You’ve probably been reading and hearing a lot lately about the Digital Age and how it’s reshaping finance and management accounting professions. When we consider management accounting and its role in translating data, there is a brilliant future for organizations that decide to seize the opportunity. For many years, the aspirational vision of accounting has been focused on the compilation and reporting of numbers. We’ve now evolved into a role where management accountants are strategic business partners in finance along with data extraction, formatting, warehousing, and eventual translation of relevant metrics to visuals that help every level of the organization find efficiencies. For many companies, the need to devote resources to the more traditional core reporting responsibilities of finance has precluded or at least impaired, this transformation.
Technological advances can help this change take place. It’s freeing the finance function from the need to perform routine, repetitive tasks, enabling it instead to better support decision making and assist in strategy formulation and implementation. And technology will provide the finance function with the ability to use organizational data to provide greater insights into the business, unlocking true enterprise value.
