by Chelsie Marinucci, Accounting team at CCT
There are few moments in casino finance when the stakes are higher than opening day.
I know because I’ve had firsthand experience.
In 2023, I was Director of Finance for the opening of Bally’s Chicago, the first casino in the city. We were building an entire finance operation from the ground up, with experienced casino people working alongside team members who were completely new to the industry.
And before we could open our doors, we had to prove the casino could balance.
We had 24 hours.
CCT was right there with us.
Like any grand opening, there were unexpected obstacles along the way. The CCT team knew how to respond to them. Danny (CCT’s Chief Operating Officer) and Davis (Director of Client Solutions) understood the system and the casino operation around it, including how information needed to move from the floor through audit and into the journal entries we relied on to reconcile the property.
Whatever came up, they found a way to help us work through it.
We balanced well before our deadline and received approval to open.
That experience stayed with me because I had worked with plenty of vendors throughout my career. There are many people out there who know their software extremely well.
But what impressed me about CCT was how well the people behind the software knew casinos.
I had spent my own career developing that kind of knowledge. My first job out of college was in casino audit. I studied mathematics, so casino finance made sense to my brain almost immediately. I like breaking things down. I like understanding how transactions move through a system. And, yes, I really like when everything balances.
Earlier in my career, I helped open Plainridge Park Casino, the first casino in Massachusetts. I helped build processes and procedures in a state experiencing casino gaming for the first time. Later came Colorado, and eventually Bally’s Chicago.
By the time I encountered CCT, I knew what a casino finance team needed because I had spent years doing the work myself.
At Bally’s Chicago, CCT gave our team a clearer view of the entire operation. Instead of spending so much of our time entering information into spreadsheets and manually reconciling transactions, we could spend more of it auditing, investigating exceptions and understanding what the numbers were telling us.
That mattered to our auditors, too. Documentation and audit trails were available electronically, which made it easier to trace activity from the journal entry all the way back through the underlying transactions without our team constantly pulling paper records.
I became such a believer in what we were doing that I started advocating for CCT beyond our own property, sharing with Bally’s leadership what the system had made possible for our team.
Today, I work for CCT.
And I’m here for a reason.
I knew this company first as a client. I knew what it felt like to have the CCT team beside me during one of the highest-pressure moments of my career. I saw their casino knowledge firsthand, and I saw how much they cared about helping our team succeed.
Now I get to bring my own casino finance experience to other properties.
One of my favorite parts of the job is seeing how different casinos operate. I spent years building processes at the properties where I worked. At CCT, I get to learn how teams across the industry approach those same challenges, work through problems with them and share what I’ve learned along the way.
I also get to teach. When someone joins our team without a casino background, I’m usually the person saying, “I’ll teach you everything I know.”
Because I love this industry. I love casino finance. And I know what it means to be the person on the other side of the table trusting CCT with your operation.
That trust is what brought me here. Now I get to earn it from the other side.
—Chelsie Marinucci, Accounting team at CCT
