DISCLAIMER: We're commenting on USA legislation
According to O-Net Online, job opportunities in the discipline of accounting are anticipated to see a growth rate that ranges from 10 to 19 percent throughout the decade that will finish in 2020. The production of the financial reports that are required to ascertain whether or not a company is profitable falls within the purview of the accounting department, the accountant, or the book-keeper. The accounting sector began to demand higher levels of computer literacy and enhanced computer skills from its workforce after the arrival of computers priced at a point where they were affordable to small enterprises.
Before the advent of computer technology, much of an accountant's day was spent making manual entries and looking for faults. Nowadays, however, most of their work is done on computers. Since the advent of digital technology, accounting professionals have been able to do a greater number of tasks in a shorter amount of time, and their primary focus now is on analysis and consulting.
If you're entering a career in computerized accounting, you'll need to know your way around a few of the basics of working with computers. Basic computer skills can help you gather information, create written documents, and even deal with the occasional issue that pops up when using technology.
DISCLAIMER: We’re commenting on USA legislation
This sets a premium on companies in an improved employment market to attract and keep accountants who have advanced technology capabilities. This places a premium on recruiting and keeping accountants who have advanced technology skills. A poll conducted in 2015 by the hiring agency Robert Half Management Resources found that among CFOs in the United States, “keeping pace with evolving technologies” was cited as the most significant challenge confronting their accounting and finance departments.
According to another observation made by Robert Half, “businesses seek for digital knowledge as more and more finance departments transition from a reporting-focused to an analytics-centric position.”
In order to pursue a profession in computerised accounting, you will need to have a fundamental understanding of how to operate computers and be comfortable with simple computer tasks. A fundamental understanding of computers may assist you in gathering information, producing written documents, and even resolving issues that may arise when using various technology forms. These are all vital abilities that may help you get through the accounting obligations and the day-to-day office chores you might be required to engage in while you are working. If you want to be successful in your career, you should develop these talents.
If dealing with computers is not something you are already comfortable doing, enrolling in an intensive accounting training programme will help you become more proficient in this area. The following is a list of some of the most important abilities that you may acquire.
In the subject of accounting, one of the most typical tasks is the preparation of spreadsheets. Having a solid understanding of spreadsheet applications such as Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Excel would be beneficial. A working knowledge of the more complex formulae that are available inside the programme will make the compilation of spreadsheets much simpler. For instance, if you know the principle amount, the interest rate, and the length of the loan, some formulae may determine the monthly payment for the loan. Accounting staff members can use spreadsheet formulas to produce “what-if” scenarios to see the effect of a given change, such as how much would the payment increase if the interest rate is 1% higher or the loan term is 1% less. These “what-if” scenarios can be used to determine how much the payment would increase.
Providing management with precise and up-to-date information that may be utilised in decision-making is often considered to be a significant aspect of an accounting position. It is possible that the information will be communicated through reports that a software programme has created. Alternatively, it is possible that it will be necessary to compress, consolidate, or organise the information into a report. In addition, most accounting positions involve additional tasks, such as creating letters and memos to be sent to clients, customers, managers, or other employees.
When it comes to keeping track of its financial dealings, a corporation could choose to employ a commercially available accounting software programme. Clerical staff can print checks, produce invoices for clients using programmes such as Quickbooks, Peachtree, and AccountAbility, and enter invoices received from suppliers and enter them into the system. The inclusion of a payroll module, a module for managing fixed assets, or an inventory module could be contingent on the particular package that is acquired. At the conclusion of each month, financial statements may be printed out in a relatively short amount of time. It might be beneficial to have experience working with at least one of the several popular accounting software applications.
Paychecks and payroll tax returns might be printed and prepared by an external payroll preparation provider when a company decides to hire one. For example, ADP and Paychex are well-known organisations providing payroll processing services. Each makes use of their own proprietary software to provide their customers with the ability to enter the data required to produce payroll. Another option for a firm to employ to generate paychecks is the payroll module tied to the accounting software it uses. In any case, it might be useful to have a working knowledge of the foundations underlying computerised payroll systems.
It’s possible that extra software abilities may be required in the accounting profession as more duties are taken on. For example, the software is available that can manage projects, carry out audits, monitor depreciation on fixed assets, and assist in preparing tax returns. In addition, a variety of software applications, such as American HealthTech Financial, are designed specifically for a certain sector of the economy.
