What the heck is an analyst?

Accountants are not analyst and analyst are not accountants but the latter have the potential to do the others role and there will be some more merging of the two at some point in corporate, it will be fight on!

The above statement relates more to the management accounts aspect of accounting and not producing the final accounts, tax or auditing.

Analyst do not just interpret data and make great reports; analyst like their accounting counter parts have many different roles, it’s the equivalent of when you tell people you’re an accountant and they assume you know tax.

An analyst is involved in the design or modification of business systems or IT systems. The analyst interacts with the business stakeholders and subject matter experts in order to understand their problems and needs. The analyst gathers, documents, and analyses business needs and requirements.

They interpret information, provide good reports and usually have additional skills sets under their belts for example software skills such: Advanced Excel, VBA, SQL, MS Access, Microstrategy, Data warehouse, Business Objects and Google Analytics etc

Analyst can slot into different departments such as IT, HR, Marketing, product design etc; analyst also whop us accountants when looking at things like bigdata, data analytics and whilst accounting bodies and organisations work to get accountants to be more ‘service’ focused we do tail analysts in this area.

Qualification rise there is not really a professional go to body for analyst (CFA is different), they tend to have degrees in maths or statistics.

If you are an accountant and want to try the analyst lifestyle I would recommend trying to get into a Financial performance and analysis (FP&A) role.

If this is a avenue you want to develop a career in CIMA is your friend here.

@Brainthrough

Image from:
Links:
https://www.villanovau.com/resources/business-analysis/business-analyst-career/
https://elabor8.com.au/what-does-a-business-analyst-actually-do/

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Image from: http://www.datwav.com/joe-budden-breaks-disputes-complex-40-minute-dialogue/

As a profession we need to do this better! RANT 

As someone in their thirties who’s been doing accounting for over 12 years one thing that still makes my blood boil as an account is our professions terrible and I do mean terrible ability to communicate the different types of accounting roles that are out there.

It is unacceptable that even to this day I often come across people who ‘fell into’ their role and look at me wide eyed when I tell them the many different positions available; the profession is also truly poor at giving candidates guidelines about which positions to start in and how long they should stay in a position if they are career orientated & the reasons why.

We also need to be more transparent about the work life balance of the profession depending on role; i.e. restricted annual leave and late nights at month end/year end. The risk of being locked into one sector or role despite the numerous papers we go through and more importantly despite accounting being a highly transferrable skill; I have seen good accountants stuck in roles not because they are crap but because they stayed in a position/sector too long; which ended up hurting their careers

Which is terrible for a profession with such great potential; our bodies also need to do more to highlight the importance of our transferrable skills to the outside world; we also need better dedicated careers sections on website which talks about the roles available with recommended salaries, duration you should do the role for and the next logical progression routes.

@Brainthrough

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Image from: http://www.thewriter.com/what-we-think/blog/what-can-a-robot-teach-recruiters-about-writing-and-how-can-you-stop-them-s/#.WuCPmUxFx1w

Which should you do?
Automate first always, if it works well then you may not need to outsource; however, if you find you still need to outsource even after automating it could save you money as you may find you are able to outsource a smaller portion of the work. 

When doing these kind of process improvement reviews, the thought process should be to get people out of the way of software i.e. if the software can do it, let it do it, providing the costing make sense.

It is also crucial to remember two things if you outsource your accounts in a bad state outsourcing won’t fix it and you will probably be hit with extra fees for them to resolve underpinning issues; also no matter which route you take staff moral will probably take a hit; it is important to be mindful of this especially if you do decide to outsource and you are relying on current staff to do the handover. 

At some point in the future there will be an interesting development over where some portions of data interpretation will sit, for example management accounting and income/expenditure analysis currently sits in accounting; but in future will it sit with IT once it is automated? (software contracts tend to sit with them), will management accounting become even more merged with the data analyst (accountants and analysts are not the same)

We still are awaiting the impact of bigdata, machine learning, AI and eventually robots, at some point in the future during these transaction phases accountants will find themselves particularly around non-statutory accounting competing with analyst who have a sound understanding chomping through and interpreting data, particularly with some analyst having additional skillsets like SQL and Dataware housing at their disposal.

Us accountants are brilliant too at what we do but it is important to remember aside from statutory side technology will bring us closer to other industries.

By the way, this is a really good video that breaks down machine learning.

@Brainthrough