Three years after the publication of “Getting Beyond Counting,” the American Institute of CPA’s (1) published a follow-up piece, “Roles Changing for Management Accountants.” This later analysis asserted that the finance function has become more truly strategic, thereby justifying raising the department to “C-level” and ensuring that corporate boards pay attention to Finance for more than just “bean counting” reporting. The facts cited came to light in a 1999 survey conducted by the Institute of Management Accountants among its members. The majority of those surveyed claimed that strategic planning topped the list of Finance functions in point of being critical to a company’s commercial success and on which they therefore spent more of their time than any other task. Second in importance was giving inputs for the building of computer systems and day-to-day operations (a dynamic that has undoubtedly grown more critical since then), process improvement (still as critical as when Six Sigma was all the rage), and finally, the “core” tasks of financial and economic analysis. Moreover, survey participants attested that the first three roles typically demanded more of their time than in 1994.
Strategic planning is a perfect example of the earlier thesis that being a visionary is intrinsic to the role of management accountants. After all, the profession needed to shake off the lethargy of simply reporting on results in a timely fashion. To grasp how company strengths can be matched against looming opportunities in the marketplace, how weaknesses can be made irrelevant in the face of relentless competition, and where the company should go for sustainable performance down the road obviously means that a management accountant must, among others:
- Frequently look up from his spreadsheets and executive information systems to visualize the possibilities open to the company;
- Be an agent for change by tramping the rest of the executive suite and finding out how they do what they do; and,
- Join the strategic planning task forces in reviewing what can be done to get more out of the supply and value chains.
The examples of EDI and deregulation given in the 1999 article are already a dozen-odd years out of date. Today, the management accountant must grapple with million dollar enterprise resource planning systems, leading the march forward to larger cash flows from e-commerce, a Democratic government intent on shaping a socialist America, bastions of Wall Street falling by the wayside, and ethical questions raised by outsourcing to semi-totalitarian nations. Twice already in this decade, the nation has endured recessions and there is no light at the end of the tunnel for the current one. Without vision and the strategic contributions that the management accountant’s sensitivity analyses permit, companies could very well stagnate.
Works Cited
American Institute of CPA’s. “Roles Changing for Management Accountants.” The Free Library. Journal of Accountancy. 1999. Web.