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New breed of ‘exceptional accountants’

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21st Sep 2016
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A new generation of ‘exceptional accountants’ with their sights set on becoming CEO is emerging in the profession, according to BlackLine research.

AccountingWEB caught up with Andy Bottrill, regional vice president at cloud accounting software company BlackLine to unpick the findings.

The survey, conducted with business decision-makers at medium and large enterprises, reveals accountants are regarded as key to business growth, but often miss out on decision-making.

Business leaders now recognise that accounting departments are under-valued in their role in the business, with more than a third of respondents accepting their financial teams are an underutilised resource. Half of business decision-makers surveyed added they felt their finance team and CFO typically had an “overly taxing volume of work”.

Andy Bottrill said the results of the research were clear: finance teams have a huge untapped potential to act as growth drivers for their organisation.

New technology is enabling accountants to break free from manual data entry and Excel-heavy tasks to help steady the ship in times of economic uncertainty. In addition, a third of respondents said they would rather have an ex-finance chief (34%), or ex-accountant (27%) run their business over an ex-salesperson (13%).

Bottrill told AccountingWEB this culture change was equipping the finance workers of today to become CFOs and future CEOs: “The control element will always be the accountant and the CFO. Having that person in the CEO chair is very comforting for shareholders because they know they’ve got that trusted pair of hands.

“In times of economic downturn, they [the shareholders] want an accountant in there to steady the ship.”

According to the latest Robert Half tracker accounting is now the most common career background of FTSE 100 chief executives, with almost one in four company bosses holding a chartered accounting qualification and 55% of chief executives coming from a finance background.

Bottrill added that to unlock the ‘true’ value of an accounting team, businesses need to provide the right tools that can automate manual work like processing and reporting, and allow accountants to focus on high-value areas including fraud detection, compliance and data analytics.

“Accountants could become ‘exceptional accountants’ and be on track to a CEO role,” Bottrill said. "Exceptional accountants can continually capture, validate and produce financial data throughout the month, to work in real time instead of in peaks and troughs. New technology is empowering exceptional accountants to gain more time to add strategic value to the business,” he added.

As revealed in a recent Deloitte CFO survey business uncertainty is on the up, and as a result CFOs are having to shift to more defensive strategies. However, Bottrill said there were opportunities for CFOs in the good times and the bad: “In the good times, when the investment is there and the technology is there it can really drive the business forward. Likewise on the flipside in more turbulent times by putting in these tools and driving efficiencies, getting those automations, it’s also good as well. So by choosing the right technology and implementing it at the right time there are significant wins to be made,” he said.

According to Bottrill, exceptional accountants have a combination of deep knowledge of business performance and the ability to act strategically in the high-value areas such as data analytics and line-of-business advisory. “They create innovation and opportunity within their organisation, and are pivotal to its success beyond simply managing finances.”

Despite recent economic uncertainty Blackline has seen increased uptake from large organisation and growing interest in the mid-market.

“We haven’t seen a trend of people putting spend on hold,” he added. “There is a new breed of accountants coming through demanding the latest technology. The next layer up to finance management are demanding things quicker and more accurately. They will achieve that through technology.

“Up to the top with CFOs and FD it’s all about compliance visibility. Instead of looking in the mirror at what happened a few weeks ago, now they want technology to tell them what’s happening in the business today, yesterday and what they should be doing tomorrow. We’re seeing greater adoption of cloud and CFOs are wanting to see ROI quicker.”

When it comes to convincing the board to invest in new tools Bottrill said the way forward was to demonstrate the value: “Case studies prove the point – the technology is proven, it’s not new. If you want to drive rather than follow the rest it’s important to jump on now.”

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