The reputation of CPAs, perhaps exaggerated, is that they are precise, introverted, and conservative. Whether they are employed by a public auditing firm or by an organization, a CPA’s traditional responsibilities have been financial stewardship and assurance of financial accounting compliance with regulatory and tax agencies and typically report past historical data.
Can you imagine accountants as American cowboys of the Wild, Wild West in the 1800s? I can. And they can be dangerous. Yeehaw! Yippee-i-o-i-a
In place of guns in their belt holsters the cowboy accountant may be carrying a smartphone. Their rodeo rope that cowboys use to catch running steers may be their audit controls manual. Cowboy accountants also wear well-shined wing-tipped dress shoes as their cowboy boots.
If Hollywood can make sequels to movies, why can’t I? This article is my sequel to my previously published “Can Accountants Grow the Beans Too?” article.
Here is an edited excerpt of an e-mail to me from an accountant I have known for years. His name will remain anonymous for his own protection.
I left my job with Xxxxx. Most of the VPs there did not understand strategy execution or managerial accounting. A few others and I tried to spread the word for about two years. It was just always a struggle to get buy-in for strategy execution, a balanced scorecard, dashboards or driver-based budgeting and rolling financial forecasts. Our guys weren’t really interested in profitability modeling or using any activity-based costing. I tried to do one driver-based budgeting project, but the accounting software could not handle it. It is sad.
Managers are increasingly shifting from reacting to after-the-fact reported outcomes to anticipating the future with predictive analysis and proactively making adjustments with better decisions. Despite some advances in the application of new costing techniques such as activity-based costing, are management accountants adequately satisfying the needs of managers and employee teams for decision-based cost information? Or is the gap widening? That is, are the accountants still just counting the beans, or are they helping to grow the beans?
I continue to get mixed signals regarding how advanced CFOs are with their journey to become the “strategic advisor” that is so frequently mentioned in finance and accounting magazines. But I am unsure how much the evidence supports the vision.
The CFOs who are bold will candidly describe their managerial accounting practices and systems as aged and Medieval at the extreme. The bold ones are unafraid to admit that their existing reported information is both flawed with inaccurate costs and incomplete by not providing P&Ls by customer including channel, selling, customer service, and marketing related “costs to serve” which are arguably more important than product costs.
