Tools and techniques you need to learn after your accounting qualification

By Andy Burrows

It can be rather mind boggling, can’t it? When you’re early in your Finance career and you’ve passed that first big milestone – qualifying with one of the main accountancy bodies – and then you realise there’s a whole load more to learn!

Where do you start? What should you choose?

And then how can you keep on a path of career progression in Finance?

And there are several possible routes of progression. You could specialise in tax, internal audit, treasury, or similar disciplines. Or you could go for a more general route towards greater seniority in Finance and in the business.

One thing is certain: constant learning is essential. In Finance careers you don’t learn for five years and then do the job for 40 years. I’m not sure that was ever the case, but it certainly isn’t nowadays.

We’re talking about business-focused Finance

Just to recap, this is the final article in a four-part series looking at the ingredients of what I call “business-focused Finance”. And that’s the more general route I’m thinking of, the one that leads from qualified accountant, through Finance business partner, towards a CFO role.

The first article gave an overview of the what and the why of “business-focused Finance”. And I presented three areas we need to develop in if we want to advance our careers in Finance, as business-focused Finance professionals – business acumen, behavioural skills and tools/techniques.

The second one spoke about business acumen, what it is and how to get it.

And then we went on to look at the soft skills of business-focused Finance.

Now we’re going to consider the third skills area of business-focused Finance – tools and techniques.

And whereas the first two areas may initially seem vague, that’s only because we’re not used to thinking about them.

Ironically, it’s the area of tools and techniques that can be even more bewildering, because there are so many things you could possibly choose to learn.

I’m going to give you three tips from my experience to try and help you with a way of thinking about it. It’s not a map for you to follow, but it will hopefully help you plot your own course (pardon the pun!).

Which tools and techniques?

Before I give you those three tips, however, let me simply list out some of the tools and techniques (or at least subject areas) that have helped me over the years. Then you’ll be able to get a feel for the kind of thing I mean. And it may also spark some ideas.

• Activity Based Costing/Management (ABC/ABM), leading to customer, product, or channel profitability analysis;
• “Beyond Budgeting”
• Balanced Scorecard
• Rolling forecasting
• KPI definition and design
• Project business cases
• Financial modelling – investment appraisal and decision support
• Business intelligence and data analysis
• Process improvement and re-engineering (e.g. LEAN six sigma)
• Project management and change management
• Value driver definition
• Economic value / economic profit
• Risk management
• Financial instruments
• Strategic planning

Some of these may have been touched on to an extent within professional accountancy qualifications.

Some of them are broadly within the sphere of what used to be called ‘management accounting’ (perhaps it still is).

Some of them aren’t even numerical tools, and are nothing to do with accounting. They’re management tools and performance tools.

As I said, it’s not an exhaustive list. I’d love it if you wanted to comment to either add to this list or challenge my thinking. The two things I’m certain of are that you must get at least some understanding of a good number of them, and that the options open to you to plot a way through can be bewildering.

No one is there with the big study guide and course timetable, telling you what to do next. You have to find your own way.

So, I thought I’d give some tips from my experience. Let me know if you find these helpful. And do add comments if there are any other helpful ideas and observations you want to share to help other readers.

Broad rather than deep is best

Firstly, to pursue general progression in Finance and in business, rather than specialisation, you need mainly broad rather than deep learning.

The danger is that you become a specialist unintentionally, simply because you learn to do something so well, and it impresses people so much, that people lose sight of your potential.

That has happened to me several times. I was once given the task of pulling together a group manual for employee share scheme accounting, but just as I’d finished it the IASB brought out ED2 (which turned into IFRS2). By the time I’d done the follow-on project to analyse the impact of the new standard, I was practically the only one in that large Finance department who understood it! I was then known as “the share schemes guy”. The fact I’d been a Finance Director before, and had previously managed the full range of Finance activities and almost 50 people, was completely lost!

Above I’ve outlined the kinds of areas you should consider. Try to get at least a basic grasp of as many as possible.

The advantage of that approach is that if you know about a broad range of things, then if something crops up where particular tools/techniques may help, then you will know where to go and deepen your knowledge to the required level when you need it.

Doing your job well is priority number one

Secondly, start with tools and techniques that help you to do your current job better and better.

I wrote an article a while back giving some advice on how to progress towards a CFO role. The first tip that I give in that article is to “do a great job now”. Don’t have your head in the future to such an extent that you don’t give your current job your full attention. Because if you don’t do a good job now, you’ll never get promoted!

So, assess what will help you to do better at what you’re doing now.

If upgrading your Excel skills would help you to do things quicker and to stand out, then go and learn (and practice) new Excel skills. Go on a course, watch YouTube videos, or whatever. I don’t care what people say about the death of Excel. Excel ain’t going anywhere. Go learn it to the extent you need!

Or learn more about the particular systems and tools you use in your business – ERP, CPM, BI, RPA, the list is endless.

Learn about budgeting and forecasting processes if you’re involved in those.

Learn how to do management reports, do analysis or build financial models, if that will help you in your current job or the one you want to do next.

The irony is (and I’ll make this point again later) that these skills won’t immediately make you a CFO, but you can’t skip this stage if you ever want to get there! It’s a bit like learning to pass the ball won’t immediately get you in the national soccer team, but you’re not going to get there without that learning!

