Key skills for CPAs in business and industry
Leaders from corporate finance and the profession share their advice for upskilling and reskilling for the next era of management accounting.
CPAs working in modern business and industry face two fundamental and interrelated challenges.
On one hand, they’re overseeing automation and other tech upgrades to core finance, accounting, and other business functions. On the other hand, they face growing demands for valuable insights on the future trajectory of the business itself.
Kimberly Ellison-Taylor, CPA, CGMA, says these twin demands have grown exponentially in the post- COVID-19 pandemic years.
The demands and expectations of the profession have “accelerated significantly forward as a result of COVID. The lemonade of that really tough time is that it elevated our thinking,” said Ellison-Taylor, a former executive director for Oracle, past chair of the AICPA, and board director for several major companies.
“We expect a savvy business user who understands how to use technology to mitigate and manage risks, use technology to improve their decision-making, and use technology to help them anticipate what’s next,” she said.
Success today requires combining specific new tech skills, including the use of AI and automation, with the human arts of relationship building and strategizing. Developing these complementary skill sets is a top requirement for job candidates, current professionals, and finance leaders.
“Business models are shifting. It’s required a whole new breed of strategic financial people to be able to deal with that changing Environment,” said Tom Hood, CPA/CITP, CGMA, executive vice president–Business Growth and Engagement at AICPA & CIMA, together as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants.
In a series of interviews, Ellison- Taylor, Hood, and other executive leaders shared their advice for upskilling and reskilling for the next era of management accounting.
Together, they laid out numerous core skills for modern finance leaders and their teams. Those attributes are listed in the information boxes “Key Technology Skills,” “Key Personal and Business Skills,” and “Key Technical Skills.”
To deploy these skills, accounting and finance professionals need a comprehensive understanding of their business beyond accounting and finance functions. Combining a passion for the business with strong accounting, finance, technology, people, and leadership skills will transform the finance team into influential business partners. The finance team will become a go-to resource for business leaders across the organization.
But just as important as the specific skills these leaders described are their suggestions for selecting and developing those skills.
AN ESSENTIAL TECH SKILL: ADAPTABILITY
When developing technology skills, it can feel impossible to choose the right area of focus. There is an ever-expanding set of technologies and skills one can learn. And with the pace of change, skills quickly become obsolete.
“Technology is evolving so fast, and the skills you possess today may be outdated in a year or two,” said Raef Lawson, CPA, Ph.D., executive director of the nonprofit Profitability Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE).
Lawson knows this well. He was early in his career in the late 1970s, when the hot new technology was “the microcomputer.” He saw an opportunity in the emerging ability to digitize and sort business data.
Using the programming language FORTRAN, he automated half his job as an inventory analyst at General Foods. His boss loved it, and the experience set him on a career riding the tech wave in finance.
“I think the light went on — the potential,” Lawson said. He went on to become vice president of finance at another company before joining academia. Today, Lawson runs PACE, which focuses on identifying and developing the competencies that accounting and finance professionals need to help their organizations succeed by making better, more informed decisions.
“Throughout my career, I’ve used technology to eliminate the boring stuff … in order to focus more on value-added activities,” he said.
The technologies change — now faster than ever — but Lawson said the same central concept still resonates from those early days: adaptability and a desire to put new technology to work in pursuit of bigger goals like strategic analysis.
Robin Thieme, CPA, CGMA, has similarly embraced the idea of “tech adaptability” in her role as CEO of KBS CFO, a fractional CFO business. When hiring, she no longer looks for specific technology software competencies on a résumé. Instead, Thieme wants to know if the applicant can adopt and adapt to new technologies to solve clients’ problems.
“I am looking for technology adoption proficiency. You cannot promise that the technology, the software that you’re currently using, is going to be the same in a few years. People need to be prepared to adapt,” she said.
Besides just using software, finance professionals increasingly must know how to build a tech stack, a combination of tech products for business use, said Jennifer Warawa, North America president of QuickFee, an online payment, financing, and accounts receivable automation platform.
Building the stack starts with assessing business needs and identifying requirements for technology upgrades. Those requirements will guide the selection of software for data management, visualization, communication, and more.
