Senior Accounting Manager– For same Central Mass.manufacturer 10-15 years experience coordinates work of three others some H.R. Accounting Manager– For $15M Central Mass. handles all accounting functions reporting to the president. Staff Accountant – For $3M Boston service provider and would-be manufacturer four years experience BA in acctg.So, having hired accounting people at various levels for four different clients this year, we offer the following basis for comparison: We found that comparable data is not easy to come by: those three, and others, emphasize larger companies and end up with very broad salary ranges. In the process of hiring full-time people to succeed us with several clients this year, we went on-line in search of salary guidance from Accountemps, from ,and even from the DOL’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. How many beans should a beancounter earn? (And unlike the SATs or the GMATs we’ll even send along the answers to help you evaluate your next candidate for an accounting position!) Alligator Bites We test our clients’ accounting candidates for these qualifications, and you can too: simply reply to this email with your request, and we’ll forward to you a complimentary copy of “Financial Managers’ 28Question Accounting Quiz.” Despite the advent of excellent accounting software, a competent accountant still needs to know debits and credits, journal entries, the reconciliation process, and have a good feel for numbers. His work was the basic building block her efforts created the framework for the financial plan.ĭon’t hire the wrong person. Yes, he was an historian, and he lacked her flexibility in dealing with the ambiguities of budgeting and forecasting, but when you looked at his monthly reports, you didn’t need to interpolate or make allowance for omissions. Jeanne had a theoretical knowledge of this, but Chuck was the person who had actually implemented the procedures and was rigorous in maintaining them. These are some of the things that a good staff accountant learns in Accounting 101 and then practices for the rest of his/her career. When the bill for repairing the copier comes in, don’t enter it in “Office Expense” this quarter and in “Repair and Maintenance” next. To be consistent in classifying revenues and expenses.Got a vendor who’s slow in billing you? Estimate the cost without the invoice (a good Purchase Order system will reflect the agreed-on price) and plug it in as an accrual for the month that you incurred the expense. To accrue for revenues and expenses not yet invoiced.When you record a sale of a product or service in September, you should record as well all of the expenses associated with that sale, including sales commissions that may not be disbursed until the customer pays you next month. To match your revenues with the related expenses.Your September rent payment should show up on the September income statement, whether you paid it on August31st or September 2nd. To record revenues and expenses in the right month.To distinguish between revenues,which are booked on the income statement when they are earned, and cash receipts, which are recorded on the balance sheet as they are received.Chuck was the consummate beancounter – he solved accounting problems.įor most smaller organizations, the first challenge in the finance and accounting area is to get timely and accurate numbers. We soon added Chuck to our staff for the clients with accounting issues – confusion between cash- and accrual-basis accounting, inability to allocate revenues and expenses to the appropriate accounts, unreconciled account balances – the stuff that affects the income statement. She dealt very effectively with the balance sheet – collecting stretched-out accounts receivable, pacifying long-term creditors, restructuring bank financing – and managing budgets. So we focused Jeanne’s energies on clients with financial issues. She had never run a set of accounting books. It turned out that I had hired a financial person.Jeanne was great with the CEOs and the rest of the management teams, but she wasn’t much help to the companies’ staff accountants – she had only an MBA’s overview of accounting. The combination doesn’t exist – at least not at an entry level. The perfect accountant.īut I also wanted a person who could initiate contact on-site with my clients, who could deal with the ambiguity of long-range budgets, who would happily help clients collect delinquent receivables, and who could persuade the client’s employees to embrace the procedural changes that we recommended. I wanted someone who was well-grounded in debits and credits, detail-oriented, meticulous, able to sit in one place and work tirelessly with data. Twenty years ago, having been a “single shingle” financial consultant to smaller companies for a couple of years, I decided to hire someone to help me crunch the numbers for my clients. I thought that I had hired the wrong person.
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