Becoming an accountant, as with any profession, takes a certain amount of guts and determination. The studying, the exams, the articles, the long years of relative poverty while less ambitious pals blow their early pay cheques on smart cars and parties. We stick it out for the promise of better things to come: maybe not quite a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but at least a modest bowlful of something shiny.
Even more, there is the promise that we’ll be helping to forge the destiny of companies. Our keen insights and brilliant financial strategies will pull businesses back from the brink of disaster, help launch products that change the world, keep a steady hand on the helm through stormy seas. We’ll be action heros.
In the real world, things are less colourful. We walk through the doors of our first job and suddenly we grow horns. Our colleagues in the rest of the business greet us with slightly less enthusiasm than they reserve for the lawyers, who at least have the advantage of bringing a sulfurous whiff of crisis and excitement with them. They call us “bean counters” and “number crunchers” and other even less kind names that can’t be mentioned in print. And they never, ever return our phone calls.
And why are we having to make those begging phone calls in the first place? Most of the time, we’re asking people for information frequently embedded in our claim to fame, our spreadsheets. This is most apparent at budget time, if you’re unfortunate enough to work in one of those organisations that still uses spreadsheets to pull its budgets together. Yes, all those years of training and it turns out they never taught us the skills we’d need for the simple, repetitive and somehow insanely difficult task of getting information out of cost centre managers who don’t work for us.
You know how it goes: You prepare your budget spreadsheet with meticulous care, sometimes developing and tweaking it over many years. (A well-crafted spreadsheet can be a work of art, for those who are able to appreciate it. In one company we know, the budget manager’s spreadsheet is such an elaborate masterpiece that the lights in the whole building dim every time he works on it).
But. Then you have to take your work of art, protect it heavily so nobody can break it and send it out into the world so the cost centre managers can populate it with actual numbers. Inevitably they find a new way of breaking it, or send you four different and wholly incompatible versions within six hours, or promise vaguely to get around to it, or — most commonly — ignore it altogether.
Then the phone calls start; except, of course, that all phone calls from finance go by some dark magic straight to the black hole of voicemail, where they disappear. We asked an actual (former) cost centre manager why and he was honest with us: “It’s a pain in the neck. And I’m being measured on other stuff.”
So we make more phone calls that get ignored — until one day we eventually manage to corner the errant cost centre manager by the water cooler, cut off his escape and beg or threaten convincingly enough to get a response.
So then we get the spreadsheet, figure out which version is the right one, pull everything together and submit it to management, who reject it. So we send the spreadsheets out again, the cost centre managers redo them while muttering curses on our heads, we painstakingly pull it all together again… And management rejects it.
Rinse, as they say and repeat. Eventually the deadline approaches and the accountants give up and tweak the budget centrally to get it approved. Everyone is happy, the cycle is complete, management have the budget they want and the cost centre manager has deniability (after all the grey suit did the budget not him!), until the whole sorry cycle starts again next year.
Except. We’re trained to be more than glorified secretaries and data capturers. A business that occupies our time this way is not, frankly, getting value for its money.
It could all be so different. It’s quite possible, without waving any magic wands, to have a budget process that doesn’t need any spreadsheets. A budget process that takes a couple of weeks, not four months, and that actually encourages cost centre managers to take responsibility for actively managing and understanding their numbers.
Eliminate all that time spent communing with other people’s voicemail boxes and we might even be able to get on with doing the analysis and providing the insight we were trained for. And maybe that action hero outfit will come in useful at last.
Kevin Phillips used to be an bean counter before he co-founded IDU, a company that delivers budgeting software that eases the budget-time blues. His horns are no longer visible.
