What are we doing when we say we work in Accounting?

Whenever accounting jobs are mentioned, the common thought that comes across most people’s mind is about someone working with Excel, doing repetitive jobs with debit and credit or and spending long working hours during closing reporting periods. While it might be part of the truth, along with constant changes of business landscape driven by technology development, careers in accounting become more diversified and offer lots of development paths to embark on. From my personal experience working in a public accounting firm for several years in Vietnam and then switching to industry in Finland, it was a real eye-opening experience to discover the dynamics of accounting and finance works within an organisation.

In our below post, we would like to present the anatomy of a finance department in a large company based on our humble observations of several Finnish companies. We hope that the post would somehow bring about a bigger picture of career prospect in finance and accounting and provide new accounting graduates with a tool to navigate through accounting and finance job hunting process. Feel free to share your own observation of how your company’s accounting and finance department is organised regardless of company size as well as your own experience in landing a job in accounting and finance in Finland. If you are students interested in this field, welcome to share your thoughts on this topic as well.

Several helpful sources of reference:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_services

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_services_center

3. McKinsey Special Collection: The Role of CFO:

4. On how the jobs are divided between Group/Central functions and Shared service centers, the divide may vary from company to company. A good reading on Shared service center from Deloitte can be found here:

Author: Giang Le