Accounting and its transformation

The traditional finance function is more inclined to the Chief Financial Officer (C.F.O) acting as a trusted accountant. About 50% of his roles and responsibilities is centered around him being a trusted accounting partner while about 20% of his responsibilities focus on corporate structures or portfolio management. The balance of 30% is shared between transformation and value creation partnering.

The future of finance will focus more on the value derived by a business, as a product of the expertise of a finance professional. This suggests that there will be a significant decrease in accounting knowledge from about 50% to about 10%, and an increase in areas such as:

·??????Value creation as an internal business partner (approximately 30%)

·??????Adaptation of finance function to the digital and global challenge, achievable via implementation of ERP (approximately 20%)

·??????Management of complex transformation programs such as finance transformation, finance process documentation, finance process and policy review etc. (approximately 20%)

·??????Advisory on the appropriate capital structure/corporate structure (approximately 20%)

This simply means as finance professionals, our accounting knowledge only serves as a foundation to reaching our peak.