discover your accountant superpowers

your secret weapons range far beyond mere numbers.

by donny c. shimamoto

many people think that the numbers on financial statements or a tax return are the endpoint of what accountants do.

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but that’s like saying that the words on the page are the endpoint of what a journalist does in an article.

in reality, the objective of both is to tell a story. the best accountants are gifted story-tellers, as well.

in an article, a journalist uses a mix of facts and context to tell you about an event or issue. likewise, when preparing a set of financial statements or a tax return, accountants tell a story about the financial state of a business or person/family.

for example, when reading financial statements, you can tell not just whether a business has been profitable, but also how its operating costs are structured, and whether its owners or management has incurred a lot of debt to enable it to operate. like mini-articles from journalists, financial statement disclosures tell the story behind particular decisions and provide context for particular aspects of the financial statements. personal tax returns and personal financial statements also tell the story of a person’s or family’s income and general financial situation; this is why banks and other lenders ask to see these as part of qualifying you for a loan.

unbeknownst to many people, though, is the complex set of tools, techniques, and standards that underly the ability to produce financial statements and other business reports. this is part of the reason why being a certified public accountant or chartered accountant takes a lot of education, training, and experience – generally the equivalent of a master’s degree and at least two years of work experience. it takes someone intelligent, who can both see the details as well as the bigger picture of the story being told – and who can also ensure that the story is told accurately to maintain the trust of the public.

this last element of trust is essential to being a cpa or ca. year over year, research has shown that cpas and cas continue to be the profession most trusted by the public. no other profession is licensed across the world to attest to the truth of statements made by a business or individual to the public. this is why one of the classic superhero personas for accountants is the arbiter of truth.

what does it mean to provide insight?

published in 2012, the aicpa’s cpa horizons 2025 report identified one of the cpa core competencies as “synthesizing intelligence into insights.” i was lucky enough to be part of the advisory panel that helped to analyze the research data that the aicpa had gathered to set the vision for the profession in 2025. when our panel discussed this area many concepts came up: business intelligence, market intelligence, information about the business environment, analyzing information, and much more. in the end, we crafted the competency to represent the accountant’s ability to pull together (“synthesize”) all the information and results of business intelligence gathering into “insights” – information that was relevant and provided in a context that enabled a business decision to be made quickly.

accountants do this by utilizing tools, primarily software, that can be as simple as a spreadsheet (e.g., microsoft excel) but also ranges in complexity and application as you look at software like enterprise resource planning (erp) or corporate performance management (cpm). just google accounting software, erp, or crm to see the myriad of software that is available for use by accountants.

so it’s not just the tools, but the techniques and standards that enable accountants to deliver insightful storytelling. let’s take a closer look at these techniques and standards.

data analytics and data visualization

in the information age, technology underlies everything that an accountant does, so it probably comes as no surprise that data analytics and data visualization are two techniques used extensively in accounting. while these are both buzzwords today, both of these techniques have been around for decades, they just had to be done more manually or depended upon having an it person program some routines to do the analysis.

for example, data analytics was first automated for accountants by the personal spreadsheet software, visicalc, in 1979. before this, you needed big mainframes or teams of mathematicians to do highly complex analyses. if you’ve ever watched the movie “hidden figures,” accountants are much like those women who helped the space program be successful, except we’re the hidden figures doing the calculations behind business success.

with data visualization tools becoming more end user-friendly (i.e., you don’t need to be an it expert to use them), they’ve also become an increasingly popular item in the accountant’s toolbelt. data visualization helps by graphically showing trends or patterns in data. however, like x-rays, it takes good training to create them properly and even more education, training, and experience to interpret them correctly to diagnose what they mean. so while the it expert or data scientist may help to craft an analysis or visualization, a good accountant will be able to view these in a relevant context and provide insights to support better decision-making.

this ability to draw out insights that drive improved decision-making is a key part of the underlying accountant superpower of insightful storytelling. however, note that i talk about this as supporting decision-making – this is because as accountants we are often not the final decision-maker. the final decision-maker is often another executive or operations person. through accounting, we provide the information and context – the story – to help other people make the best decisions for their own success, whether it be a personal “happily ever after” or business “win.”

business reporting (financial and integrated reporting)

one of the things that make accounting difficult is the myriad of business situations and financial arrangements that it needs to be able to tell stories about. add in a variety of industries, tax laws and regulations that vary between different countries, and the need to enable comparability among like, and also unlike, entities and financial reporting quickly becomes very complex.

often more art than science, financial reporting is more than just generally accepted accounting principles (gaap) or the international financial reporting standards (ifrs). at its heart, financial reporting standards are the accounting profession’s mutually agreed-upon way to ensure that there is consistency and comparability among similar and dissimilar entities. rather than being driven by tax law, which may have underlying political motives, the financial reporting standards were created by and are maintained by accountants with the primary intention of being able to tell the financial story of a person or business entity to various stakeholders.

i use the term stakeholders because there could be a variety of people who are interested in the financial picture of a person or business, including:

• banks and other lenders
• tax authorities
• regulators or public policy entities
• a legislature or other governing entity
• a business’s owners or shareholders
• investors or potential investors
• data aggregators who provide benchmarking or industry analysis
• academics and other economic researchers

this is by no means an exhaustive list, but most people don’t realize that even their personal financial picture is just one data point in the pages of their city’s, county’s, state’s, country’s and the world’s economic story. and it’s the financial reporting standards that make the telling of this grand aggregated story possible.

