The Value Add Accountant

Publisher: JCC Press

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.

Jean E. Cunningham, former chief financial officer and vice president of company services for Lantech, Inc., was the leader in the company's transformation to lean beyond manufacturing. Today, she runs a lean consulting firm specializing in integrating a client's business functions i.e. accounting, HR, IT, etc.) with lean operations. This is known as Lean Business Management or The Lean Office. Jean has a BS in Accounting from Indiana University and an MBA from Northeastern University's Executive Program.