Industry Accountants - Document Your Work!
Coming from an audit background, I have been trained to have clear documentation over practically everything I do. Whether that documentation takes the form of a memo, a standard operating procedure (SOP), or a streamline template for future work products, I am constantly aiming to make my work understandable out of habit. In the last few years, I've been supporting small and growing businesses and have noticed that this sentiment of documentation is not shared amongst all of my industry counterparts. So today, I'm going to share some reasons why industry accountants should document their work.
Career Advancement
I see stories fairly often on the internet that tell professionals to not document what they do so that no one else on the team can take over their job. While this might be beneficial in some circumstances where you don't care about being promoted and want to work minimal hours, it's my experience that it's difficult to demonstrate value without being able to share what it is you are doing. By keeping The details of your process and responsibility is a secret, upper management and ownership will probably Don't not have a good idea of what you are doing with your time. Without documentation, industry professionals can find themselves in a difficult situation. If their managers don't understand how long something takes, they may end up giving out too much work or just simply not appreciating the level of effort required by the accountant to do their job. In either circumstance, the accountant is not putting themselves in a good position to advance their career at that company. In this industry, careers are built on gradually taking on more responsibilities and handling more complex tasks while automating or delegating the simpler tasks. As an industry accountant, if your goal isn't to eventually automate or delegate what you're currently doing so you can take on more interesting work, then don't expect your career to go anywhere fast.
But They Will Replace Me!
This is an argument that is becoming more and more real with the current trends of outsourcing and automation. As I have said before, outsourcing and automation are best fit for simple repeatable tasks that don't require a higher level of thinking or analysis. If your role is composed completely of outsourceable and automatable tasks, it's probably not a role you want to be in forever. You should take the opportunity to learn how things should work so that you can take those skills and learnings with you in your career instead of just sitting around and hoping they won't be smart enough to replace you. In my experience, the people that take the time to document their work, do a good job, and visibly demonstrate their value are the ones that are not easily replaced.
Make Things Better!
It's very difficult to improve a situation if you don't understand what's going on. For industry accountants, this means that every internal process, policy, and procedure that can be improved to make life easier should first be documented so that the pain points and inefficiencies can be understood. One of the biggest challenges in industry accounting is translating the financial aspects of the business to the non-financial stakeholders who they interact with. Especially in the time when companies want their finance apartments to be operating efficiently, it's incredibly important first understand how they are operating in the first place. Remember, companies want to keep smart people around. You will be remembered as a smart person. If you are constantly working to make things better. For many areas of industry accounting, that process starts with documentation.
Hopefully I've convinced you of the importance of documentation. If you are convinced, I suggest taking the time to record a video, create a process map, or even just make a long word document with screenshots and instructions on how to do your job. You will be amazed at how much better you understand your work and you might even find a way to make your life easier tomorrow. Good luck!