Strategic Accounting, Not Just Reporting

Episode  # 146: What if your accounting team did more than close the books—what if they helped shape outcomes before the month even ends? We explore how to evolve accounting from a reporting function into a true strategic partner that translates numbers into decisions. From building business acumen and storytelling skills to inserting accountants into high‑stakes projects, we lay out a practical path to unlock the insight already sitting inside your ledgers.

We start by reframing the role: compliance and accurate reporting remain essential, but the next level is connecting transactions to the choices leaders face. You’ll hear how to turn variance reviews into narratives operators can act on, when to reset baselines so forecasts stop lying, and how to use simple visuals and clear language to remove guesswork. We also talk about freeing capacity—retire low-value reports, streamline reconciliations, and focus on work that changes outcomes—so your team can show up where decisions are made, not just after the fact.

If you’re ready to move from ledgers to leverage, this conversation gives you clear steps to start today—train for communication, show up in project rooms, tell the story behind the numbers, and make accounting a catalyst for growth. Like what you heard? Follow, share with a colleague, and leave a review so more finance leaders can turn their teams into strategic partners.

Episode outline:

1. Evolve accounting from a reporting only entity,
2. Looking beyond compliance and good bookkeeping, and
3. Integrating governance and risk into strategy.

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Transcript

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Stephen McLain: 0:04

I have an important accounting team capabilities. Question this week, is your accounting team a strategic partner, or are they still only a reporting entity, providing little or no context? I have higher expectations for accounting than the traditional financial reporting role that they have traditionally been asked to do. Accounting has a unique viewpoint that can translate the meaning of financial transactions into future implications for the organization, instead of only being historically focused. Let's add the element of future looking to help the department leads and strategic leaders make better decisions with the limited resources they have. It's about optimizing and better strategic planning. Please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host. Stephen McLain, this is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. My usernames and the links are in this episode's show notes. You can also follow finance leader Academy on LinkedIn. Thank you. This is episode number 146, and I'll be talking about developing your accounting team into a strategic partner. And I'll highlight the following topics. Number one, evolve accounting from a reporting only entity. Number two, looking beyond compliance and good bookkeeping. And three, integrating governance and risk into strategy. I like talking about capabilities and how you can use those capabilities that are at your fingertips as a leader, especially the untapped ones that will always lead me to the accounting team. Accounting has a unique perspective. They have unique duties, but they also have exclusive insights that often go unused when fully utilized, accounting can look beyond its usual responsibilities of maintaining the financial records, preparing reports and practicing good governance. They can also provide unique insights that can help drive the business to more growth. I believe that you have staff accountants on your team right now who see things you would like to know, if only you would ask them and teach them how to explain in everyday business language. Last week, I shared episode number 145, fpna and operations, creating powerful partnerships for strategic growth. I talked about aligning your fpna team with operations so that they can help each other solve strategic problems easier. A well aligned fpna team operates as a true strategic partner, rather than just a reporting function, they maintain a forward looking mindset using forecasting, scenario analysis and sensitivity testing to guide decisions instead of merely reporting historical results, processes become streamlined. Data grows more accurate, and finance professionals proactively engage with department leaders to translate strategy into measurable financial gains. Please go back to listen to that episode. In case you missed it. This week, I want to take a look at our accounting teams to explore the possibility of them becoming more strategic in their duties, which in turn will help the organization be even better in the marketplace. We of course, need accounting to be focused on compliance, competent record keeping proper bank reconciliations, good governance, financial reporting and many other essential tasks we need our financial transactions to be recorded in the correct accounts, which then leads to proper financial reporting. The financial reports we use, like the PnL and the balance sheet, are critically important to get right so we know our financial position, but we can go beyond this to extract critical insights for leaders from the accounting perspective and from a good governance position. I'll share an example as a team, accounting can become great finance storytellers to help explain financial results in plain language so that non finance leaders can understand better. A staff accountant can translate from accounting language to business language for that department or team, to what is happening and why it matters and how it shows up on the P and L and the balance sheet. To perform this function even better, your accounting staff must develop their business acumen knowledge for your particular industry and for how each team performs its duties. We should be moving beyond just providing a list of variances to highlight why each material variance matters and then advise business. Leaders how to make adjustments for the follow on periods, or to make changes to the overall plan. If we find that a certain variance is occurring each period, then maybe we need to update the base in the future, we may have a new standard. I challenge you to connect the financials to the business strategy. Don't leave leaders guessing. A spreadsheet by itself can be visually appealing to us as finance leaders, but to a department head, it may be an ocean of confusion. Provide an appropriate graph or a picture with words on it, explaining what is happening with words and language that they understand. Please subscribe to the podcast on the platform you are currently listening to. And also, please subscribe to my weekly email. One more tip. Please view your CPE completion total for this year, we are about to enter q4 so it's time for many of you to get to the required number for your certification. Set up a plan today. I have worked in financial planning and analysis and auditing and in accounting. All of these functional areas have a different perspective, and they also have unique insights into the facets of the business. I want to see more accounting teams grow their capacity and ability to help the organization overall and individual teams to improve. Not just report what happened, but start to shape transactions before they happen. Be forward leaning and forward looking at the financials, to influence how the PnL will look before month end close to the benefit of the entire company. Now let's talk about helping your accounting team to be more strategic. Number one, evolve accounting from a reporting only entity. I believe