Art of Accounting: Accountants Club’s new president

I met Natasha Kosnac through the Accountants Club of America where she is the current president. She succeeded Peter Frank, who was a long-time president and who guided the club through the pandemic lockdown. Natasha is a remarkable person and I found it very interesting to talk with her and decided to share who she is and what she said about her agenda for the ACA and her career.

Natasha worked at a number of smaller accounting firms and that led her to EisnerAmper for about six years. Presently she is the chief audit officer at UniteHere, a union that represents over 250,000 hospitality and related field workers in the United States and Canada. This position has her doing quite a bit of traveling and meeting many varied people that she enjoys. She is also an adjunct professor at Hunter College, which is part of the CUNY system sharing her knowledge and career experiences. She is also a new mom and finds managing her career and mom duties a challenge but also very satisfying and rewarding. A great benefit about working at EisnerAmper was meeting her husband Fred Kosnac there. He has started his own fractional CFO firm called Crystal Oak CFOs & Advisors. 

Natasha started at ACA as a typical member participating in its events and then was asked to join the board of governors. She worked her way up to taking over as acting president and then as its current president. She is gung-ho about the ACA and its many benefits to its members including a forthcoming presentation by Mark Koziel on February 10 on Zoom and in person in Manhattan (click here to register). Natasha’s hard work ethic allows her to juggle being the president of the Accountants Club, her career and her many other interests. 

Natasha did not start out wanting to be an accountant. She studied biology and anthropology at Stony Brook University and also spent time in Australia researching fruit flies. She said what she did was interesting but it did not appear to be something she wanted to do for the “rest of her life.” Her father, who is a CPA, suggested she spend a little time working at his firm to see if this might be something she would like. Well, she loved it, and returned to school to get her accounting credits and later an MBA.

She is also active with a company she founded over 10 years ago. Dream Dance Fitness provides adult wellness and fitness counseling through dancing and now employs about a dozen specialists. She is very well organized and has established a set of systems using her internal control knowledge that permits her to control its operations without being onsite. Those skills also help her immensely in her “day job” overseeing the auditing at the many locations of UniteHere. Natasha is an organizer, also having founded a “Rising Stars” program at EisnerAmper teaching younger accountants’ soft skills such as how to network, marketing, social media strategies, client relations, confidence building, identifying mentors and ways to jumpstart their careers.  

She certainly can multitask, has a lot of energy and is looking forward to applying these to ACA to grow that important organization by attracting more members, bringing in timely and relevant speakers, and adding younger professionals of all types to the club’s board. ACA does not just admit accountants, but it includes professionals that work with accountants, e.g., bankers, attorneys, financial planners, investment managers and valuation experts.

Natasha is approachable and welcoming! Show up and register for an Accountants Club of America event. Introduce yourself if she hasn’t already sought you out because you are a new face. Don’t miss the chance to connect at the Mark Koziel presentation on February 10.

Do not hesitate to contact me at emendlowitz@withum.com with your practice management questions or about engagements you might not be able to perform.