One Millennial’s Determination Leads to 30 Rock

By Kathleen Hoffelder, NJCPA Senior Content Editor

When NJCPA member Danielle Karacsony, CPA, sets her mind on something, she typically doesn’t let anything stand in her way. That explains how the Millennial from Jersey City passed all four parts of the CPA Exam on her first attempt with an average score of 93. It also explains how she worked for both NBCUniversal and The Walt Disney Company before the age of 30.

Danielle’s career path started out at KPMG as an audit associate, advancing to an audit senior. Though auditing offered great opportunities, she saw the chance to work for a company she admired since childhood — Disney. “I really liked auditing, particularly risk assessment. But you should always be aware of the job market. You always need to be prepared,” explains Danielle. After two years at KPMG, she jumped to Disney, where she spearheaded fixed-asset accounting and analyzed marketing expenses.

“I thought I wasn’t ever going to have the opportunity to work at Disney if I didn’t move to Florida or California, where most of their operations were located. I was on their website and saw a job posting in New York for their streaming business. I applied and was selected,” she explains. Disney licensed out their platform to other third parties, which meant she had to know all the income streams to do her job well. “Getting involved in the fixed-asset process was important for me to understand how the business worked as a whole,” she says. Danielle eventually made the leap to NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York as the manager of accounting. Here, she manages its subscription revenue process; oversees the automation tools for revenue recognition; resolves discrepancies; and collaborates with operations, marketing, partnerships and technology advisors on compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act controls. In short, she focuses on improving its business processes.

Her department also implemented a new software solution that automatically recognizes revenue. “Our (streaming) procedures had to be scaled in such a way that we could handle moving from a small business to a large-scale business. The manual process we had for recognizing subscriber revenue was not capable of handling the volume of transactions,” she explains. Danielle also works with marketing and partnership teams over vouchers for companies like JetBlue.

Early Decisions

As someone who enjoyed math throughout school, Danielle considered engineering before selecting accounting as her major. Danielle’s mother, Debra Karacsony, CPA, also a member of the NJCPA and formerly the director of quality control at Sax LLP, influenced Danielle’s choice to start in accounting. “She didn’t push me to become an accountant, but she said I should consider taking a class in college,” she says. Her mother’s only stipulation for Danielle and her sister, Amanda, now an interior architect, upon entering college was to select a major that led to professional opportunities. Danielle’s mother said, “Choose something you like, but you need to have a career path in mind.”

After initially entering the University of Delaware as an undecided major, Danielle took her first accounting class during her second semester and loved it. “Once I fully understood accounting, it was a no brainer. At the end of my freshman year, I declared an accounting major,” she says.

So, what specifically appealed to her?

“It is very logical; accounting involves a different way of thinking than I had ever thought of before,” she explains. Jobs were also readily available. The Big 4 and other accounting firms were frequently on campus, offering internships and jobs, she says. “They had many events which you could participate in and learn about the profession. It became the obvious choice.”