In 2024, Master This Skill To Accelerate Your Career

As 2024 arrives, I want you to invest in one skill: accounting and the broad understanding of Balance Sheets and Profit & Loss Statements. Yes, everything we do in companies has one destination: financial statements. And some special people (the Board of Directors) are anointed to use those statements to evaluate the health of the business. Those people are powerful, and most times, you may never see them in any building in a company, even though they control and influence the firm.

When they meet, typically quarterly, they evaluate if the coding, marketing, pitching, selling, customer support, etc are going well. Magically, they do not even need to come and ask you the coder how you are coding: they’re extracting and extrapolating based on the financial statements. Those statements are the summaries of how the firm is doing on its mission.

If they conclude that the numbers do not align for the grand vision, they tell the executive management to re-calibrate, and sometimes, due to the instructions pushed, people will lose their jobs, and factories can be closed. In Nigeria, some people reading financial statements out of GSK, P&G, etc headquarters, decided that things were not working, and commanded their lieutenants to close the Nigerian operations.

The question is this: do you understand the financial statements of the company you work for? If you do not, you are a follow-follow person with no bearing, because you are financially blind to the state of the business. When you cannot make sense of these documents, you  will not understand how the business is reporting everything ALL of you have been doing to the “owners” or custodians.

I am an engineer and I am proud that I understand financial statements. As a young banker in Lagos, I did not want to be blind; I enrolled for ICAN (graduate, intermediate), and became aware of the implication of the two most important documents companies create yearly.

In 2024, I challenge you to master how to at least read them. If you do, veils will be lifted, and you will understand that company better.

The Power of Accounting

Computing along with the whole information age is built on 0s and 1s. Those 0s and 1s are like the biological cells which are the fundamental units of life (cells make up tissues, tissues organs, and organs systems). In the world of business and commerce, the language most spoken is the language of accounting, and that language is expressed in credits and debits.

Debit comes from Latin’s “debitum” which means “what is owed” or simply debt; credit also comes from Latin, now “creditum” which means “having been loaned”. Since Luca Pacioli formulated the double-entry system in the 15th century, the core attributes remain. 

As 2024 arrives, plan to understand basic accounting. If you do not, you simply follow others, blindly. And that means you will not rise to the highest level of your call because business is nothing but accounting, chronicled in statements like balance sheets and income statements.

Indeed, your tech skill, your strategy session, your sales, your loans, and everything in that company comes down to debit and credit, souped with ingredients of asset, liability, equity, revenue and cost, with the asset (=liability + equity) and the revenue/cost delta (profit or loss). If you do not understand this, you are following others in the world of business, and opportunities will pass by which your antenna will not pick.

They have passed you twice for a new promotion even though you are the best tech guru. Have you checked? The other guy is a tech guru and also understands the business which gives him/her an edge.

Because I like to provide solutions when I write, I made sure that our Tekedia Mini-MBA (register for next edition starting in Feb 2024) has ICAN and accounting experts who can help you on that journey:

• Accounting – Ndubuisi Umunna (ACA), Head Finance, Grand Treasurers
• Auditing, Forensics, Controls – Yusuf O. Sanni (ACA), Chief Internal Auditor, BUA Cement Plc
• Internal Auditing Strategy for SMEs – Abel Osuji – Director, Internal Audit & Risk Control, African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) Egypt
• Managerial Accounting, Business Decision Making and Growth – Idris Ayinde, ACA, CFA, KPMG UK
• Building Your Business Financial Models (templates included) – Michael Olafusi, Financial Analyst Fellow Brightmore Capital

Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 10 - May 3, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.