Best Practice for Professionals

There are several professionals working in the Industry in India.  They are engaged in accountancy, finance, costing work in commerce, industry, financial services, education, and the public and not-forprofit sectors. They are ensuring that organizations, whether partnerships, companies or not for profit entities are more successful and sustainable. Professional accountants in business form a very diverse constituency, and can be found working as employees, consultants, and self-employed owner-managers or advisors.  

Many professional accountants working in organizations are in positions of strategic and/or functional leadership, and are well-placed to partner with colleagues in other disciplines to create long-term sustainable value for their organizations.  

The following are the typical job profiles of the Professional Accountants in Business  

• Leadership/management: Chief executive officer (CEO); Chief financial officer (CFO)/financial director (FD); Chief operating officer; Director of governance or operations; Treasurer  
• Operational: Business unit controller; financial, or performance analyst; cost accountant; resources manager; business support manager; systems analyst  
• Management control: Business risk manager; compliance manager; internal auditor  
• Accounting and stakeholder communications: Group controller; head of reporting; investor relations manager; financial or management accountant  

The Attitude of Chartered Accountant in Employment  

Gaining practical experience in different roles will also help professional accountants acquire an attitude and mindset that enables them to enhance their own performance within organizations. Employers are demanding a broad range of professional and general business skills, which, if developed, improves the versatility of the professional accountant.  

In addition, with experience, the successful professional accountant in business/employment can typically also be characterized by a distinctive way of thinking.  

Best Inter-personal Practices by Chartered Accountant in Employment:  

1. Reconnecting With The Co-Employees:  You can create this type of environment by developing good relationships with your team, and by reconnecting whenever possible.  
2. Develop Emotional Quotient:   It also helps to develop your emotional intelligence: the better you can sense the emotions and needs of those around you, the better you will be as a leader.  
3. Appreciate the Team:  You'll also want to give everyone regular feedback on their work.  
4. Developing Your Team: Assist people to develop their skills. Offer your people opportunities for learning and development, as a way of helping them feel more secure and committed to the organization.  
5. Improving the Workplace:  Review your office spaces, conference rooms, and  rest areas that your team uses. Ensure the following:  

• That each area is safe and clean.  
• The air quality is good with adequate cross ventilation.  
• The rooms bright and energizing.  
• The team members have the tools and resources they need to work effectively.  

6. Improve Communication: Poor communication can be another common root cause of low morale. Give people accurate, timely information, especially if sales are down, or if the company is restructuring or downsizing. (Just make sure that your communications are coordinated with those of other managers.)  

7. Keep Key People Informed: Identify ways that you can keep your team in the loop. Perhaps you could send a weekly email with important updates, or devote a few minutes in your regular meetings to keeping people up to speed with what's going on. Communicate fully with your team, and explain how any changes or decisions will affect them. Remember, the flow of information should go both ways. Encourage your people to come to you any time they have questions or concerns. Listen actively to what they have to say, and respond in a timely manner to problems or suggestions.  

8. Goals Setting For Self & team: The lack of direction is disheartening, and disorienting. Make sure that your people are aware of your organization's mission and vision, and of how their work contributes towards these. Understanding these gives members of your team a clear and (hopefully) inspiring view of what the organization expects, and helps them think about how they can use their own talents and skills to fulfill the organization's mission.  

9. Build Confidence: Perhaps your team just lost an important contract or project. If this is the case, people's confidence may be shaken. Learn how to build confidence in other people. One great way to do this is to give them more autonomy to make decisions.  

10. Take Initiative:  People with a good attitude take the initiative whenever they can. They willingly help a colleague in need, they pick up the slack when someone is off sick, and they make sure that their work is done to the highest standards. "Good enough" is never quite good enough for them!  

Remember Demonstrating Ethical Decision-Making And Integrity Could Open Many Doors For You.  

Best Practices by Employee-Chartered Accountant  

1. Productivity: Probably the most crucial thing that you can do to become more effective at work is to learn how to manage your time. Without this skill, your days will feel like a frantic race, with every project, email, and phone call competing for your attention.  

Start by looking at your daily schedule.  

• Use an Activity Log to analyze how much time you're devoting to your various tasks, like attending meetings, checking email, and making phone calls.  
• Once you know how well you're using time, you need to learn how to prioritize activities.  
• If you know which jobs are important, and which can be rescheduled or delegated, you'll be able to focus on the work that brings the most value.  
• To keep track of everything, use an organizing tool, to make sure you don't forget vital tasks and commitments. Being effective at work means you use time to your advantage.  
• Goal setting is another important element in working productively.  
• Good organization is also important for working effectively and productively. If you're disorganized, you can waste a huge amount of time just looking for lost items. So learn how to file properly, and find out how to create an effective schedule  

2. Versatility: The vast range of circumstances and situations that can arise in organizations of any  type, industry, and size makes the application of detailed rules ineffective for guiding management decisions. Therefore, the quality of professional judgment becomes a differentiating factor for high-performing professional accountants. This includes balancing organizational nimbleness and quick and intuitive decision making with a need for evidencebased decisions.  

3. Communication: Think about just how often we communicate every day. We make phone calls, attend meetings, write email, give presentations, talk to customers, and so on: it can seem that we spend all day communicating with other people! This is why good communication skills are essential, especially when your goal is to work more effectively.  

