Accountants and the price of cheese

What’s with the title of this article, you might ask. Yeo Beng Yean, a Director in Global Financial Services, a division within Assurance and Advisory Business Services in Ernst & Young, explains, so read on and you will get the answer.

Stereotyping

Accountants have had a long history of being stereotyped as uninteresting and boring number crunchers who often dress in crisp white shirts with black or grey pants; or maybe dark blue pants on the day that they are feeling a tad adventurous. This stereotyping has also been ingrained in most forms of media, none more than on TV and in movies. Try naming a movie which featured an accountant in a positive role - chances are you’ll have a hard time finding one.

Here’s one, possibly: The Producers. In that movie, accountants are described as people who ‘spend their life counting other people’s money; people they are smarter than, better than’. Hmm... is that supposed to be a compliment? Then it gets worse when they are also described as people who ‘live in grey little rooms, go to grey little jobs and lead grey little lives’. In fact, people say that since all they do is count, even the word ‘count’ is in part of their job title.

Well, nothing is further from the truth. Accountants are not merely number crunchers and their favourite piece of technology is definitely not the calculator. In fact, some accountants don’t even own a calculator nowadays. With the advent of technology, calculators may soon be made obsolete by the computers or mobile phones. But that’s another matter altogether. Let’s focus back on the accountant. It is common that a vast number of accounting graduates choose audit as their first stepping stone to the working world. So learn about this oft-misunderstood world of auditing.

Multi-faceted window of opportunity

Audit is not just about regurgitating accounting standards and it is definitely more than just looking at numbers. To be a competent auditor, one often needs to be multi-faceted. Auditors are not trained to just look at numbers superficially but to delve into the business decisions and reasons that drive those numbers. Hence, one would be expected to communicate not just with other accountants but also with personnel from operational areas such as production managers, sales managers, treasurers, corporate finance personnel and even the COO, CEO or members of the Board of Directors. The opportunity provided to discuss and communicate will serve to provide auditors with insights on how each company is run, and to hone their business acumen.

Variety is not only the spice of life, but it is also another reason why accounting firms may be an attractive stepping stone for new graduates. Very often an auditor will serve more than one client within each calendar year and in that respect the clients served may well be from various industries. The variety of clients served enables an auditor to gather multi-industry knowledge, and to compare practices in different companies within the same industry, eg the characteristics and peculiarities of each industry. Where a particular section of the audit requires specific technical or specialised skills, for example the treasury division of a banking client, very often an auditor will find that the practical knowledge exposure obtained is invaluable.

Financial knowledge coupled with strong commercial or business comprehension makes for a very strong combination of skills commonly needed in business leaders.

© GTI Specialist Publishers. Reproduced with permission.