Ok, so that’s a loaded statement and I am sure many of you will throw your hands in the air and say “that’s completely preposterous” but now that I have your attention let’s explore what I mean by the financial accounting function never being strategic.
Financial Accounting at its most fundamental bookkeeping level is, well, to be quite frank, not very inspiring.
The job is all about initial allocations, making sure the debits equal the credits and that all the relevant and material stuff is called out and stated consistently and in a way that it can be easily understood.
If there’s one thing the Financial Accountant needs to be, it’s not dynamic, creative, inspirational or strategic, it’s just ‘be consistently reliable and accurate’!
Unless you’re the kind of person who spends their days lining up freshly sharpened pencils in order of height the chances are that you embarked upon a career in accounting and desperately want to be doing something quite different.
Sharp orderly pencils don’t mean much
If you’re the guy who hasn’t moved on to propelling pencils or committed to ink, then you probably get hot sweats waiting for those periodic updates, fresh exposure drafts and public comments documents.
Ok it’s not all so bad, perhaps you’re a craftsman of sorts and see those digital mounds of spreadsheets as a kind of badge of courage and determination.
On the other hand you may already have graduated beyond the humdrum repetitive weekly flash reports and slow month-end close panic and now you get to be one of ‘those’, who breathe down the necks of the labouring bookkeepers responsible for the trial balance and P&L statements. Your view might be that it’s only after the accounts are at trial balance that the ‘real’ work gets done.
When I worked in the accounting field, it was either on public audit, internal audit or working on those financials.
Getting out of Financial Accounting was something I desperately needed to do, the grind of weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual preparation, accruals, standard journals, payroll, treasury and reconciliations of sub ledgers was mind numbing stuff. Some former CPA’s regard their transition into management accounting or consultancy as rehabilitating.
One of the reasons it’s mind numbing is the sheer volume of information that needs to be processed and then that dull repetitive nature of the work – thrills come down to finding that miscast penny or catching a supplier providing you with a duplicate invoice or roasting AP for double paying a supplier or perhaps being delighted by a duplicate payment by a customer. Actually, none of those things are really that much fun at all. It’s not like winning the lottery or throwing a double six in monopoly it’s more like ground-hog day!
Over the years I have had to contend with being involved in a wide variety of accounting processes and functions on a pretty regular basis, in the end it is difficult to escape financial accounting.
Certainly, having to prepare financials helped in being able to relate to the frustrations that financial accountants have voiced to me over and over again when working with various systems but it’s one of the reasons why I want financial accountants to be able to “work smarter and not harder”, I have lived and felt the pain and am convinced there are better ways to do some things.
To my mind there are really only two ways that the financial accountant can work smarter and the answer lies in automating the financial accounting function as much as is practically possible.
By automating the financial accounting function you free up time for accountant to give more considered thought to how the numbers appear as opposed to what the numbers appear as – this is especially important if the financial accounting group carries some responsibility for having opinions on how the business is doing things and giving considered judgement on certain courses of action.
