Accountants are essential and valued advisors. They are professional problem
solvers, and their numbers are growing.
Accountants are essential because accurate financial records aren't optional.
They're required by law and act as indispensable planning tools.
Besides tracking and recording numbers, accountants design and control
systems of records, prepare financial statements and provide tax advice.
Some accountants work as auditors. Auditors go over a company's books to
make sure that they have presented their finances fairly. While one accountant
may calculate the cost and efficiency of a new technology, another might form
tax strategies or help implement quality management.
Accountants work at public accounting firms, in government, for corporations
or in private practice. They're needed at big and small companies, in major
cities and in small towns.
"The demand is really across the board," says Scott Moore with the American
Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The AICPA has more than
480,000 members in 143 countries.
In the U.S., there are two main accounting designations: Certified Public
Accountant (CPA) and the Certified Management Accountant (CMA).
"They specialize in different areas," explains Satiprasad Bandyopadhyay,
a professor of financial accounting.
CPAs work with the public and are certified to do audits. CMAs are mainly
focused on decision-making within a company. They provide guidance to management
regarding cost measures and accounting issues.
To earn a particular designation, graduates of accounting programs need
to take additional courses and exams. The professional societies and associations
for each designation can provide you with details.
You might imagine an accountant as someone hunched over a desk, adding
up numbers without much interaction with others. But that is a far cry from
reality. Accountants often work together with others, and they're constantly
sharing information with managers or the general public.
"Typically accountants are putting together information that upper management
is going to want to know about," says Moore. "Your level of communication
has to be strong so you can provide that information in a way they understand
-- you're almost a translator."
Many accountants are male, but there's a shift underway toward more of
a gender balance.
"I think there's definitely a growing number of women in the field," says
accountant Tarsha Jacobs. She's a chapter president with the Accounting &
Financial Women’s Alliance (formerly the American Society of Woman Accountants).
It currently has more than 1,600 members and 66 chapters across the U.S.
Jacobs has a couple of theories why men have outnumbered women in the
profession. "Maybe it's just the interest [level], maybe it's just that financial
circles have traditionally been a male-dominated field," she says.
Bandyopadhyay sees a "fairly even" gender breakdown in his classroom. For
now, however, men continue to outnumber women, especially when it comes to
leadership roles in accounting firms.
"Especially among partners, women partners are really rare," says Jacobs.
"But I definitely think that number is shifting."
A 2009 report by the AICPA found that 51 percent of the students graduating
with bachelor and master's students in 2007-2008 were female. Overall, about
30 percent of AICPA's membership is female, but that number is growing quickly.
In recent years, some big companies have been caught committing financial
fraud. In some of those cases, accounting firms were found to be guilty of
helping to carry out, or at least failing to catch, the fraudulent activity.
You might be surprised to learn there are some ways that those scandals might
have actually helped the accounting profession.
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act was named after the men who drafted it: Senator
Paul Sarbanes and Representative Michael Oxley. The Act is supposed to protect
investors. It does this by improving the way corporate financial reports are
done to make them more accurate and reliable.
"If you look at that the scandals that brought about the Sarbanes-Oxley
legislation, it really brought accountants more to the front of the public
eye, and we've actually seen an increase in the number of accountants since
then," says Scott Moore with the AICPA.
"So it actually has a positive effect," says Moore. "I think what it really
did as well is it showed how much an impact a CPA can have on an organization.
They're looked on as subject matter experts, so the value of a good CPA is
more apparent." All accountants, if they're doing their job properly, watch
out for signs of fraud. And with fraud being a hot topic right now, forensic
accounting is a growing area of specialty.
Says Moore: "One of the new hottest [areas] right now is forensic accounting...
Somebody that can really analyze the accounting records and determine where
the money went [and] who's responsible for the transactions..."
Accountants will continue to play a vital and growing role in helping individuals,
government bodies, and companies to make sound financial decisions. It's a
challenging profession with many rewards.
"I enjoy the work, the interaction with clients, discovering something
new," says Jacobs. "The situation may be different but the rules stay the
same. I definitely enjoy the challenge of it."