“How can you explore and evaluate technology that’s out there, and how it’s going to be a fit for your own business?” Warawa said. “If you can define requirements and help navigate a very crowded technology environment to find the right solution to meet your requirements, that’s important to me.”
THE ROLE OF AI
Generative AI has drawn much interest in the past couple of years, especially as it’s been incorporated into countless business software products. The AICPA’s Future of Finance group has identified generative AI as the second biggest issue for the profession, behind only digital transformation in general, Hood said.
Familiarity with generative AI technology — which can process and respond to a nearly infinite variety of natural language prompts — will increasingly become a core skill for accounting and finance professionals in the near future, Hood added.
The options include chat-based tools like ChatGPT; research-oriented search engines like Perplexity; implementations of the technology within existing software, such as Microsoft’s Copilot variants and Google Gemini’s appearances in the company’s business software suite; and a long list of other large language models and variations on the technology, including Anthropic’s Claude models.
“The first thing you should be doing is getting familiar with it,” Hood said, referring to generative AI tools. “Don’t put all your company data out there — but start asking it questions, and prompting it, and it reacts to context.”
One way to use generative AI is in research. Especially for executives, generative AI can provide a quick education on a business topic, as well as summaries and analyses of memos and data, according to Don Tomoff, CPA, founder of Invenio Advisors in Strongsville, Ohio.
“If I’m a CFO, that’s pretty valuable,” Tomoff said of generative AI’s power to answer questions and analyze scenarios. “I no longer have to hand it to someone to do the analysis. It might not be perfect, but it’ll get me to the 20-yard line any time.”
Generative AI can also generate code in many programming languages. It’s a lightning-fast way to complete simpler tasks such as Excel formulas, scripts, and macros, with the user providing nothing more than a description of the task and the data to be used.
“You can write any formula you need. You just have to know what you want it to do,” Tomoff said. Generative AI agents also can write and revise longer sections of code, allowing savvy users to quickly build prototypes of software tools that might be helpful for the business.
But, as Tomoff noted, generative AI remains somewhat unreliable. It sometimes gives the wrong answer, confidently, or ignores the users’ instructions. In addition, generative AI brings privacy and security concerns — e.g., all information loaded into ChatGPT is used to train its underlying large language model. This means users should never enter any confidential data into ChatGPT.
With so many possibilities, and so many pitfalls, the key is practice and experimentation, Warawa said. Her executive team has licenses for Microsoft’s Copilot, which adds GPT-powered features to many of the company’s apps and to its Windows operating system.
The idea, she said, is that generative AI can be used as a kind of sketchpad for projects and ideas. An executive might use it to generate code for a prototype showing how automation might serve a specific business need, or they can run iterations of data analysis and visualizations more quickly and create drafts for others to expand upon.
STRENGTHENING BUSINESS FUNDAMENTALS
Technology is a tool for the accounting and finance professional’s real mission: delivering useful information and advice about the future of the business. However, that requires skills and knowledge beyond technology.
“I want them to be a strategic thinker and tell me the story of those numbers,” Warawa said of her ideal employee. “What do I need to care about? Tell me strategically about what actions we should take based on what the data is telling us.”
Strategic thinking requires stronger business fundamentals. Accounting and finance professionals can contribute by learning topics like revenue management, managerial costing, and investment management, which traditional accounting curricula may not cover, Lawson said.
“Management accountants don’t have to be revenue management experts. That’s the remit of sales and marketing folks, but we need to be able to partner with them,” he said.
Accounting and finance professionals can provide the costing information that other teams need to understand which customers, products, and services are profitable.
“Then we’re adding value together to our organizations,” Lawson said.
Tomoff suggested that accounting and finance professionals study their employers and their industries.
“How do I as an accountant fit into the bigger picture of what this company does? How it makes money?” he said. “Try to understand the operations of the organization.”
Accounting and finance professionals can also help to identify potential new sources of data to inform strategy — looking to eliminate holes in the big picture that leadership is seeing.
“It’s much easier to interpret data that already exists than to say, ‘What would make this a more complete picture?’” she said.
