The Value Add Accountant

Accounting delivers a lot of indecipherable reports. Finance rarely addresses the business leader’s need for a greater understanding of the complete financial impact of decisions made as well as decisions to be made. Both functions also have a lot of internal process waste. The Value Add Accountant can provide solutions to all of these issues.

Jean Cunningham and Orest Fiume wrote about their experience as CFO’s creating this role in the 2003 seminal Lean Accounting text, Real Numbers: Accounting for the Lean Organization. In the years since, Jean has traveled the globe, consulting on Lean process improvement and waste reduction in accounting and other office processes for numerous companies great and small.

This book expands the Real Numbers message by providing detailed examples of how to reveal accounting waste, start a personal value add transition, and get buy in on these pivotal accounting changes. This book also describes how accounting can effectively evaluate corporate waste reduction and improvement activities.

You will learn how adopting this new role can enable accounting and finance to proactively support business decision making and impact improved outcomes. This expanded role has both accounting operations and company-wide elements. It is initiated by applying Lean principles and tools to everyday processes to minimize mind-numbing transaction work and other waste from accounting processes. Those improvements increase available accounting capacity. This capacity is then applied to impacting the future with more time spent on internal customer-based, value adding activities for the organization.

Your Value Add Accountant journey starts here.

“If you or your company is struggling to see the benefits of your Lean efforts in your financial information, you need to read this book. If you are an accountant and your company doesn’t see you as relevant to its lean efforts, you need to read this book. Once again, Jean, using language that both accountants and non-accountants can understand, describes how a company’s accountants can add value to your Lean Strategy.”

– Orest Fiume, co-Author of Real Numbers and The Lean Strategy and retired CFO of The Wiremold Company

 

“As I read through Jean’s book, I constantly thought, “This is brilliant!” But also, could not help thinking, “Who the heck is not doing this!” This contradiction is the essence of the brilliance of Jean’s latest writing.  It is a solid, pragmatic, and road-tested pathway to success for you as an accountant and your entire organization. And as Jean states at the end of the book, “We need to take action.”

– Jim Huntzinger, author and founder of Lean Frontiers and The Lean Accounting Summit

 

“Every business has an accounting function in need of improvement. I think this book is terrific. It is easy to read, has very straight forward language that can be understood by humans [unlike standard cost accounting statements] with a lot of good examples, and is a great roadmap for any financial organization that wants to eliminate waste and improve.”

– Art Byrne, author of The Lean Turnaround and The Lean Turnaround Action Guide and former CEO of The Wiremold Company

 

“In this excellent and much-needed guide, Jean Cunningham shows how accountants can become full partners in continuous improvement efforts and why it is so critical for them to do so.  This is a must-read for financial professionals in organizations applying Lean, and for any advocate who faces the question, ‘Show me the numbers!’ ”

– Jacob Stoller, journalist and author of The Lean CEO