This is how, with 20 years' experience, SLO's/Sonepar Finland's accounting manager Sinikka Tynjälä summarises the duties of a finance and administration unit.
Accounting manager Sinikka Tynjälä is responsible for the financial administration of Sonepar Finland's Finnish companies and also acts as adviser to the Baltic subsidiaries. She has an experienced and efficient team of six to help her.
According to Ms Tynjälä, the fundamental elements of financial administration are still the "basic" bookkeeping and closing of accounts, which must be administered not only with the utmost efficiency, but also accurately and quickly. The key to this is advancement of automation development. "In banking, Finland is a global forerunner. Payment traffic is fully automated and the automation of other functions is also advanced. This makes it possible to manage perfectly well with just a small staff. Next in line are business-to-business invoicing and exchange of information, which must be elevated to the same level. It ought to be enough that data - input once in one company - is then automatically transferred onto another. This would spell the end to traditional printed invoices for example", she explains.
Sinikka Tynjälä emphasises that financial administration is not only merely number crunching. It is an important tool to support company management, owners and units by producing various data on how the firm is doing and what is being planned etc.
“Perhaps the most challenging part of finance & administration is understanding business through figures", Sinikka Tynjälä reflects. "One has know answers to questions such as: which customers or products are cost-effective and why?"
Several factors have a simultaneous impact on the electrical wholesale business and figures alone do not tell the whole story. One way of approaching the matter is activity-based cost accounting; wherein a customer's return is calculated based on how labour consuming the customer is. The most cost-effective customer is not always the one whose margin is highest. When reviewing the matter as a whole, a low margin customer may have surprisingly good return. An entirely accurate result is hard to achieve even with ABC-accounting. My motto is however, "it is better to be approximately right than absolutely and accurately wrong", Sinikka Tynjälä summarises.
