Traditionally, the accounting function’s role is always viewed as that of a steward, the control centre for
the organisation, rather than the catalyst for enterprise growth. The term ‘back office’ is often used to
describe the operating nature of accounting function. So in today’s volatile global business
environment, the key challenge for accounting function is how to lead the enterprise in its growth
strategies while ensuring effective risk management and stewardship of the enterprise.
With complexity and data proliferation, increasingly the CEO and the board turn to accountants to help
make sense of all the data, to help cut through this complexity, and to provide more informed analysis
on the business and its operation. The opportunity for accounting function is if it can generate the
insights that help make better corporate decision making, while continuing to ensure effective control
of the enterprise, its reputation as a catalyst for growth will be guaranteed. To do so, traditional
accounting departments may have to transform themselves into ‘intelligent accounting functions’.
Intelligent accounting functions run their operations as cost effectively as possible, leveraging
technology to reduce finance operating costs; strengthen stewardship and control so as to establish a
solid foundation to support growth. The biggest challenges, however, lie in creating the efficiencies
needed to gather and process basic financial data and continue to deliver traditional finance outputs
while at the same time redeploying their limited resources to enable higher-value business decision
support activities.
This accounting analytics practicum which adopts SMU-X approach, focuses on a few key topics that are
vital to establishing an intelligent accounting function (refer to the diagram below): finance strategy and
transformation, lean finance and finance shared services, business intelligence analytics, and enterprise
process management. In this experiential learning course, students from various disciplines learn what
comprises a highly optimised accounting process, design an end-to-end process management and
explore the underlying accounting IT systems and advanced data analytical applications. By working
closely with instructors from accounting and information systems disciplines, together with an industry
partner, students are expected to carry out design and development of an intelligent accounting
function solution. The whole idea is to engage students in real-life application and to encourage
students to creatively apply concepts to practical problems in their pursuit of solving real-world
problems. Students will apply the concepts in real projects.
TBD
