When are management accountants more than just management accountants? When they transform into business partners, according to the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, in a report that seeks to set the benchmark for how top companies treat their finance functions henceforth.
The report, based on an extensive series of deliberations by the CIMA Improved Decision Making in Organisations Forum, argues that in a world where global markets give every company much the same access to resources, and where business processes are converging on similar standards, the one real remaining differentiator lies in the decision-making function.
As Peter Simons, one of the report’s authors and a technical specialist at CIMA, explains, CIMA’s case is that some of the world’s leading companies, such as Unilever, Shell, BP and Vodafone, are already transforming their finance function. The main aim is to produce business partners instead of bean counters.
This initiative represents an enlargement of the traditional role of management accountants as purveyors of ad hoc reports to line management and the board. This was a necessity when enterprise systems were opaque data mountains that required skilled financial analysis and presentation before line management could make sense of them. However, corporate performance measurement systems are now delivering much of what a management accountant used to do, direct to an executive’s PC, with all the drill down facilities that any line manager could wish for.
So what can the management accountant offer after the line manager has digested the massaged and highlighted key performance ¬indicators and significant figures that pertain to their area of expertise, and which they now get at the click of a mouse?