a frequently heard criticism of the financial reporting standards, though, is that they only tell part of the story of what’s going on in a business. there are a lot of other aspects other than financial that tell us whether a business is going to be successful or not. this is why investment analysts don’t just look at the financial statements when making stock recommendations, and why financial performance is only one aspect that business valuation professionals look at when determining the value of a privately held company.

enabling internal insights

looking at a more holistic view of a company first became really popular in the early 1990s with the design of a “balanced scorecard,” first published in articles by kaplan and norton in 1992 and comprehensively described in their book “the balanced scorecard” in 1996. intended to support internal decision-making, the scorecard analyzed three additional areas beyond financial: customer, internal business processes, and learning and growth.

the conscious capitalist movement also uses a framework that follows four tenets that incorporates the “bigger picture” of a business and its impact on the world around it. conscious capitalism’s tenets are paraphrased below:

1. higher purpose – businesses exist for more than just profit; profit is a means to the end of a higher purpose.
2. stakeholder orientation – businesses operate from an ecosystem of employees, customers, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment; conscious businesses value and care for everyone in their ecosystem.
3. conscious leadership – conscious leaders keep the business focused on its higher purpose, and support the people within the organization to create value for all stakeholders.
4. conscious culture – fosters love and care, builds trust, and includes accountability, transparency, integrity, loyalty, egalitarianism, fairness, and personal growth.

these are just two examples of business reporting frameworks that drive internal insights and more holistic decision-making.

enabling public insights

like the balanced scorecard, conscious capitalism is used primarily to drive better internal decision-making, and the information represented by these frameworks isn’t intended for public consumption. that’s where the integrated reporting (ir or <ir>) standards come into play. originating in 2009, these standards are intended to enable reporting about an entity’s value creation over the short, medium, and long term via its governance, performance, and prospects.

with increased public awareness of big companies’ potential to impact the environment, the sustainability reporting movement drove the adoption of integrated reporting by big companies who wanted to inform the public about their efforts to minimize their impact on the environment. aspects of this movement also incorporated human rights issues such as fair wage practices and socially responsible sourcing of raw materials and labor. this has now come to be called environmental, social and governance (esg) reporting.

the increased popularity of this type of reporting has also led to the founding of the sustainability accounting standards board (sasb) in 2011, with the stated mission “to establish industry-specific disclosure standards across esg topics that facilitate communication between companies and investors about financially material, decision-useful information.” its mission also mentions ensuring that “such information should be relevant, reliable and comparable across companies on a global basis.”

the world economic forum has also been working on developing more detailed guidance around esg reporting and in january 2020 published a paper called “toward common metrics and consistent reporting of sustainable value creation,” which proposes reporting around four pillars: principles of governance, people, planet and prosperity. these pillars are intended to incorporate standards already published by entities like the sasb in the areas covered by the pillars. the paper was prepared in collaboration with the big 4 accounting firms: deloitte, ey, kpgm, and pwc. this is clearly within the realm of accounting … accounting for nonfinancial information.

reporting on nonfinancial information is not only important for regular businesses, but also for the government. by providing the public with information on the services that were provided using tax revenues and the resulting outcomes of those services, local, state, and national governments can help the public understand how the taxes they pay are benefiting them.

one example of this is the association of governmental accountants (aga), service efforts and accomplishments (sea) reporting standard. this standard describes how government can report on non-financial information and how this may translate into taxpayer benefits: for example, the number of households serviced by garbage trucks, and the number of tons of trash versus recycling they picked up. the recycling information, in particular, could be used to show the reduction in landfill usage and the conservation of natural resources through government-run recycling programs. another example may be the number of people served by homeless shelters, and the number of people who were able to be transitioned from shelters into low-income housing and workforce development programs that provide more stability and enable the person or families to become more self-sufficient.

by providing insights into how tax monies are being spent and the benefits to taxpayers and the greater community, accountants can help the public make more informed decisions about the impact of their tax dollars and how (often political) decisions around government programs and policies may impact themselves or their community.

hopefully, through all these examples you can see how accountants are key to insightful storytelling. the software tools are there and can be used by anyone, but when combined with the techniques and standards-driven by the accounting profession, the synergy results in a superpower that enables people to trust the information being provided and make better personal and business decisions based on that information.

how to tell if this may be one of your latent superpowers

as you can tell from the historical references, this is one of the areas of accountant superpowers that have been identified for a while now and researched extensively. if you think this may be one of your superpower areas, you can check out these two certifications that have supporting frameworks and training to help you develop and refine your powers:

• certified management accountant, institute of management accountants
• chartered global management accountant, association of international certified professional accountants

note that both of these are considered specialty credentials, so only accountants who seek to make it publicly known that they have these powers pursue the credential and display it with their name. many who have this superpower choose to keep it a secret or are satisfied with just the cpa or ca designation, so don’t assume just because there aren’t a lot of cmas or cgmas out there that this is a rare power. this is probably the most commonly appearing superpower (at varying levels of strength) among accountants.

have a story to share about this accountant superpower? record a video or write an article and share it out on social media using the hashtags #accountantsuperpower and #insightfulstorytelling.

posted on february 8, 2021