Strengths of an accountant

Answer 1

Strengths--- We get paid GOOD. A CPA will make somewhere between $35,000-$100,000 a year (salary) and you only need a bachelor's degree. Weaknesses--- Buisness varies on the economy. Right now in 2009 it's great. Also depends on your area, like where you live. You might have no buisness or too much.

Answer 2

I have always been incensed by the weakness of accounting and management oversight in the official relief and development assistance (ORDA) organizations. It is difficult to understand how the World Bank and the other donor organizations allowed accounting and management information to become one of the weak links in development.

Maybe it had something to do a "racist" perspective. How can we (whites) in the NORTH possibly ask these ignorant (black) natives in the SOUTH to do good accounting?

Or it might be because the World Bank and the donor community never had any good Accountants on their staff and in their leadership. They never understood the value of good accounting, and just ignored it.

The real reason may be the first or it may be the second. Or it could be a bit of both. But I am horrified that accounting is one of the failures in development, when it could so easily have been one of the great successes of development.

Governments, and the ORDA community usually operate with very weak accounting systems that reflect a era when government was small and the funds they managed quite limited. Few governments work with accrual accounting that is a requirement for generally accepted accounting in the corporate world. Government accounting is structurally much weaker in its ability to control resources.

But many governments and public sector organizations have strong financial regulations that make a basically weak accounting structure operate effectively. It can be done, and some countries are doing it. But the ORDA world is not. Attempts to make improvements in the way the UN organizations do their accounting have been delayed and little has been accomplished.

In the ORDA institutions there is a voucher based culture that ensures that there is paperwork to substantiate why funds were disbursed, but no similar culture about evaluating and recording the value derived from the expenditure. This is forced in a corporate system with a balance sheet, but not forced in govenment accounting and the typical ORDA systems.

Answer 3

One of the best strengths for an accountant would be to like math and numbers. They also should have some type of special accounting education, such as an associate or bachelor degree.