To Be An Accountant
What is the work of accountants? Accountants help entities be successful, ethical, responsible participants in society. Their major activities include observation, measurement, and communication. These activities are analytical in nature and draw on several other disciplines (e.g., economics, mathematics, statistics, behavioral science, law, history, and language/communication). Accountants identify, analyze, record, and accumulate facts, estimates, forecasts, and other data about the unit’s activities; then they translate these data into information that can be useful for a specific purpose.
The data accumulation and recording phase traditionally has been largely clerical; typically and appropriately, this has been called bookkeeping, which is still a common and largely manual activity, especially in smaller firms that have not adopted state-of-the-art technology. But with advances in information technology and userfriendly software, the clerical aspect has become largely electronically performed, with internal checks and controls to assure that the input and output are factual and valid.
Accountants design and maintain accounting systems, an entity’s central information system, to help control and provide a record of the entity’s activities, resources, and obligations. Such systems also facilitate reporting on all or part of the entity’s accomplishments for a period of time and on its status at a given point in time. An organization’s accounting system provides information that
(1) helps managers make decisions about assembling resources, controlling, and organizing financing and operating activities; and
(2) aids other users (employees, investors, creditors, and others—usually called stakeholders) in making investment, credit, and other decisions.
The accounting system must also provide internal controls to ensure that
(1) laws and enterprise policies are properly implemented;
(2) accounting records are accurate;
(3) enterprise assets are used effectively (e.g., that idle cash balances are being invested to earn returns); and
(4) steps be taken to reduce chances of losing assets or incurring liabilities from fraudulent or similar activities, such as the carelessness or dishonesty of employees, customers, or suppliers. Many of these controls are simple (e.g., the prenumbering of documents and accounting for all numbers); others require division of duties among employees to separate record keeping and custodial tasks in order to reduce opportunities for falsification of records and thefts or misappropriation of assets.
An enterprise’s system of internal controls usually includes an internal auditing function and personnel to ensure that prescribed data handling and asset/liability protection procedures are being followed. The internal auditor uses a variety of approaches, including observation of current activities, examination of past transactions, and simulation—often using sample or fictitious transactions—to test the accuracy and reliability of the system. Accountants may also be responsible for preparing several types of documents. Many of these (e.g., employees’ salary and wage records) also serve as inputs for the accounting system, but many are needed to satisfy other reporting requirements (e.g., employee salary records may be needed to support employee claims for pensions). Accountants also provide data for completing income tax returns.
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