Does IT strategy of your company influence your career ?

Management Accountants are known for strategic accounting rather than doing mundane things. The Canadian Management Accountants recognise themselves as "Creative Accountants". Yes, internal accounting is like that. A product may show profit by applying overheads in the traditional way but may go into loss when applied the concepts of ABC.

Do you feel advances in Information Technology has direct influence on Management Accounting ?

I have posted the point on http://cmaindia.informe.com forum and views of members are as follows:

Rajendra Patil of Appsconsulting

My primary answer would be 'YES".

In various areas of management accounting, it is 'essential' to collect, calculate and present the data to the users. The advancement in the field of harware and software solutions has helped management accountant in a great way.

First example would be the ERPs. The regular job of the management accountants in manufacturing industries is to calculate the cost of the inventories. This has become very simple (or fully automated). So the professional can look into the other areas.

With the development of various tools to generate cubes, we can now 'slice and dice' the data very easily and can use the tool to generate views to find the possible reasons for the business pains. Using the Business Intelligence (BI) solutions we can now use the information of profitability in other areas of Customer Intelligence solutions like Customer Segmentation, Cross Sell-Up Sell, Campaign management, Customer Life cycle costs etc.

B V Prabhakar also shared the same view

IT , has no doubt, revolutionised the Management Accounting.

ERP , such as SAP helps Management Accountant to prepare separate Financial Statements for Tax laws under Local GAAP and also under International Standards such as IAS/IFRS/US GAAP. The time taken by Accounting Groups for Monthly Closing Process such as Bank reconciliation, Inter-company reconciliation, FOREX Payables/Receivables reinstatements and Consolidation, is considerably reduced.

Ashutosh Gupta had concerns

With the advancements of IT in day to day life of management accountants whether the role of Accountant has been secondary to IT professionals ?

Management Accountants roles has gone a drastic change over the years. The role of accountants has enhanced with these IT tools where we have to work with operations and business. Our role is understanding the requirements of the business and designing the solutions that would help them in decision making. ABM, EVA is a good examples.where you require details for analysis.

This leads to another question:

As Management Accounting is directly influenced by technology, does IT strategy of the company influence your career ?

I feel it does. Just like how a company scans you by looking at your CV of your achievements in past, you should review the history of the company on how it has progressed till now. A general drive in improvement of the system indicates that you will be able to demonstrate your role as a Management Accountant.

E.g. long time back, I had a interview call from a large MNC in Hyderabad where they needed Business Analyst. I went through the interview process where they told me they were using SAP 3.1h when the world had moved to 4.6C. On enquiry about the upgrade, they said, it was not on their agenda in the near future. I had terminate the interview process since I did not feel that I would be able to progress over there with the ancient technology.

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