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What is your recourse if you cannot remedy performance issues? How do you set up future hires or service providers for success to avoid these kinds of issues in the future?
We’ll cover these topics in our guide to accounting management: The Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) publishes an annual report detailing accounting program enrollment and graduate hiring trends. In their most recent report, they provided data on a problem that the accounting industry has been facing for the last decade. The problem is that fewer people are choosing accounting as a career. Our conversations with colleagues have yielded the same kind of feedback. It seems that fewer people (even those majoring in accounting) are going into accounting these days upon graduation. The AICPA backs this observation with data showing that from 2019-2020 the number of accounting graduates dropped by 2.8% at the undergraduate level and 8.4% at the graduate level. Furthermore, the hiring of new accounting graduates in 2020 decreased by 10%.
1/18/2023 How to Improve Close
As such, improving accounting close has become a main focus for many accounting teams over the last several years as business demands have grown and hiring qualified accounting staff has gotten more difficult.
Strategies to improve close can focus on making your accounting close faster, more accurate, or less painful… and, if you do it right, all three! 12/12/2022 Controller or CFO – Which Do You Need?
At this stage, companies are feeling the limitations of their existing accounting personnel and are evaluating what their next move should be to keep the company moving forward. But knowing whether to hire a Controller or a CFO is a big decision, because, contrary to popular opinion, the roles are distinctly different.
As Kevin Briscoe, the CEO of CFO Selections, explains in nonprofit leadership podcast, “A Controller is ‘walls-in and rear-facing’ and a CFO is ‘walls-out and forward-facing’.” He goes on to explain that a controller analyzes what the company has done already while a CFO evaluates where the company is going next.
For companies lagging behind, the financial cost of taking an extra 20 days to close their books can be steep, and for companies performing on par with the industry, the financial benefit of reducing their work by 10 days can be a huge advantage.
In some cases, holding onto the role internally means hiring an in-house accountant, but at many small businesses, the alternative is simply tasking other employees with these kinds of functions. And, to no one’s surprise, the lucky person who gets the accounting work added to their to-do list tends to be the business owner.
In recent months we have solidly come to understand that for better or worse the typical office work model we were once accustomed to has been permanently changed and we may never see the corporate world fully return to the office full-time. And yet, even as we begin to look forward to 2023, this question of whether accounting work will move back into the office still remains.
Other times they are more internally motivated, looking for ways to improve and standardize the handling of their financial data to facilitate growth.
Either way, many businesses come to us looking for a set of generic standard accounting policies and procedures that they can just copy. We understand the rationale here. Why reinvent the wheel if you can just take what someone else is already using it and tweak it to fit your company’s needs? And in all honesty, there is nothing wrong with modifying an already existing manual if you know why your business needs formalized accounting policies. However, simply creating accounting policies based on someone else’s business practices without an understanding of why you are doing it and what kind of outcome you are looking for is not the right strategy.
In fact, the adoption of technology seems to be quickening across the board among consulting accountants, for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, and the government alike. (Yes, even the IRS is now using video visits to oversee tax preparers!) In an interview with Accounting Today Twyla Verhelst, head of the FreshBooks Accounting Partner Program, explained, I've heard it said that the last 30 years of technology and accounting have been taking what accountants used to do on paper and digitizing it. This is a very broad oversimplification of the advance of technology over 30 years, but I think there's some truth to it… Now, of late, we're starting to move away from that and move to creating new things based on what the technology can do as opposed to recreating what paper could do.  As fractional accountants, we have experience with a wide array of “less than full-time” accounting engagements ranging from ongoing part-time work and extra assistance during busy periods to short-term project work and interim roles while a new accountant is hired. Of these, interim work is notoriously underutilized, which is disappointing because it is an area where bringing in help expeditiously can have a huge impact.
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1/31/2023