Extracts from an article in The Sydney Morning Herald, March 3, 2001

Are you aware of how much accounting has been redefined over the last few years? Accountants are today doing less number crunching and more business advising and planning.

Probably the biggest change has been the pressure business is under to improve profitability. "There's a real need for companies to be more efficient and get value out of every service they [buy]. Accountants have to provide information every day, every week and every month that the business can use to make decisions" says Roger Penman, Partner at WH&K.

The accounting profession has evolved into 30-40 distinct occupations - from auditing to management consultancy and taxation to business development - that have entry level training in common.

"Accountant doesn't really describe what we do. Close to 70 per cent of our members don't ever do any accounting. Business adviser is much more accurate." says Joycelyn Morton, President of CPA Australia.

So how has this made the work more interesting? By tying the job to the success of business, Morton says.

"It doesn't matter whether you're in public practice with an accountancy firm, or an in-house employee, the accountant should be in partnership with the people who are running businesses."

It follows that employers are looking for recruits who are "more rounded", with communication skills and life experience. "Numeracy is much less important," Penman says. "You need to be able to look at the numbers and see where the business fits in the market, rather than just being able to make a set of numbers add up neatly."

Another fading tradition is the gender imbalance. While 64 per cent of accountants are men, Morton says graduating batches of accountants are now more likely to be "at least 50 per cent women".

According to Gottliebsen Research, businesses are prepared to pay big money for the new type of accountant. Employment grew by 103.4 per cent in the last six months of 2000, because of the GST stampede. The average salary was $54,346 - up a burly 9.5 per cent. (Even in information technology, where job vacancies and average incomes outstrip all other industries, salaries rose by only 5.1 per cent.) Chief financial officers (CFOs) in the technology sector can earn salary packages worth between $100,000 and $300,000.

Maling says that while CEOs commonly came from sales and marketing in the 1980s, today they re more inclined to have been accountants. "More and more [accountants], with good technical and presentation skills who are well qualified and can work with the CEO, banks and market analysts, are being fast tracked," she says.

AMP Group CEO Paul Batchelor, and NRMA CEO Eric Dodd are among dozens of accountants to have made the senior executive ranks in Australia's biggest companies.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, March 3, 2001

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