that the accounting team has way more potential to foster growth beyond their normal daily duties. What accounting does and is expected to do is critically important. My degree is in accounting, and I've worked in accounting, so I know, but there is more capacity to find strategic insights from the governance, risk analysis and financial reporting perspective than what we are currently asking them to do. I know that someone is saying that we don't have capacity to do this. We barely have time to do our normal duties, which often includes about two weeks each month to do monthly close. I would challenge that every time. It's about how we use our time and the capacity we do have. Re look at what we are spending our time on, find efficiencies and update, remove anything that doesn't add value. We can always find better ways to improve our processes we are focusing on the most important value added tasks. This is what finance leaders do. Optimize your team's work effort to add more value. We all win when this happens, when becoming more strategic. Begin with your audience. Know what they need to be successful. Answer the so what in your numbers? Know the difference between what a strategic leader needs versus what operations or marketing needs in terms of context, and translate your accounting language into operator or strategic leader language to help them not guess what you mean. Now, going forward, I like to see accounting personnel be present in the important meetings and projects. I have been assigned to many project teams while working in fpna, sometimes there was an accounting representative assigned. Also. I always had a prominent speaking and contribution part for the project as a rep from fpna, but the accounting team. Rep was often very quiet and contributed the minimum. Now this needs to change. I want to see accounting contributing strategically to high visibility projects across the company. Of course, this depends on the project type, but I want to see more contributions and more perspective from accounting. I believe it will add high value. Anytime you ask a team to pivot or add more value, there will be training requirements so ensure team leaders that you add training sessions to help your team members think and act more strategically. Number two, looking beyond compliance and good bookkeeping, month end close has many opportunities to positively influence better decisions on the accounting side of month end close, the system produces massive spreadsheet pages filled with data on financial performance for that period, often broken out by a line of business, product categories and actual products, plus a lot more a massive data dump with endless columns of performance data. But there are insights in there. Our staff accountants have the ability to share special accounting specific insights that can help business leaders. It might be on how to more efficiently use raw materials so cogs are. More accurate, or it might be inventory management that creates a net positive flow to the P and L statements, or maybe a labor optimization issue. All these examples flow to the P and L and then to the balance sheet as a higher asset or a lower liability, or even a change in retained earnings. Again, what accounting does is critical, so I want them to get it right when following GAAP and any regulated accounting guidance that has been codified, which happens a lot. Let's go beyond just following the rules to adding strategic value in your work. What do you see that no one else does what can make a positive difference in a decision? Become that avid storyteller in how you present your findings, break down your work in an understandable language. Let's not keep leaders guessing on what the numbers really mean. Add high value context. It could be as simple as a sentence highlighting a trend in your accounts that would have normally gone unnoticed. Number three, integrating governance and risk into strategy, we need senior leaders of character to lead our organizations, and this is why good governance practices are so important to be integrated into the culture. We need to have systems and values that hold leadership accountable, which in turn builds more trust. Trust then gives us lots more potential for off the charts growth. Governance does not need to be something we do in the back room, but in the forefront of all of our activities. So make it part of the culture and all of our activities. I covered governance in my auditing series leaders want to know the risk associated with decisions. Risk analysis helps decision makers understand possible consequences from making the actual decision along with other decision options and in making no decision. Not making a decision is okay, but you need to know what may happen from taking no action? Does the competition get even stronger in the market? Do they exploit a weakness to gain market share, or something even worse? These areas I talked about over the last few minutes are just a few important topics to consider to engage in, to be more strategic in everything we do on the accounting side, I believe we must connect the financials to business strategy with every variance is a story. But variances may trigger us to look at financial relationships or outcomes differently, but the department head may not realize it. So when you are reviewing variances, let's add some story elements to lead that department had to review what happened to further improve better decision and outcomes. Now for action today, how much does the accounting team significantly contribute to strategic conversations in your organization? And I'm not talking about just a controller or a VP, I mean the team managers and the individual contributors. Is accounting providing context to their numbers? Are you seeing a partnership between staff accountants and leaders at all levels of the organization, or is it only a reporting relationship? I want you to see the value and opportunity to push your accounting team to the strategic level. It will make a positive difference. I know it today, I talked about developing your accounting team into a strategic partner, and I highlighted the following points. Number one, evolve accounting from a reporting only entity. Number two, looking beyond compliance and good bookkeeping. And three, integrating governance and risk into strategy. There is an amazing opportunity for the accounting team to provide more insightful strategic support for decision making. I know it, and I believe it, your team has access to data insights that can make a difference. And if you train them to become data storytellers, so that they can turn that data into actionable insights, you may find that business outcomes become more favorable. There is value in the accounts your team is managing. We should not just be chasing lost pennies in our trial balances, but contributing high value information with stories to strategic conversations. In future episodes, I will discuss areas that you can start to improve so you have additional capacity, but it takes effort to do it. There are opportunities in month, end, close your other analysis work and how we conduct ourselves daily, so that we focus on what's important instead of what makes us frustrated. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader podcast. You can find this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. If this episode helped you today, please share with a colleague until next time, you can check out more resources at finance leader academy.com and sign up for my weekly updates so you don't miss an episode of the podcast. And now go lead your team and I'll see. Next time, thank you. Applause.