Financial Reporting Accountant

Money makes the world go round. Especially the business world, which needs cash to produce goods and services, pay employees, purchase supplies and finance growth. More than that, however, companies need cash to create confidence — among Auditors, consumers and shareholders, who all rely on a company’s cash flow to tell them it’s strong, stable and successful.

The job of Financial Reporting Accountants is to manage money to create confidence. As a Financial Reporting Accountant, you oversee your company’s financial reporting processes and procedures to make sure they’re both effective and accurate.

A big part of that is producing the financial reports themselves, which include balance sheets, profit and loss (P&L) statements, cash flow statements and statements of stockholders’ equity — all of which must be prepared using accurate financial data in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), which are a series of universal standards, conventions and rules that Accountants use to record and summarize transactions.

In addition to preparing reports and ensuring GAAP conformance, it’s often your job as a Financial Reporting Accountant to communicate and translate financial data for company executives, who rely on you to analyze company financials and make strategic recommendations about spending, budgets and revenue.

Because public companies produce quarterly and annual earnings reports for their shareholders, you’ll play a key role in creating and communicating those reports, which include financial results and forecasts; when the results are good and the forecasts accurate, that creates confidence, which in turn creates growth. You’re a lot more than a numbers cruncher, therefore; in a way, you’re your company’s financial jet fuel.