We all know about the “Accountants” and have a fairly good idea about what they do.
Today let me talk about the “Management Accountant” and what he does and how he/she can prove to be an invaluable asset for your business.
As top management of businesses you must be faced with problems like ->
- Whether to make a particular component in-house or to outsource the same to outsourcing companies.
- Whether to buy outright or get a component job-worked from job-working vendors.
- Whether to give a very high discount in certain orders which could result in substantial jumps in top line revenues.
- Whether to spend on Automation of a given process or not.
- How many units of a given product or service needs to be sold to break-even.
- Given certain estimates of potential increase in sales from advertising what would be the ideal spend ratio in varous advertising avenues.
- Given limited resources, which products should be produced in what proportion to earn maximum profit.
- On a regular basis.
Simply put, a Management Accountant can help you answer these questions and thus aid in better decision making.
As the word suggests Management Accounting is the descipline of Accounting employed specifically to result in better management or a business.
Are all Accountants, Management Accountants?
A common error made by SMEs is to expect their book-keeping and accounting department will be able to produce high quality decision aiding insights, forecasts, analysis and projections.
No disrespect intended to by book-keeping brothers, but their skills are geared towards different outcomes. Supporting decision making is a completely different ball game.
It requires skills, experience and insights into business core such as procurement, production, logistics and marketing and to be able to put all that together alongwith putting a figure to everything, using mathematical, statistical and scientific methodologies to be able to produce the high quality reports needed for a good decision.
So long story short a Management Accountant is definately an Accountant, but every Accountant is not a Management Accountant.
Conclusion
If you are torn between various alternatives and you want to pick the one which has the highest potential to make money and you want someone to put it all into perspective, an experienced Management Accountant is your “Go-To-Guy”.
Hope this helps.
Cheers.
