If you look at the work (i.e. the “multicolored spreadsheets”) in 100 different companies, and see how they perform Budget, CashBudget, Investment Evaluation etc, you will see 99 or more different forms to do the same job. And if you happen to witness the freak occurrence that two people are doing work in the same manner, it probably means that at some time, one of them was the other one’s mentor, when they were working at the same company.
On the other hand, Accountants have a more or less uniform working environment. There might be hundreds of ERPs in the market, but they all pretty much require (in principle) from the user the same input, and they give (again in principle) the same output. An Accountant that has just been hired, is expected to be able to perform basic invoice entries within the first week, and in most cases on the first day.
Controlling and verifying an Accountant’s quality of work is relatively easy. There are countless audit firms that specialize in that task. On the other hand, auditing a “multicolored spreadsheet” is mission impossible, sometimes even for the actual creator of the file, if that work hasn’t been touched for several months, and thus the assumptions, the maneuvers and the reasons behind them, have been forgotten.
If you ask about which is the software, that is currently the global standard in Financial Analysis, the answer is that currently there isn’t one. Actually, there never was any software that can lay claim to that title. As a matter of fact, before C2BII there wasn’t any software that could effectively handle those tasks at all. But as we have already seen, the existence of C2BII is a message that needs to get communicated, so that it will become the first global standard in the field of Financial Analysis.
The curious thing for Accountants and Financial Analysts is that, even though the working circumstances vary by a wide margin, both professions deal with the exact same concepts (sales, purchases, expenses etc).
Every Financial Analyst wishes that there was a uniform way to work, and a uniform way to verify one’s work, just like Accountants have one.
Stick around, and we are going to see the other thing that Accountants have, and again Financial Analysts can only wish they had.
