And then, we Account

I keep telling people that if I don’t get a CFA certificate in addition to my EMBA certificate, I will fight someone. Corporate Financial Accounting (CFA) is one of my first semester courses for my EMBA programme at the Lagos Business School. From the classes I have taken so far, I have some tongue-in-cheek thoughts. Accounting is mainly addition and subtraction. Years ago, some people came together after seeing engineering mathematics and thought to themselves, “How can we make accounting look more prestigious and hard so that people will take it seriously?” Then they came up with the different accounting equations: the balance sheet, statement of profit and loss, statement of change in owner’s equity, and statement of cash flow. If they had stopped there, it would have been nice, but they went further with the T accounts, trial balance, and the rest; I can understand accrual and cash basis accounting. Then the different standards of accounting showed up. The good news with this is that everyone is gravitating towards International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) thanks to global standardization. The world is now a village, and with investments across continents, it would make sense to have a standard accounting template. To my accounting friends, I mean no disrespect; I love you.

Life is funny, and the universe has a way of playing tricks on you. I found business studies boring when I was in junior secondary school. The only business studies class that I didn’t sleep in was the advertising class. When I moved up to senior secondary school, even though I passed my accounting subject the first term, I actively ran away from being in the commercial class, as we named our classes then. We had three class classifications: commercial, arts, and science. I decided to follow the path of science because I had an engineering dream. Twenty years later, I am faced with the challenge I ran away from, which reminds me of a Yoruba proverb: “the pounded yam of twenty years is still very hot”.

Looking through accounting now, I still find it boring, but not as bad as it was when I was younger. I understand the different individual financial equations and the elements of financial statements. I marvel at how some of my coursemates work with numbers to analyse a case and how they interpret financial statements. I know these concepts are not difficult; I have done further mathematics and engineering mathematics. However, I just find it boring.

For my aspirations, I find it very useful, and I particularly like the idea of being able to know the direction of a company by reading its financial statement. I have to focus and maybe bribe my brain to make corporate financial accounting less boring because I need that knowledge for my career path. I want to focus on developing strategies for organisational growth. I need to be able to make the correct analysis with a proper understanding of an organization, and I believe most of the information I would need will be in the financial statements.