Start by developing your active listening skills.  

a. Listening: This means that you're making a concerted effort to really hear and understand what other people are saying to you.  

b. Active Listening: Don't plan out what you're going to say next while the other person is talking. Instead, just listen to what they're saying. You may be surprised at how much miscommunication can be avoided simply by listening actively.  

c. Writing skills: Next, look at your writing skills. How well do you communicate in writing? Start with your emails. Most of us write dozens of emails every day. But there are many techniques that we can use to write effective emails - ones that actually get read!  

• For instance, always keep to one main topic when writing an email.  
• Putting several important topics in one message will make it difficult for your colleague to prioritize and sort information.  
• If you do need to bring up several different points, then number them sequentially, or split them into separate messages, with relevant subject headings.  

d. You'll be more effective in your role if you learn how to communicate better across all these media, and your boss and colleagues are bound to appreciate your skills, since they'll be the main beneficiaries!  

4. Career Development / Learning  

No matter what your field is, it's important that you keep learning and developing your skills.  

• To begin with, carry out a Personal SWOT Analysis to identify the areas that you need to work on. ii. In addition to the technical skills required to do your job, you also need to focus on soft skills.  
• These include leadership skills, problem solving techniques, emotional intelligence skills, and creative thinking. Anything you can do to enhance these skills will pay off in the workplace.  
• Also consider if there are any qualifications that you don't have that a reasonable person would consider appropriate for your field.  
• If so, could this be holding you back from advancement or promotion? For instance, would it be useful to have a particular degree or other certification if you want to apply for a management position?  
• Are you lacking any specific skills?  
• In some roles, keeping up-to-date with developments in your industry helps you stay relevant. This will help you do your job better, especially as you climb the ranks.  

What are the activities that are undertaken by Chartered Accountant in Employment?  

The roles professional accountants perform can be described as creators, enablers, preservers, and reporters of sustainable value for their organizations in both performance and conformance dimensions:  

• Value Addition: By assuming leadership in creating and implementing strategies, policies, plans, structures, and governance measures that lead to value addition.  
• Decision Making and operationalisation: Enabling managerial and operational decision making and implementation of strategy for achieving value addition on continuing basis, as well as constant improvements.  
• Facing Risks: Protecting the organisation from risks by drawing up strategies  to face operational, and financial risks.  
• Ensuring Compliance: There is a slew of disclosure requirements set out in the Companies Act by Companies, the periodical returns under income tax, service tax, VAT and excise is required to be filed. Apart from this the annual financial statements confirming to the Accounting Standards and IFRS wherever applicable, has to be ensured. The requisite returns has to be filed on a timely basis, the relevant tax payments have to be done. This would ensure that interest, fines and penalties are not imposed on the organisation for nonpayment/ late payment of taxes due, and ensure compliance with regulations, standards, and good practices.  
• Drawing up Financial, Costing, Payroll and Management Information Reports: These reports help to convey the performance of the organisation to stakeholders.  

In practice, the various supporting roles performed in the organizations by a CA in employment could include the following:  

• Development of Growth Strategy  
• Support to senior management in decisions making and facilitating the effective performance of other organizational functions such as marketing, purchase etc  
• Enabling asset management and mitigating strategic risk and implementing effective internal control systems  

To sum up, acquiring Professional Skills  

The following is a list of professional skills for professional accountants:  

• intellectual skills;  
• technical and functional skills;  
• personal skills;  
• interpersonal and communication skills; and  
• organizational and business management skills.8  

These professional skills are part of the set of capabilities required by professional accountants to demonstrate competence. These capabilities include knowledge, skills, professional values, ethics, and attitudes. The standard classifies a non-exhaustive list of required skills under the five skill sets listed above, and recognizes that not all these skills will be fully developed at the point of professional qualification.  

Professionalism and ethical behavior  

Professional accountants should uphold high ethical standards, which requires accountants to encourage an ethics-based culture in an employing organization that emphasizes the importance that senior management places on ethical behavior. Therefore, professional accountants can support an organization’s code of conduct and ethics through their own behavior and actions in the various roles that they perform. Although the importance of ethical leadership is highlighted under the success driver “Effective Leadership and Strategy,” professional accountants should develop and promote an ethical culture through their professionalism across all the drivers of sustainable organizational success.  

How to ensure compliance?  

To sum up:  

1. When we're truly effective at work, we manage our time well, we communicate clearly, and we have a good attitude.  
2. Effective workers are often the most respected and the most productive in their workplaces, and they're often the first to be considered for a promotion.  
3. Start by doing a job analysis to discover what your role is really about.  
4. Next, learn how to manage your time better, communicate more effectively, and control any stress.  
5. Also, make sure that you devote time towards further learning and career development.  
6. Post-qualification training: The performance of professional accountants in specific jobs will largely depend on their post-qualification training and development and experiences, and will require a good understanding of an organization and how it generates value for its stakeholders.  
7. Additionally, professional accountants in SMEs usually perform multiple roles. In a SME, strategy, business planning, and performance management are equally critical functions, but may be done by one person or a few people, and because of the nature of the organization, can involve simpler processes.  

These above are a few thoughts borrowed and collated as for the professional in trying times, where limited success if being achieved- looking at what are the possible areas of improvement could spell future success. All the best.