for non-accountants so you take all the courses you would have taken as an undergrad and you get an MBA degree. And thereafter I sat for the CPA exam and thankfully I passed it in one sitting. Back then you had to take all four parts at once. It was the second time I took it, the first time I took it I didn’t pass enough for it to count.
CFO Dive: So you started your career at LG?
Moonsun Park: I started at the electronics maker LG in accounts payable and eventually moved up into an accounting manager role… I moved to Sharp as an accounting manager and along the way I was able to work part-time. So I had my second child and Sharp allowed me to work two days as a consultant and I was able to be home with my young children. In those two days I worked on different projects that I am so thankful for. With a team of course I got us from seven to a two-day close.
CFO Dive: How did you do that?
Moonsun Park: We’re not perfect, I won’t say we have everything calculated, buttoned up 100% but we’ve gotten to a point where we do a lot of work prior to the last day of the month. It’s only the items that are depending on sales closing where that happens in one and a half days and on the last half of day two we’re meeting with all the business units to ensure that we look appropriately stated.
CFO Dive: That’s interesting, everybody’s always talking about how AI will shrink the closing time. Are you using AI now to shrink it further?
Moonsun Park: So we haven’t focused so much on the close process with AI. Although we are using AI for things like our NRV [Net Realizable Value reports for our inventory] calculation. They used to start working on it at the end of day one and it would be a very, very late night for them. Now we use Anthropic’s Claude and we’re able to get that calculated within an hour. So still the process is two days and I’m not sure we can make that any faster. Could we get it done in a day and a half? Probably, but I’m not sure how much we benefit from a half day.
CFO Dive: How you handled COVID-19 was one of your accomplishments that have been cited. What did you do?
Moonsun Park: We didn’t know how long it was going to last, we weren’t sure if it was a one-month issue. As we went [further] into it we knew it was going to be a longer-term issue. So things like supply chain disruption, that was very significant for us. Containers were stuck in China…and we were willing to pay a premium for them because we needed to get our products to our customers. So during COVID there was a point where we had to airship products and some were large products like copy machines. But we made that commitment and some of our customers are still talking about it.
CFO Dive: Looking back, what’s one of the hardest decisions you’ve made and how did you come to it?
Moonsun Park: I’d say some of the hardest decisions have been in businesses we’ve decided not to continue in. Many years ago we decided to exit the TV business. It’s very commoditized. We had to restructure our teams and we had a lot of people in AR, collections and accounts payable finance functions who were going to lose their jobs. That was probably some of the toughest times. These are people we’ve been working with a long time, they were part of our organization, they became friends. We had to do it because our cost structure couldn’t support it. On a personal level it was very difficult.
CFO Dive: Anything else about your career that you want to mention?
Moonsun Park: I think one of the things I’m proudest of is I helped start our women’s group at Sharp in 2019. From that organization we started a mentorship program. Even though I am a CFO and have day-to-day responsibilieties around finance, these are my passion products and I’m very thankful to Sharp for continuing these programs.
CFO Dive: At this point, the number of women who are CFOs in public companies is still under 20% [according to one recent study from Crist Kolder Associates]. What needs to change and do you have any advice for women in finance?
Moonsun: You’ve got to be out there, you need to be networking and talking to different people. Find a mentor who can give you advice and help you through struggles or whatever it is to help you get to the next level if that’s something you’re looking for. I think men do it very naturally. They talk about sports, they go out to grab a beer and women tend to focus more so on, you know ‘I have a family to go home to and I need to be home for them or help them with their homework or drive them wherever they need to go.’ But don’t be afraid. The more you’re out there and you can show people and individuals what you can do, that recognition will come through.
CFO Dive: So do women need to go out for beers more?
Moonsun Park: I don’t think it’s necessarily going out for beers. Be where you are. Whatever that networking opportunity is, don’t let it get away. Be involved in mentorship.
