Question

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) assumes that, at a minimum, all accountants will be proficient in the AIS user role and at least one other role listed above (manager or designer or evaluator). Why would the AICPA and IFAC expect this proficiency?

Answer 1

Basic knowledge of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, define the set of standards that govern the practice of accounting in the United States. They’re meant to standardize accounting practices across organizations and industries and ensure that a company’s financial statements are clear and complete.

GAAP is a best practice for anyone working in accounting, but if you’re working for a publicly traded company, they’re a requirement. Organizations that trade on public exchanges are mandated to file GAAP-compliant financial statements regularly. Even for private companies, GAAP compliance is viewed favorably in the eyes of lenders and creditors.

2. High level of proficiency in Microsoft Excel

Trying to get an accounting job without knowing Microsoft Excel is like trying to become a bus driver without a driver’s license. It’s a basic job requirement. While not all accounting or finance professionals will work in Excel on a daily basis, spreadsheets are standard fare in the field, so it’s still essential to be able to read and analyze the data in them.

At a minimum, accounting and finance candidates should have a solid footing with Excel’s basic features like formulas, sorting and filtering. For roles that will use the platform as part of their primary job duties, candidates should be proficient with advanced features like pivot tables, VLOOKUP, and what-if scenarios.

As the size of an organization grows, so does the volume of data you’ll be dealing with, making these technical skills even more valuable for jobs with enterprise-level organizations.

3. Knowledge of Quickbooks

Quickbooks is one of the most widely used pieces of accounting software among small businesses, with the online version alone boasting some 4.2 million subscribers. The software offers a suite of financial features that are useful for growing organizations, like expense tracking, invoicing, and payroll.

If you’re going to be working for a small or medium-sized organization or doing business with them, it’s highly likely you’ll be working in Quickbooks, so knowledge of this platform is definitely a technical accounting skill you want on your resume.

4. Experience with business intelligence software

Accounting and finance professionals do much more than just track money in and money out. They play a crucial role in guiding the financial direction of the organization. This requires the ability to make accurate predictions about what the future holds in terms of sales, inventory and labor, and use that data to make recommendations to the board of directors or c-suite.

Experience with ERP, or enterprise resource planning software, is one of the core skills required for accounting and finance jobs, especially higher-level jobs like senior accountants and financial analysts. You’ll need to use ERP software like SAP and Oracle to plan the purchase of raw materials, control inventory, facilitate distribution, allocate labor hours and more.

Additionally, you might need to work with popular business analytics and reporting software like Tableau or Zoho Analytics. These platforms help organizations take raw data and turn it into visualizations and other meaningful forms of information that can be used to make decisions.

5. Knowledge of tax preparation software

There’s an entire segment of the accounting and finance industry dedicated to tax. If you work in this part of the field, you’ll obviously need deep knowledge of the software your organization uses for tax preparation.

But even if you don’t work specifically in tax, you’ll likely be keeping records and preparing documents for colleagues who do. So, having a working understanding of the platform your company uses for tax preparation is helpful. Lacerte, ProConnect, and Drake are a few of these commonly used programs.

6. Proficiency in preparing financial statements

Financial statements are the on-paper records of an organization’s business activities and financial position. They’re used by many entities, including but not limited to the business itself, employees, shareholders, potential investors, and financial institutions, so these statements must be clear and easy to understand.

There are three main documents you’ll need to be familiar with: the income statement, the cash flow statement, and the balance sheet.

An income statement, also called a profit and loss or P&L report details the company’s earnings and various expenditures over a given period of time. A cash flow statement reports on the movement of a company’s cash, which should include operating costs, investment activities and financing activities. A balance sheet is a moment-in-time breakdown of a company’s assets, liabilities, and owners’ equity.

Taken together or independently, these statements serve as an at-a-glance-indicator of a company’s financial health. It’s up to you as a finance professional to ensure they’re prepared accurately.

7. Data query/data management abilities

The amount of raw data in the world is growing exponentially, and that includes the financial data of organizations. One of the most relevant technical accounting skills for a competitive candidate is the ability to help a company manage and employ said data to its advantage.

One way of doing this is through data query skills, and one such data query language is SQL. SQL stands for structured query language. In layman’s terms, it’s a programming language used to pull the information you need from large volumes of data.

Imagine an order database for a major company like Target or Amazon. Let’s say that for sales tax purposes, the company needs to be able to easily tell which state a customer lives in based on their order number, and they need to be able to find that information with the touch of a button.

Now, all those orders and the corresponding customer information are of course stored somewhere, but with a company so large, the number of records is in the millions. Finding this information manually is possible, but it isn’t efficient or realistic on a large scale. Instead, an accountant with knowledge of SQL could create a function so that as soon as they input an order number, the customer’s state and corresponding sales tax information is instantly displayed.

In a similar fashion, data query skills can be useful in identifying business patterns in a set of data and even catching fraud. Once you’ve determined what data you need to access, data query skills help you take the next step and get that data.

8. Independent research skills

The last item on our list of skills required for accounting and finance is the ability to conduct independent research. No matter how strong your finance skills, you’re bound to run into scenarios where you don’t have the answer. When that happens, how will you find the answer?

Top candidates should know where to turn to find the information they need, be it by searching accounting databases, poring through pieces of government legislation or searching online forums. The best finance professionals don’t necessarily have an encyclopedic knowledge of financial rules and regulations, but you can bet they know where to find them.

Leadership
Leadership is that quality which is needed even in the smallest group of 2–4 people and in the biggest groups of audiences. When you know how to lead, you know where to go, and once you know which direction to move in. You will never get in the hassles of confusion. Heading straight towards your goal is the best thing to be successful.

Decision Making
A good decision maker is needed in every business but especially, when you are an accountant, you need to make decisions every day in and day out. The decisions to be made are not small or futile here. Crucial decisions are to be made which would affect hugely, even for slightest error. Also you cannot rely on anyone to help you in such decision making process as the data and everything is so confidential.

Diversified experience
Indulge with new people everyday. Every new contact, new work and new environment gives you a deeper perspective for life. It helps you to build your own thought process and make decisions. Keep your eyes and ears wide open to learn from your surroundings, you never know what comes your way. And, learning of life never goes futile, it will come at your rescue somewhere, may be later in life.