In the field of accounting, having experience working with fundamental computer functions is often required for positions. This is in addition to accounting-specific software products. For example, administration of email accounts, storing and printing information, and creating data backups are all routine responsibilities. Because most jobs need a significant amount of data input, having a good working knowledge of the 10-key number pad on a computer keyboard is highly useful.
Accounting in the United States is governed by a set of rules known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP for short. These standards regulate the practice of accounting in the country. They are designed to guarantee that the financial statements of a firm are both clear and comprehensive, as well as to standardise accounting processes across all companies and industries.
Anyone who works in accounting should follow generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), but if you’re employed by a publicly listed firm, doing so is mandatory. Law requires businesses that trade on public markets to provide financial statements that comply with GAAP standards routinely. Even privately held businesses and financial institutions like lenders and creditors favour compliance with GAAP.
If you want to work in accounting but don’t know how to use Microsoft Excel, it’s like attempting to obtain a job as a bus driver when you don’t have a licence. However, it’s a standard prerequisite for the position. While not all accounting and finance professionals may use Excel daily, spreadsheets are a common tool in the industry. Because of this, it is necessary to be able to understand and interpret the data included inside spreadsheets.
Candidates seeking positions in accounting and finance should, at the very least, demonstrate a good foundation in Excel’s fundamental capabilities, such as formulae, sorting, and filtering. In addition, candidates applying for positions in which using the platform is one of the job’s key responsibilities should have a strong working knowledge of more complex capabilities like pivot tables, VLOOKUP, and what-if scenarios.
These technological abilities are even more useful for positions with enterprise-level companies since the volume of data you will be dealing with will increase in proportion to the size of the firm you are working for.
Quickbooks is one of the pieces of accounting software that is utilised the most frequently by small businesses. The online edition of Quickbooks alone has over 4.2 million members. The programme provides a set of financial capabilities that are helpful for expanding businesses, such as expense monitoring, invoicing, and payroll functions. These features may be found in the software.
It is very likely that you will be working in Quickbooks if you are going to be working for a small or medium-sized organisation or conducting business with them. Therefore, having knowledge of this platform is definitely a technical accounting skill you want to include on your resume if you are applying for a job in accounting.
Accounting and finance professionals do much more than simply keep tabs on incoming and outgoing cash. They play an essential part in directing the firm in the appropriate path from a financial standpoint. This involves the capacity to generate accurate forecasts about what the future holds in terms of sales, inventories, and labour and to utilise that data to make recommendations to the board of directors or the company’s executive suite.
ERP, which stands for enterprise resource planning software, is one of the fundamental abilities necessary for positions in accounting and finance, particularly in higher-level professions such as senior accountants and financial analysts. In order to plan the acquisition of raw materials, monitor inventories, streamline distribution, assign labour hours, and more, you will need to employ enterprise resource planning (ERP) software such as SAP or Oracle.
In addition to that, it is possible that you will be required to work with well-known business analytics and reporting tools such as Tableau or Zoho Analytics. These platforms assist companies in taking raw data and transforming it into relevant visualisations and other types of information that can be utilised to guide decision-making.
The subject of taxes occupies the focus of a whole subfield within the accounting and finance industries. If you operate in this segment of the industry, it goes without saying that you should have an in-depth understanding of the tax preparation software that your company employs.
However, even if you do not work particularly in tax, it is probable that you will be responsible for maintaining records and creating paperwork for coworkers who do work specifically in tax. Therefore, it is beneficial to have a functional knowledge of the platform your firm utilises to produce tax returns. These are some of the most often used programmes, and some examples are Lacerte, ProConnect, and Drake.
The financial statements of an organisation are the written records of the business activity and financial status of that entity. Since these statements are utilised by a variety of parties, including but not limited to the company itself, its workers, shareholders, potential investors, and financial institutions, it is imperative that they are comprehensible and straightforward.
The income statement, the cash flow statement, and the balance sheet are the three most important financial papers that you will need to be familiar with.
An income statement, also known as a profit and loss statement or P&L report, is a report that summarises the profits and different expenditures of a firm over the course of a specific time period. A company’s operational costs, investment activities, and financing operations should all be included on its cash flow statement. This type of statement reports on the movement of a company’s cash. A balance sheet is a snapshot in time that details a company’s assets, liabilities, and owners’ equity at a certain point in time.
The financial health of a firm may be quickly gleaned from these statements, whether they are viewed in conjunction with one another or alone. However, as a person who works in the financial industry, it is up to you to ensure that they are appropriately prepared.
