Expectations for a Staff Accountant (#176)
/In this podcast episode, we discuss the expectations for a staff accountant when you are the manager. Key points made are noted below.
Focus of the Staff Accountant
This may sound like a simple question, but it actually gets to the root of how to advance in your accounting career. Some people seem to stay buried in their original jobs for decades, while others move on pretty fast. For example, I know two people who started as accounts payable clerks. One is still there, thirty years later, and the other is a partner at Deloitte. What was the difference?
The Ideal Staff Accountant
Well, I’ve managed people for many years, and developed some pretty strong opinions about this issue. My first point, and the most important one by far, is that a staff accountant is hired to assist his supervisor with a problem that the supervisor has. Therefore, the staff accountant’s main focus in life is to make sure that the supervisor’s problem goes away. There’s nothing better for a boss than to hire someone into a position, and then never have another problem come out of that area.
So what does this mean? To start with, it means the staff person doesn’t require any re-training. They’re trained just one time, they take notes, and then they know how to do it. If there’s a problem, they figure it out on their own or ask a co-worker. The supervisor is involved in re-training as little as possible. So from the staff person’s perspective, this means taking what may be some verbal work instructions and translating them into a procedure. And then updating the procedure to make sure that you’ve got the process down perfectly.
If a staff person can do this, the view of the supervisor is that he was able to hand off a problem, and then the problem disappeared. At this level of expertise, a supervisor will look upon you as a good employee, but that’s not good enough to be promoted.
My second point is in regard to errors, and it relates quite a bit to the first point. A really competent staff person does not create errors, and also knows how to correct and prevent errors.
This means that when you create an error or find one, you spend the extra time to figure out how it appeared in the first place, you can fix it, and you know what kind of a procedural or other change is needed to make sure that it never happens again.
To reach this point requires that a staff person has a deep knowledge of their work. They don’t just have that procedure written down that I talked about in the first point. In addition to that, they know why each step in the process exists. They know why there are controls, what information is entered into the accounting system, what constitutes an error, and so on. At this level, a staff person is a complete and total expert in what he does. In fact, in some companies, if you asked a manager about the difference between a staff person and a senior staff person, they might say that a senior staff person is someone they’d trust to fix mistakes. In other words, a junior person creates errors, and a senior person fixes them.
So in the first two points, we’ve progressed from having a solid knowledge of work tasks to having a comprehensive knowledge of the entire process. And at this level of expertise, a staff person can expect some advancement within the department, but it’s not good enough to be promoted into a management position.
Which brings us to point number three. After knowledge comes improvement. A really awesome staff person is someone who takes their knowledge of the system and recommends improvements. And this should be ongoing, with a stream of changes going up to the supervisor all the time. If you can do this, the supervisor’s view is that he originally hired you to take away a problem, and now not only is the problem gone, but the whole area has improved.
A further point here is that the improvement suggestions have to be well-considered. That means knowing how to implement a change, and knowing what the effects of it will be. It’s quite likely that a supervisor will ask the person making a suggestion to go ahead and do it. So you have to be prepared to do so, and to get it right the first time. At this point, you’ve proved complete competence, and you can be relied upon to advance the state of the department. If you can reach this level of ability, the supervisor is going to recommend you for a management position.
Reaching this third level can take time, but some people dive into the work so fast that they can blaze right through the clerical aspects of accounting in no time at all. That’s why you see some people linger in jobs for years, while others are on the fast track right from the start. Usually, from the supervisor’s perspective, someone who is ready for promotion to management is incredibly obvious, simply because no one else in the department is trying.
The trouble is that so many people never get past the first point. They don’t fully understand what they’re doing, and they never wrote down their work instructions to begin with, so they’re always causing problems. Which leaves supervisors wondering if they need to find a replacement, not whether these people can be advanced.
This brings up the question of why someone can’t get past that first point, and I think it comes down to their level of interest in the job. If they don’t really want to be a staff accountant, or they find some element of their job to be annoying or not very interesting, then they don’t delve into it enough to make sure of how it works, and they certainly don’t try to improve anything.
If this is the case, my advice is that no job is completely perfect, but even so, you still have to be competent at all of it. I went from staff accountant to chief financial officer in about ten years, and I can assure you that there were annoying aspects to every job I had along the way, and that includes the CFO job. But I still went ahead and learned about the annoying parts.
So there you have my expectations for a staff accountant. There’re a lot of accounting managers who listen to this podcast, and with any luck, they’re all nodding right now, saying yes, that’s what I need from my staff – right there. Either that, or they’re simply nodding off.