On Aug. 5, Bradley Fralic was appointed permanent university controller by president Barbara Snyder. The interim controller since last Fall, Fralic plans to continue his various improvements.

According to Case Daily reports, over the past several months, Fralic and his staff have enhanced streamlined accounting processes and reduced the time required to complete major quarterly reports by more than 50 percent.

Fralic said he plans to work with his staff to continue to improve accuracy, timeliness and relevance of information provided to campus constituents. Fralic has tidied up the financial mechanisms of the University so well, it begs the question, what was so wrong in the first place?

“It was fine,” he said. “I offered a fresh set of eyes, a new perspective. There was nothing wrong with the way things worked here, but before I arrived, everyone was used to working with older methods.” Coming from an environment different from CWRU, he said he was better able to challenge the older routine because he wasn’t accustomed to it.

He hopes to implement changes this year that may have a very positive effect on the student body. According to his plan, people from the Bursars office will travel to more convenient locations on campus on different days of the week to answer students’ questions. Because everyone at CWRU is touched by the Bursars office in one way or another, making these services more accessible will enable students to better manage their tuition-related finances.

“We’re a bank for the most part. We work closely with the Bursar’s office and the Cashier’s office [with billing and loans],” meaning that his office doesn’t choose how to spend funds, but rather manages the payments and the transfers of money.

Before accepting his appointment as interim university controller, Fralic had prior history with the university, having graduated from CWRU in 1991 with a Masters in Accountancy. He went on to teach at Kent State and Cleveland State Universities At Kent state, he taught accounting for MBA students and taught a similar class to students in the Non-profit Masters program at Cleveland State.

“I wasn’t training students to be accountants,” he said. Rather he was teaching accounting and how to manage other financial issues that come up in other professions.

Fralic has also worked with KPMG, an international audit, tax and advisory service where he advised Chief Financial Officers. At Deloitte & Touche, a similar financial firm, he spent 12 years consulting with an expansive scope of public and private clients nationwide. Previous to his employment with CWRU, Fralic worked at Skoda Minotti, a Northeast Ohio broad-based accounting and tax, strategic planning, litigation support, financial staffing, information technologies, insurance, marketing and investment services firm.

Besides operating as controller, Fralic wants to begin teaching once again. He hopes to teach Graduate courses in accounting next semester. “I loved interacting with other people. It’s fun to watch students grasp concepts, to watch the change in their faces as they begin to understand what I’m teaching them,” he said.