Career of a Management Accountant

If you dream to be a management accountant you need to have passion for keeping track of financial records. The position of a management accountant has responsibilities as well as power. This article will help you to know the skills you need to strengthen to become a successful management accountant.

There are professional and educational qualifications like CMA Australia you need to acquire first of all if you aspire to go for management accounting jobs.

Management accountants usually work for private, public companies or government agencies. They are known by different names like cost accountant, managerial accountant, industrial accountant or corporate accountant too. Their functions are more or less same, however for some; the job also involves public accounting apart from preparing data for in-house circulation.

The major chunk of management accountants’ job involve recording and making internal reviews, assess budgets and help a firm in improving its performance as well as investments in different ventures. Therefore, it can be said that for any company, its accountant manager is a risk manager, who budgets, plans, formulate strategies and make decisions for betterment of its business prospects. It is true that accountant managers are not general managers or directors who actually take decisions but they are the real workers who make this decision making process relevant and viable by evaluating their risks and advantages.

The responsibilities of a management accountant differ depending upon the size and type of firms. In general, they are supposed to supervise basic accounting, record income and expenditure of a firm, check tax liabilities and make income statements and balance sheets however in a small company these tasks are performed by the management accountant himself. He then presents it to senior management for further operations and decision making.

The job a management accountant is not finished yet. He or she also has to look for market trends, analyze company’s growth and manage risk, look for funding alternative measures and also monitor overall functioning of the organization.

Therefore, you need to be master of all things simultaneously to be a management accountant.  A flair for numbers, data, and records with a strong power to analyze and observe business processes are must to be a management accountant. He or she need to have strong accounting skills, basic knowledge of mathematics and logical thinking to grasp complex budgets and market processes, taxation issues and financial laws. They need such skills to help a company drive toward growth assessing its ability and adjusting to market situation, customers’ demands and administrative provisions. To present his views, observations and judgment, a management accountant need to have good communication skills too. His planning, strategies and risk management measures need to be presented in an effective manner in order to make senior managers and directors convinced.

In nut shell, while other managers are engaged in contemporary issues, a management accountant has the task to show a company its future with its running strategies. This is why fund management, structuring and capital investment decisions are given to him.

Formally, management accountants need to have a bachelor’s degree in accounting or finance. Having an MBA in finance or accounts is a plus but not necessary. Most of management accountants opt to expand their academic qualification with a CMA Australia credentials even when they get jobs so that they can get promotion and better salaries.

 

About Prof Janek Ratnatunga 1129 Articles
Professor Janek Ratnatunga is CEO of the Institute of Certified Management Accountants. He has held appointments at the University of Melbourne, Monash University and the Australian National University in Australia; and the Universities of Washington, Richmond and Rhode Island in the USA. Prior to his academic career he worked with KPMG.