3 Non-Accounting Concepts That Accountants Should Know
I am a huge believer in learning about things outside my regular discipline to help grow myself as a person and professional. Over the years, I've realized the value of having skills outside what's expected of me because those skills represent the "extra mile" in many situations that has been a differentiating factor. Last week, we talked about accounting concepts that non-accountants should know. This week, we'll talk about non-accounting concepts and skills that accountant should be utilizing for their work.
Human Resources
As an accountant, you know the mechanics of the business. It's very likely that you understand how the company makes money and how cash comes in and out of the business. However, the one thing many accountants are missing from their skill set is an understanding of how people work within the business. Understanding what policies and procedures should be in place to help employees is a critical skill set to have. This is especially important for accountants who want to work with smaller businesses one day. most of the small businesses I know will hire an accountant before they hire an HR person, and the responsibilities that an HR person might handle would be passed on to that accountant until the company is large enough to have more administrative employees. On top of the fundamental operational advantages, having a fundamental understanding of human resources will also help in developing good compensation and incentive compensation plans for employees that make sense for the employee as well as the company.
Communication of Information
Accounting is the language of business, and very often it will be your responsibility to translate concepts from the accounting terms to plain English to facilitate projects with people who are not accountants. It's very important to understand that your value is inherently limited by what you can communicate to others. Outside of circumstances where you are doing everything yourself to submit to a bank or the IRS (which can happen if the company is small enough), the value of your work is determined by the company's ability to utilize it. If the company owner doesn't understand the report you just created, then they can't make use of it. Well some of the responsibility is on them to understand their business, it's also on you to translate accounting into plain English. I've seen many accountants succeed where others fail by taking the extra mile to make their reports, emails, and communications clearer to people outside of their accounting department.
Internal Networking
Internal networking (networking within the organization you work for) is a skill that provides accountants great value, in either private or public accounting settings.
For Private industry accountants, portions of the job will involve receiving information from others in the company. This could be expense reports, progress reports on projects for revenue recognition, or purchase orders with the appropriate personnel authorizing the purchase. I've seen many instances where the accounting department acts as its own separate entity and doesn't interact much with the rest of the company. In these situations, questions or problems with these interactive tasks don't get resolved as quickly. Alternatively, I've seen companies where the accounting department goes out of their way to interact with everyone and communicate exactly what is needed in certain circumstances (such as documenting things in email chains). As a result, these companies have a much smoother accounting operation because the whole company is working to support them. By creating a spirit of cooperation with the accounting department and the rest of the company (instead of an us versus them mentality), you can save time, effort, and headaches.
For public accountants, networking within your firm is likely the best way to get answers to important questions. Public accounting tends to have an attitude of working with what has worked in the past. This is generally a good idea because it's gone through multiple levels of review, including a quality control review. This means that your experience performing procedures on one job can translate to another job, and this is true for everyone you work with. This means that if you have a new job that has a certain characteristic, you can use your networking to go out and ask someone who you know has had a job that is similar. Doing this allows you to save lots of time by leveraging their experience instead of starting from nothing. Personally, networking within my firm has saved me hundreds of hours because I'm able to ask other people about things I haven't directly experienced yet.
As you progress through your career, it's very likely that at least one of these concepts will come up while you're working. What's important is that you identify these as separate tangible skills that can be trained, utilized, and improved over time. I challenge you to see if you can utilize these things to improve your productivity at work. Good luck!