3 Steps for Being a Modern Accountant and Controller

By Michael Shultz

Traditional, manual and Excel-based accounting processes aren’t sustainable in the current business environment. Already long gone are the days of putting on our green visors and completing journal entries and account reconciliation financial statements and spending late nights with the audit team. While the work is still there, the ways we do it are rapidly changing and so too are the demands of corporate finance professionals. We’re now expected to be partners throughout our organizations, aligning with the CEO and CFO to support their needs, seeing through significant business transactions, having a hand in talent recruitment and retention, and so much more.

How do we manage all our traditional tasks plus these new demands? We could work more hours, but that’s not realistic or sustainable. We could hire more staff, but that’s not usually afforded to us. Or we could change when and how we work — this is what I call “modern accounting.”

Modern accounting is all about changing your mindset and not following the “same as last year” mentality. The good news is, while technology plays a key role in achieving this accounting nirvana, there are steps you can take now, even before the technology is in place, to start moving you in the right direction. While this may seem like a daunting task, it’s easier than you think.

As a recovering accountant with more than 20 years of experience in various accounting roles, I understand that change isn’t something we generally readily embrace. However, I think my view of what modern accounting and controllership is might excite you. Here are three steps to take now.

Do you have data coming at you from many different systems? Do you have processes that change based on who is completing a task? Do you have to hunt to get visibility into where the monthly close or annual audit are at? If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, then you likely need to unify.

With today’s new modern accounting technology solutions, you can integrate, or unify, all your data into one source, allowing you to link your data sources through various connectors, file transfer protocols and application programming interfaces. More importantly, by applying a timing interval of your choice — hourly, daily, weekly and so forth — the data is brought into the technology solution for you, cutting out manual effort.

By unifying your data, you’ll also be able to vastly improve the templates for standardizing your accounting processes, such as account reconciliations and journal entries. Every time you look at a digital workpaper, it’ll look the same. No longer will you spend extra time looking at a spreadsheet to understand how it’s built. Instead, you can use that time to look strategically at the work in the workpaper.

What’s more, you’ll no longer have to call your team members, send emails or wait for responses in a bid to get the data you need. In a few mouse clicks, you’ll be able to understand things like which reconciliations are done, what journal entries need to be completed, where your audit stands, who’s accountable for the data and more.

In other words, unifying your data is a huge time saver — it standardizes your processes, and it affords you real-time, global visibility into the entirety of your finance function.

Automate

Automation is my personal favorite aspect of modern accounting and controllership. I, like many of you, didn’t spend time in university and studying for the CPA Exam only to do busy, manual, mundane work. A significant portion of the manual tasks we complete in our finance departments can be automated. One simple example is the ticking and tying of bank data. Depending on the number of transactions, this can take a significant amount of time. What if you could get this done in seconds and only spend time on exceptions? I know of one company that automated a bank transaction set, going from reviewing

40 million transactions each month to analyzing only a few thousand exceptions — an amazing time savings. My point is that being a modern accountant and controller demands you to seek ways to automate the manual, mundane and timeconsuming tasks that take you away from being the strategic business advisor you need to be to meet the ever-growing demands placed on you. Or, maybe more importantly, you free up the time to be the accountant or controller you want to be — one that’s not bogged down by the minutiae.

Change

When do you complete certain tasks during your monthly or year-end close? Whenever the checklist tells you to, right? Why? Because that’s when your predecessor did the work, and that’s when their predecessor did the work. But is this the best way or time to work? No.

There are changes you can make today, even without the implementation of a modern accounting technology solution, that can help you become more efficient and invaluable to your organization. For example, one step might be as simple as moving certain tasks from the close period to earlier in the month. Consider this modification:

Your company issues 10-year debt. For the next 120 months, you journal the amortization of fees, accrual of interest and more. You’re doing this during the close only because the checklist says to do it on day two. However, why not do it throughout the month? It’s the same journal set month after month. This frees up time during the critical close period to focus on other things, like being a partner to the other departments in your organization.

Of course, this is just one example. There are many tasks that fall on the finance function that can be moved around to create positive change. Combine simple changes with unified technologies and automation, and there’s even more that you can do without the fear of errors or time constraints.

Ultimately, modern accounting and controllership are about modernizing your mindset and developing one that continually thinks about the future of the profession. Change is inevitable, and as corporate finance professionals we must embrace that change to stay relevant and be all we can be for our organizations. The costs of not changing may include longer close periods, riskier processes, lost time, shrinking profits and a diminishing of our value and credibility. The

“same as last year” approach must become a thing of the past. If you don’t embrace change now and start taking the steps to become a modern accountant or controller, you’ll be left behind.