Ep. 99: Andrea Williams - The Future of Accounting Work

Contact Andrea Williams:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-williams-201a9a12/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Mitch:
(00:05)
 Welcome back to Count Me In. IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch
Roshong, and this is episode 99 of our series. Today's
conversation features Andrea Williams, Senior Vice President and
Controller at Perdue Foods. In this episode, Andrea talks with
Adam about the future of accounting work and the ethical
challenges management accountants need to be aware of as their
roles continue to evolve. Let's get over to the discussion and
hear more about the topic now. 
 
Adam: (00:40)
What do you see as the differences between management reporting
and financial reporting? 
 
Andrea: (00:45)
Well, financial reporting certainly has to follow all of the
accounting roles that we were trained on as accounting
professionals and those roles continue to evolve over time.
Management reporting should certainly follow all those rules, but
normally management reporting looks at slices of the business and
targets insights into subsets of the financial statement. And so
it's really important for the management accounting teams that
are preparing that information to keep the financial reporting in
mind and certainly tied to it and every possible way that they
can, but to recognize that they're peeling the onion and that
they really need to be careful in how they represent those
pieces, that they would still represent what is in the ultimate
financial statements. In our business, we have, we use management
reporting for certainly for what I  would call,
accountability reporting. We provide levels of reporting for all
layers of management, from folks that are running a subset of the
production floor all the way up, of course, to the executive. And
we also provide reporting that is targeted to certain functional
areas, you know, the sales teams and the marketing teams and the,
the critical aspect of this is that as management accountants,
again, we need to really be sure that ultimately these are
subsets of the financial reporting and be really careful that we
don't mislead folks as we're just providing their slice of the
pie.


Adam


So how do those differences, provide some additional ethical
challenges that management accountants need to be aware of? 


Andrea:


Well, providing the multiple views, doesn't always easily
coalesce, into the total. And so an example of that is, we
actually provide, what we call sales value of production to each
of our plant facilities. Sometimes they like to call them income
statements. We always correct them and say, no, this isn't an
income statement. This is a sales value of production. And the
critical difference there is that from a production perspective,
they're interested in understanding a margin related to products
they produce that week or that month or that quarter, even. And
of course we are as many businesses, we don't sell out everything
that we produce in a particular alignment with a financial week
or financial close, and so consequently, we are put in a position
of bringing in what we call a representative sales value. It may
end up being more or less than what we ultimately realized as the
invoice value. And so where this becomes an ethical challenge is
that, of course we have algorithms that go out and choose what
sales value to use, for example, that's based on history. And so
everyone's happy to use that sales value when it, when we're in a
rising market, unless happy to use it when we're in a declining
market or in a business that is impacted by some commodity
values. And, that becomes, can become an ethical challenge
because obviously you can't play both sides of the coin and
because it isn't, tied to invoice sale, we get into very
interesting conversations with our production folks, and we all
just need to remember what was the point of what we're trying to
represent and be as honest as we can with the business and
ourselves and what we're representing. 
 
 Adam: (04:35)
 Definitely. So, you know, you're kind of referring to how,
you know, things are constantly changing in the industry and all
over the world, and obviously we're still in a pandemic that's
happening. how have you seen like the management accountant role
evolve over time, especially with all the, everything that's been
happening? 
 
 Andrea: (04:52)
 Well, in the most recent day, I would say the, just like
everyone else, we all have to learn how to work from our homes,
where we were traditionally more used to being in the offices or
in the plant, the plant, buildings. So certainly our technology
skills have had to improve and our collaborative skills, you
know, building  itand, you know, as everyone in the world
that seems to be doing as our zoom meetings. So that's in the
more recent, the more recent days of how we've had to evolve. I
would say over time in my career, there's really been an
evolution of what the management accountants are expected to do.
When I started, the roles were very, closing focused. The closing
calendar was paramount. We, you know, work through task lists
that were either leading to, or coming out of closing cycles, and
it was still very much, an accounting role. And although we still
have those responsibilities, our business partners really, don't
expect to live and die by a resource that is connected to closing
calendars, and consequently we've had to smooth out our tasks,
and actually provide information in a more consistent basis every
single week. And then some, some cases every single day. That is
not really impacted, by the strict financial reporting. And what
that means is then we've added to our plate, a significant amount
of what we call estimates. We do a weekly estimate, all
throughout the entire business of what we based on information
that, you know, certainly happened in that prior week. But, you
know, we're making, you know, educated guesses of what something
will actually realize based on education and history and
foresight and those types of activitieswe're not anywhere in the
role when we, when I first started. And so then that's
transitioned to not just, you know, that's still looking
backwards, and so in the last several years, of course, then now
we're being asked to look forward and providing, much more of our
time is providing information of what we believe will happen, not
reporting on what has happened. That's a significant shift and it
requires, um, very demanding skills on, on accounting folks, very
different than, you know, the traditional auditing skills or
traditional just financial closing skills.
 
 Adam: (07:39)
 For sure. So you, you know, you've described kind of how
the roles evolved for that you've seen over time, but where do
you kind of see it going in the future? 
 
 Andrea: (07:47)
 So, interestingly enough, I feel like the profession's at a
crossroads. A  crossroads being that, are we going to
continue as management accountants covering both roles? Are we
going to continue to be the ones that, you know, shepherd the
books and really make sure that things are tied out, in addition
to all the analytical demands, or are we going to split into
separate groups? That one group is handling the accounting and
one group is deeper into the analytics. I've seen that certainly
some of the other bigger companies as they, as they create
separate FP&Agroups. and I feel like I'm seeing a trend of
that, that's more and more what's requested, certainly at the, at
the bigger, at the bigger companies. And so what happens there is
that then how do those teams ...