Of course, turning insights into action also requires the “soft skills” of planning, prioritizing, managing relationships, and communicating with others.
“We see now a greater emphasis on, or a greater need for, softer skills, the soft skills you know, the need for teamwork, need for communication, for management accounts in general, but also CFO and CFO aspirants,” Lawson said.
“The need for ‘new skills’ for finance and accounting is in the top three issues from our surveys of finance and accounting leaders,” Hood said. “These ‘new’ skills involve boundary-crossing skills needed to navigate the changing nature and role of the corporate finance teams that we refer to as the ‘T-shaped professional.’” (See the graphic, “New Skilling: The T-Shaped Finance Professional,” below.)
New skilling: The T-shaped finance professional
A visual look at a cross-section of skills that accounting and financial professionals need to develop to succeed in the modern business world.
“Critical skills like strategic thinking, collaboration, and storytelling allow the finance professionals to navigate across the business in their emerging role as ‘finance business partners,’” Hood said. “This need has accelerated with the advent of gen AI and the desire for finance to move up the value chain on the way to become the Chief Future Officer.”
WHAT EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES CAN DO
Continual learning is the responsibility of both individuals and their employers.
For individuals, Tomoff suggested adding tech skills incrementally, expanding out from core, common tools like Excel. Skills developed in the Microsoft family of tools, like Power BI, will apply to other data analytics and visualization software. The key is to focus learning on skills that will have clear application in the near future.
“Solve problems,” Tomoff said. “Start where you are. Start with what’s right in front of you.”
Meanwhile, Hood said, company leaders should be doing all they can to offer opportunities and incentives for “new skilling” and explaining how those new skills will contribute to career progression.
“It sends a message that you care about your talent,” Hood said. “It also says, ‘I’m going to give you the skills to move up into those value-added roles. Your job will be preserved.’ It takes away the fear factor.”
Leaders should encourage experimentation from everyone, Tomoff said.
“You want them to be incentivized and awarded for pushing the envelope as well,” he explained. “Acknowledge that and show some interest in what they’re coming with. If you really get a good team going, they’re going to be driving change throughout your finance team and maybe throughout your organization.”
The best results come when leadership has a clear vision for the future, Ellison-Taylor advised.
“When we’re talking about reskilling and upskilling, we have to tell people why and on what timeline,” she said. But Ellison- Taylor warned that a constant emphasis on dramatic skills change can be wearying and frightening to employees. Once employees have developed the fundamental skills needed to accomplish their role, the focus should shift to continual learning at a sustainable pace.
“We’re always in a mode of learning, growing, and development,” she said. “You don’t have to get ready when you stay ready.”
Key technology skills
Accounting and finance professionals need deep and ever-broadening technology skills, including:
- Building tech “stacks” (i.e., a combination of technology products for business use) by selecting and overseeing implementation of software tools for the business.
- Employing technology to streamline processes and eliminate duplication.
- Developing specific familiarity in areas such as robotic process automation or data visualization.
- Using generative AI in research, writing, and computer programming tasks as appropriate.
- Extending data skills from Microsoft Excel to other more specialized applications or to coding.
Key personal and business skills
Accounting and finance professionals need comprehensive, ever-broadening personal and business skills, including:
- Specific aspects of costing and revenue management.
- Strategic and critical thinking.
- Communication and storytelling.
- Negotiating and influencing.
- Change management.
- Cross-functional teamwork.
- Development of trust and application of ethics.
Key technical skills
Accounting and finance professionals need deep and ever-broadening technical skills in areas including:
- Risk management.
- Corporate finance.
- M&A.
- Performance management.
- Sustainability and corporate governance.
- Economics.
About the author
Andrew Kenney is a freelance writer based in Colorado. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Jeff Drew at Jeff.Drew@aicpa-cima.com.
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AICPA & CIMA MEMBER RESOURCES
Articles
“Microsoft’s Huge AI Rollout: What CPAs Should Know,” JofA, April 1, 2024
“Harnessing Collaboration for Workplace Transformation,” JofA, Oct. 5, 2023
Podcast episode
“How AI Can Drive a Proactive Approach to Corporate Finance,” JofA, May 2, 2024
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