5 Career Tips For Making A Move From Accounting to Finance! #Finance

hey guys welcome to another CashNews.co with the financial controller my name is bill hanna and in today’s CashNews.co i’m gonna walk you through five career tips for making the move from Accounting and to

style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance and the reason why i’m making this CashNews.co is that since the start of this channel in january of 2020 and since i started covering career advice in Accounting and

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance i’ve received so many questions from you guys on how to make the move from Accounting to bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance my first reaction to this kind of question is usually why why do you want to make the move from Accounting into text-decoration: none;">Finance since Accounting is so awesome but i am biased because i spent the majority of my career working in Accounting i started out at pricewaterhousecoopers as an auditor and then worked briefly after that as a financial

analyst but then i progressed further into Accounting and then i went to become an Accounting manager and then a corporate controller so i am biased toward Accounting however i’ve seen throughout my career so many others make the move from

Accounting into Finance for some other reasons that i’m going to get into in a minute here however i’ve seen other people do it and there are

five things that these people do usually that helps them get in from Accounting into Finance so let’s cover quickly why some of you would want to make

that move from Accounting to Finance and in my view there are three main reasons why you would want to do that reason number one has to do with earnings so

usually your earning power as a Financial Planning and analysis associate is about 10 to 20 more than someone else in Accounting with the same number of years if you look it up online you’ll find that in the us the median salary for an fp a person is around

86 000 a year versus 71 000 a year for an Accounting professional with the same number of years of experience reason number two has to do with the nature of the work itself so in Accounting you’re mostly concerned with the past with history you are looking at

the past and summarizing the transactions in accordance with the Accounting rules in the country that you’re in however in Finance you’re usually

concerned with the future so it’s more strategic in nature you’re mostly planning um you’re Forecasting your Budgeting for the future so it’s more strategic in nature and that is more appealing to a lot of people it’s more sexy quote

unquote and so a lot of people are attracted to Finance for that reason and the reason number three has to do with career progression so usually when you work in fp a or in

Finance in general you have much more chance of becoming a cfo so for those of you who want to become a cfo in the future you have a much bigger shot of becoming a cfo if you

go into Finance usually about only 10 of cfos will come out of an Accounting background versus the vast majority or 90 percent of cfos that will come out of

a Finance or fp a background and really quickly before jumping into today’s five tips i want to give a big thank you and a big shout out to everybody who subscribed to

the channel we just crossed the 5 000 subscriber mark recently and i thought that would take me years to achieve and it took me about only maybe 10 months and this is thanks to you for subscribing engaging liking and commenting on my CashNews.cos so thank you so much for that i promise to give you

more in the coming months and years my number one tip for making the move from Accounting to Finance is to make that move internally within your employer

right now rather than trying to go and get a new role as an fp associate with a background in Accounting it will be much easier for you to make that move internally and you can make it gradually over time and what i mean by that is that you can ask your manager right now in your

current company to be included in more Finance responsibilities beside your Accounting job so this might be a little bit difficult at first because

you’ll be doing your Accounting work beside doing some more new responsibilities in Finance such as budget building or Forecasting but

this will give you some exposure to the type of work and you get a taste of it and you can also include it in your resume as something you’ve done so that you can begin building your resume and shifting it from an Accounting focused resume into more of an fp a focused resume

and that would be tip number one is making the move gradually within your current employer my tip number two has to do with the mindset of operating because mostly when you operate as an accountant your world is either black or white with maybe a little bit of gray when it comes to maybe

interpretation of Accounting guidelines however when you work in Finance there is a lot of navigating over the gray because you’re working with

planning and Forecasting and Budgeting and not everything is clear-cut so you need to get comfortable with working in the gray and the best analogy that i’ve heard to illustrate this point here is that as an accountant you’re like a sweet water fish

while if you work in Finance you’re more of a salty water fish so for a period of time when you’re working when you’re trying to transition from

Accounting to Finance you are in between that meeting of salty water and sweet water which is called brackish water so for a while there you’ll be

called brackish water fish which is someone who’s trying to be in between Accounting and Finance and until you can graduate from there and go into

Finance and be more comfortable in the salty water and the gray areas of working and text-decoration: none;">Finance if you or anyone you know is preparing for a job interview and Accounting be sure to download my Accounting interview checklist it’s 100 free and an amazing summary of the most common Accounting

interview questions i’ll leave a link in the description below my tip number three making the transition from Accounting to Finance is working on your

social and presentation skills because when you work as an accountant most of the time you are dealing within a close circle of Accounting and Finance

professionals in the company however when you work in Finance most of the time you’ll be dealing with other people from around the company in sales and coming up with

sales targets and forecasts and operations and working on system implementations and on Budgeting you work with everyone around the company so you need to begin working on your social skills and the way to do that is to force yourself in social situations and attend meetings and

social gatherings with other team members and just get in the habit of getting yourself out there and be more visible and more vocal and that will help you in making a transition in the future internally within the company and to go along with that you need to work on your presentation skills

because a lot of the time when you work in Finance you’re going to find yourself explaining to someone else from within the company a financial concept to someone who

is not from a financial background and so you need to work on your presentation skills by working on your verbal presentation so find more opportunities for you to present to someone else whether one person or two or more than one person another way to do this is to do what i’m doing right

now create a CashNews.co uh post it in youtube get some feedback on your presentation skills and also work on your visual presentation in terms of creating slides and powerpoint so this way you can communicate your ideas a lot faster and break things down for someone who doesn’t have the

financial background my tip number four making the transition has to do with the idea of making and delivering decisions because when you work as an accountant most of the time your decisions have to do with closing the books preparing Financial Statements going through an audit

and the decision making here doesn’t necessarily impact others around the company however when you work in Finance you’re gonna have to make tough calls and

decisions based on the input that you gather and you’re gonna have to make these decisions and not only make them but you’re gonna have to deliver them to someone else and obviously there is no magic pill that you can take that will make you overnight able to make and deliver decisions

so this is something that comes over time with experience so your best bet is to begin gradually taking on role roles and responsibilities that has to do with Budgeting and Forecasting so that you can get comfortable with the idea of taking input and making

decisions based on this input and then be able to live with that decision and also deliver it on top of that especially when it’s a tough decision for example if you’re like declining a budget request that someone had made from the company and so this is something that comes over time

so begin to gradually get exposed to it and this is the key to becoming a highly effective Finance professionals all right my final tip or tip number five has to do with

creating a track record in your current company specifically around two things one project management because that will come in very handy when it comes to Budgeting and then secondly with system implementations so my advice here is to take on new projects as they come in in your

company so whenever you see a new opportunity to take on a new system implementation or a project in general and take ownership of it this is your chance even though it will be more work for you because you have your job to do and this will be incremental to your job but this is your chance on

taking on a project putting your name on it and delivering a final product that you can can stand behind and be proud of and that will begin to create a track record for you around the company to be known as someone who can take a project from inception and deliver a finished product and if there

isn’t a project to take on try to create a project for yourself one of the things that i’ve seen in the past is that if a company is not for example using an expense management software like expensify or abacus or any of the other expense management software you can recommend that to

your company and you begin to implement that project yourself own it put your name on it and deliver a good product and that at the end will help you as a stepping stone from going from your Accounting career into a bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance role all right that’s it for this CashNews.co if you liked it go ahead and smash that like button if you’ve taken some steps to move from Accounting into

style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance let me know in the comment section below what steps you’ve taken and if you haven’t subscribed to the channel go ahead and subscribe now and i’ll see you in the next CashNews.co you