The quantity of raw data that exists in the world is expanding at an exponential rate, and this growth includes the data that corporations keep about their finances. Therefore, the ability to assist a firm in the management and utilisation of this data to the company’s advantage is one of the most significant technical accounting abilities for a candidate who is in competition.
The ability to do data queries is one approach to achieving this goal, and SQL is one data query language among many others. The abbreviation “SQL” refers to the “structured query language.” Simply said, it is a programming language that allows you to extract the specific pieces of information you want from enormous amounts of data.
Imagine that you work for a large firm like Amazon or Target and have access to their order database. Let’s imagine that the firm has to readily detect which state a client resides in based on their order number, and they need to obtain that information with the click of a button. This would be necessary for the company to do so in order to comply with applicable sales tax laws.
Now, all of those orders and the information on the customers who placed them are, of course, saved in some location; but, given the size of the business, the number of records is in the millions. It is feasible to locate this information by manual searching, but doing so is neither practical nor efficient on a broad scale. So instead, an accountant who is familiar with SQL may write a function that, when it receives an order number, immediately displays the customer’s state and any relevant sales tax information for that state.
In a similar manner, having the abilities necessary to query data may be helpful in recognising business trends in a set of data and even in detecting fraudulent activity. Data query abilities allow you to take the next step and retrieve the data you need after you’ve decided what data you need access to in the first place.
The capacity to engage in independent study brings us to the conclusion of our rundown of the abilities necessary for accounting and finance. Regardless of how proficient you are in the field of finance, you will inevitably face circumstances in which you do not know the solution. When it occurs, what plan do you have to identify the solution?
Candidates of high calibre should be aware of the resources available to them in order to locate the information they want, whether this involves examining accounting databases, reading various pieces of government law, or researching various internet forums. You can bet that the greatest finance experts know exactly where to go for financial laws and regulations, even if they do not have a thorough understanding of all of those rules and regulations.
Exploring the world wide web is not only an essential part of the modern workplace but also, for many people, a vital part of modern existence. When individuals browse the online, some of the common activities they participate in include, just a few examples: travelling to certain websites to access the services or information they provide and looking for specific information on a variety of web services.
Academy of Learning Career College will teach you how to become proficient in various skills linked with internet navigation as part of the accounting training you will receive there. This aspect of your education will allow you to practise a useful skill that will allow you to access a plethora of information available online. It does not matter if you are an experienced computer user or if you are relatively inexperienced with using a computer web browser.
At our institution, all students who are enrolled in an accounting diploma programme spend some of their time learning how to use Microsoft Word, which is one of the pieces of software that is both the most widely used and vital piece of software in the whole globe. The primary purpose of Microsoft Word is the creation of text documents such as letters, memos, articles, and a variety of other types of writing. Therefore, if completing an assignment requires typing or writing a significant quantity of text, the likelihood is high that Microsoft Word will be an acceptable tool to use in order to do the work.
You will learn how to edit text, format documents, make use of proofreading features, and investigate a variety of other helpful skills in Word during your lessons. Your experience with Microsoft Word will come in handy if you ever find yourself in a position in your professional life that demands you to prepare documents.
An operating system is the fundamental software that runs on a computer and enables users to access the machine’s various applications and functions. Windows 8.1 is an operating system that is used by many people who have employment in accounting all around the world. Therefore, the programmes we offer at our school contain a segment dedicated to teaching you how to operate inside this particular computer operating system.
You will learn essentials such as how to access crucial system information, establish and manage user accounts inside the operating system, and browse between directories and drives to discover files and arrange them on your computer as part of your training. This course will help you acquire more confidence when working on a PC running Windows 8.1, especially if you are not particularly experienced with using the features that are being covered. In addition, because other Windows operating systems are relatively comparable to Windows 8.1, receiving training in Windows 8.1 can also assist you in becoming accustomed to the many kinds of Windows machines that you could use in your future place of employment.
A bachelor’s degree in accounting or finance is the minimum level of education expected of applicants. However, additional significant accounting certifications provide great value to the mix of skills and information you possess. In addition, if you have a higher level of education and experience in accounting, you will have more access to better-paying career options. The following is a list of skills and information that you need to have:
Technology can potentially increase accountants’ productivity and efficiency, which, in turn, may provide improved outcomes for employers and customers. As a consequence, there will be an increasing need for accounting professionals with a combination of school credentials, professional credentials, and skill-sets that encompass business intelligence and data analysis.
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