Question

If you were to become an accountant would you rather be a financial or a managerial accountant and why?

Answer 1

If I were to become an accountant I would rather choose to be a financial accountants over managerial accountants and reasons are as follows:

• The role of financial accountant, prima facie is much more broader than the managerial accountant.
• The information reported by financial accountant is used by all the stake holders of the entity and on the other hand the managerial accountant's role is largely limited to generation of information for internal management purpose.
• All the entities irrespective of the size, nature of business and objective (whether for-profit entity or otherwise) are required to prepare financial statements under various statutes while the necessity of managerial accounting is not mandated by statute to every entity.
• The scope of management accounting and the information it generated will have no or minimum applicability in small and medium level entities whereas the financial accounting and the use of its information is pervasive
• Further the financial accountant will have more independent when compared to managerial accountant. While managerial accountant is dependent upon the financial accountant for information financial accountant is not dependent upon the managerial accontant for the same
• The information provided by financial accountant is backed solely by historical data and hence is verifiable unlike the information provided by the managerial accountant which is backed by both historical data as well as predictions making it less verifiable
• The preparation and presentation of financial statements by financial accountant requires adherence of pre determined formats and guidelines whereas the information generated by managerial accountant has no pre determined formats or guidelines (mostly) making the work more difficult