Starting with the learning you need for your immediate work, a) establishes your mindset as someone who likes to do the best job possible; b) shows you are someone who has a thirst for learning and improvement; and, c) enables you to learn things you never expected, like how systems and databases work or how to think logically and critically.

Learning mix changes with maturity

Thirdly, be aware that your sources of learning shift as you mature and progress in your Finance career (or indeed any career, I guess).

I have no particular basis for saying this, other than what I’ve observed through my 25 years of experience with a lot of different Finance teams.

What I mean by this is that early on you learn in structured settings, through courses and books. As you build on that, however, you find yourself learning increasingly from those around you (Finance and business colleagues), coaches and mentors, and in less structured workshop and programme settings.

There’s another way of looking at this too. And this is what makes ‘tools and techniques’ difficult to plot a learning route through.

If we consider that we’re looking to take people from being qualified accountants to being mature, seasoned, CFOs, we can look at the weighting of skills needed at each end of the continuum.

With business acumen and behavioural skills, the accountant, analyst or Finance business partner starts with quite a low level. Through learning, intentional practice and experience this grows fairly consistently. They grow and mature over time, and they develop the ‘gravitas’ they need to become CFOs and to succeed as CFOs.

At CFO-level it’s mostly about business acumen and behavioural skills.

On the other hand, with tools and techniques, at CFO level you actually need less ability to actually use them personally than you do at the Finance business partner level.

But, the irony is that at CFO level you have to have a general knowledge of many tools and techniques. And you should have experience of using some of them at some stage earlier in your career.

What this means, to put it bluntly, is that early on in your career you will inevitably learn stuff that you will no longer need to such an expert level as your career progresses. But you can’t take any shortcuts!

And this also explains why CFOs go on less courses but attend more conferences, whereas it’s the other way around for Finance business partners and Finance managers.

The takeaway, I guess, is that you need to gauge what mix of learning is right for you at each stage of your career. There is no set curriculum like there is for an accountancy qualification. If you’ve missed learning about certain tools and techniques, pick up a book or a blog article just to make sure you know the basics, and increasingly concentrate on the softer skills and general business acumen.

In conclusion

So, I’ve laid out my view that to be a business-focused Finance professional you should build on your accountancy qualification in three areas: business acumen, behavioural skills and tools and techniques.

I’ve described what business acumen is and how I think you can develop in it.

I’ve outlined the behavioural skills that are important in the mix.

And I’ve suggested a few observations that will hopefully help you choose the tools and techniques to study and get to grips with.

Two points to close with:

Firstly, I’m aware that other thinkers in these areas delineate the skills slightly differently. For instance, some people see many of the tools and techniques I mentioned, and several of the soft skills, as falling under the ‘business acumen’ heading.

It’s semantics.

And it comes from the fact that the CFO should be the ultimate business-focused Finance professional. And at the same time the CFO’s ambition is to lose the accountant image and be seen as primarily a business leader. And it would be correct to say that business leadership is all about business acumen.

The reason I separate the three areas is because a different emphasis and mix is needed as you mature, as I mentioned earlier in this article.

Secondly, it’s worth being conscious that after professional qualification the onus is on you to make sure that you keep learning and that you learn whatever you need.

I know that might sound like stating the obvious, because all the professional bodies have CPD (continuing professional development) requirements.

But, often we see those requirements as just that – tickbox exercises. It’s just a bit of bureaucracy to be done every year to keep the letters after our names.

My point is twofold:

a)    To get a professional qualification we are spoon-fed the curriculum. After we’ve got the letters, we decide what to learn.

b)   We rarely question what the experts tell us we have to learn in the curriculum for a professional qualification. Those things are simply topics that help us pass exams to get us the qualification. After we’ve got the letters, it’s all about what actual learning will help us to go further and do better.

As a consequence, we should take ownership of our development. It may feel alien at first - reading business and Finance books, getting involved in LinkedIn discussions, reading articles, magazines, blogs, and so on – for personal instruction and because you want to rather than because you have an exam to do!

But if you want to keep progressing, that’s what you have to do!

Learn More

Don’t miss my future articles and posts – click the Follow button at the top and bottom of this article!

I have some free downloads that you may find helpful if you want to explore the topics in this series further:

The free pdf version of my book, An Introduction to Personal Effectiveness for CFOs and Finance Professionals.

And the short guide, How Finance Can Drive Business Performance.

And here are links to a couple of other articles on similar topics:

Why Finance Business Partner is the new best route to a CFO role

If you want to be a CFO, develop these three skills

For online learning products to help Finance professionals help their business, visit the Supercharged Finance website and get on our mailing list!

About the Author

Andy Burrows is a popular Finance writer and experienced senior Finance professional.

Having founded Supercharged Finance in 2016 to encourage Finance professionals to pay more attention to the way that Finance can boost business performance, he continues to write articles and develop learning material, books and online courses, to that end.

In terms of history, he qualified as a chartered accountant in public practice in England in the 90s. And he’s worked in a variety of businesses of different sizes and types in senior Finance roles since he made the move into industry and commerce in 1996.