As accounting and finance professionals,
you do so much more than just handle money matters—you’re also critical for creating strategy and driving process improvements across the entire organization.
But if the majority of your days are spent manually reconciling accounts and matching transactions, little time is left for these bigger picture activities.
What if you could be more productive with fewer resources, less overtime,
and also easily improve the quality
of your work?
Not only would you be pleased with
this improvement, but it would also
set you apart in the industry.
By adopting seven key habits, you can become an exceptional accountant.
What is an Exceptional Accountant?
Historically, too much of accounting and close activities involved traditional manual accounting processes, which simply aren't sustainable. With new technology that can automatically discover errors, inaccuracies, and exceptions, accountants are freed to focus on the issues instead of losing days just trying to find them in the first place.
According to CFO.com, five days typically separate top performers from those at the bottom end of performance. That translates to an entire work week that could be spent on analysis.
By only researching the anomalies, accounting and finance staff can
also refocus on providing strategic guidance to the business,
such as improving internal processes or finding cost-saving opportunities.
In other words, the added time allows accountants to apply not just
their knowledge and expertise, but also their nuanced creativity
and intelligence.
By focusing only on exceptions, you can be free to be
an exceptional accountant.
Building a Foundational Framework
During an annual BlackLine user conference, a panel from Johnson Controls discussed the seven habits that can help you achieve exceptional accountant status while building a foundational
framework for your accounting and finance teams.
The Johnson Controls panel is highly qualified to be speaking about this subject. Through hard work, they have developed a high-performing accounting organization that is not just embracing change but driving it.
Their secret is modern accounting. After going through significant reorganizations and several different acquisitions, they realized they needed to move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility. This has enabled them to break down business-driven silos,
earn that win-win with auditors, and work smarter, faster, and better.
Here’s how they did it.
How often do you begin your work day knowing exactly what needs to get done, when, and by whom? Developing detailed schedules adds discipline and structure to your financial systems and ensures Accounting stays on track.
But when you have tens of thousands of accounts to reconcile, multiple checklists and calendars, and no idea what your coworkers have completed—especially during the close—this is easier said than done.
Automating the account reconciliation process improves organization through easy access to data and workflow benefits. Implementing a task management solution provides visibility into what your team has on their plate, replaces the inefficient spreadsheet approval process, and manages the entire financial close with checklists, real-time dashboards, and structure to ensure compliance.
MedComp Sciences reduced time spent on reconciliations from a week to two days.
The team accelerated close times 5x and is 50% more productive, allowing more time for value-added activities.
To become exceptional, accountants must have controlled, well thought out processes. And to ensure they’re done properly and accurately, controls need to be in place for change management and to maintain integrity.
A solid foundation with strong controls and processes allows for endless growth and expansion opportunities. But it isn’t possible to achieve this with traditional manual processes that limit the enforcement of controls and leave compliance gaps.
Process automation enhances internal controls while enforcing standardization to improve the quality and accuracy of financial data. No longer weighed down by the most time-consuming manual work, you are finally free to use your knowledge and expertise to instinctively discern mistakes and compliance issues, and detect the first indications of fraud.
"The audit process for many of our SOX controls has become hands-free. As long as the attached documentation and the information that we provide matches, auditors can complete a monthly audit without even having to contact us."
Shannon Randolph, Staff Accountant,
Scotts Miracle-Gro
Documentation is vital to accounting processes. Reconciliations, journal entries, and many other financial close tasks must be documented in such a way that a user can not only follow the logic, but also reach succinct conclusions.
The individuals preparing and reviewing the task should have a basic understanding of the task purpose and methodologies. It’s also incredibly important to provide guidelines, an implementation plan, and training so that everyone is aligned with policies and processes.
"What's nice about a modern accounting solution is that everything is visible. It tells a good story. You can go into any account reconciliation and understand what occurred.”
“Every relevant file is attached, and it's right there at your fingertips. You're not hunting around for this file or that file."
Mike McNamara, Senior Director of Finance & Corporate Controller, Marinus Pharmaceuticals
It’s so easy to go to work each day and grind through everything on your To Do list with your head down. It’s easy to get comfortable doing things the way they’ve always been done, and even easier to do the bare minimum just to get by.
But accountants are too highly skilled and too valuable to spend 40-80 hours of their week this way.
Pursuing a continuous improvement mindset—looking for new and better ways of doing things—is much more rewarding and creates opportunities for you to impact the bottom line. Strive to exceed strategic and operational goals by contributing to the creation of a high-performing and sustainable organization.
"Not only did we reduce the overall days in the close from 15 to five, but we also reduced the number of hours needed each day. People are working eight hours during the close instead of ten.”
Ray Willardson, Controller, sPower
Ownership comes with holding yourself and your co-workers accountable. Take the time to perform post-mortem reviews to identify what went right and what went wrong. Seek out root causes, and then incorporate what you’ve learned into a continuous improvement model.
The best performing finance teams know that success means always adapting, innovating, and improving to create a culture of continuous improvement. Looking for new ways to use technology to parse and automate logic-based processes can help you feel more invested, as you’re playing an essential part in meeting the evolving needs of the accounting and finance organization both now and into the future.
Franklin Templeton reduced the overall number of high-risk accounts by 50%, allowing for personnel to spend more time analyzing the accounts and adding value through their analysis.
Don’t just accept the way things have always been done. Instead, seek to understand the entire process from end to end and then challenge it, applying out-of-the-box thinking
to uncover better operating models.
It’s taken a long time for innovation to find its place within Accounting and Finance, and now is the time to challenge your own company’s internal policies. This can result in streamlining processes to eliminate unnecessary steps, which reduces the amount of work and improves
quality all around.
This step is essential for being exceptional because the manager accepts the status quo. The leader challenges it.
"With BlackLine, instead of four reviews a year, we're getting 12. What wasn't getting reviewed until the end of the quarter is now getting reviewed every month. As a result, quarterly financials are prepared more quickly and accurately."
Mike Galus, Vice President, Finance & Accounting
The most effective way to put the six previous habits into practice is to follow this principle: if you can’t eliminate it, automate it.
Manual processes are time-consuming and responsible for the huge spike of work during the financial close. As organizations automate these processes, it will accelerate their close and free up time to focus on more value-adding activities.
Automation increases accounting efficiency and transparency, and creates more satisfied and engaged finance and accounting teams.
Better yet, you can trust the numbers again.
Zendesk's accounting workload has doubled, yet it continues to cut time and effort from its financial processes. Some of the greatest savings have come from automating key, high-volume transaction matching processes.
Becoming an Exceptional Accountant
These seven habits work in unison to serve as building blocks to Exceptional Accountant status. Today, more than ever before,
exceptional accountants are exactly what companies need.
Learn five ways technology can equip your
F&A teams to move to modern accounting
and thrive in this virtual world.
