Job Career Profile Of Group Accountant. Choose A Profession For You!
By: Bimol Bee
Submitted: 2011-10-29 09:47:04 | Word Count: 509
The profession of a Group Accountant is extremely important in the contemporary life. But before speaking of it in detail, let's define what a group accountant is general. The Group Accountant is responsible for consolidation of a group of companies' accounts, as well as for overseeing the local reporting of those companies and exactness of the financial data systems and parent-subsidiary relationships.
It has to be mentioned that this job is loved by few people as doing consolidations involves the difficult analysis of a multi-set of different companies' accounts. According to the statistical data, only four accountants in ten like their difficult job, the other six confessed that they aren't always comfortable with accomplishing their tasks.
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Required Qualifications
In order to become a good group accountant an individual needs to be ACA (Association of Chartered Accountants), ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) or CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) qualified as well as to have strong financial and management accounting experience. Nevertheless, sometimes a Group Financial Accountant can work as a part-qualified accountant, who acquires this experience in a bigger corporate. By the way, it's a traditional act for a new person in the field of accounting.
Earnings of Group Accountants
Qualified Group Accountants usually earn $45,000-$60,000, in dependence on the size of the group of Companies they deal with. For instance, having more than 50% of the voting stock of one company by another company usually makes up a parent-subsidiary relationship. Nevertheless, control of a company can be even got with less than 50% of the subsidiary's voting stock, but this will be considered as a fundament for creating consolidated statements. In this very case, the investment will be accounted for under the equity method in an account named investment in investee. On this stage the major responsibility of a Group accountant will be to bring together all liabilities, assets, and dealing with accounts of a parent company and its subsidiary companies. Thus, the company offers the financial position of a group accountant. As a consequence, the subsidiary companies are greatly influenced by the results of operations of the parent company. And the subsidiary organizations are as if united in the group having a parent company over them. The method of creating consolidated financial statements is to make the individual statements consolidated and to combine them on a worksheet after eliminating intercompany transactions and intercompany relationships. The greater number of firms makes consolidated statements if they have more than 50% of the subsidiary's stock.
Definition of Consolidation
The definition of consolidation is the presentation as one economic entity of the earnings of a parent and subsidiary (subsidiaries) subsequent to the date of the purchase. The parent company holds more than 50% of the voting common stock of the subsidiary, and thus it's leading. The reporting mechanism in consolidation is represented by the group of companies. Remember that the entities making up the consolidated group hold their separate legal entity. And adjustments and eliminations are offered to consolidated financial statement.
