Jack Geary, 3rd year BA in Accounting and Finance awarded CIMA prize

DCU Business School was delighted to welcome Claire Lambert, Business Development Manager, CIMA Ireland, to the Business School to speak to the 3rd Year B.A. in Accounting and Finance students (in AC320: Management Accounting: Decision-making lecture) about the opportunities with the CIMA qualification, exemptions (which are currently under review) and consultancy firms accepting the CIMA qualification.

Pictured below: Claire presented the 2019/20 annual CIMA prize for the highest overall marks in AC223 ‘Management Accounting – Cost Systems’ and AC224 ‘Management Accounting – Planning and Control’ to Jack Geary, 3rd Year B.A. in Accounting and Finance and Dr Ruth Mattimoe, CIMA Advocate, DCU Business School.

Carmel Seery, CGMA, gave a short talk to the B.A. in Accounting and Finance Third Year students in their core Management Accounting: Decision-making module AC320 about how she evolved her own business to serve the needs of entrepreneurs. Carmel gave a most interesting talk on her work as a management accountant in practice, helping entrepreneurs making sense of the financials, after over 20 years employed in various industry sectors as a management accountant.

Her slogan is “making numbers easy” and she understands the problems business owners have when they get caught up in their ideas and creativity and then do not have clarity about whether they are actually making any money. She also helps with the integration of computerised packages into the businesses of entrepreneurs and spoke about the fundamental requirement to understand the basic book-keeping in a manual form first, before trying to install the packages. Without this understanding there is a need for remedial intervention to get the correct information from the computerised system, which has been a growth area for her business.

Carmel also talked about adding value to the accounting reports from the packages by having a “deeper dive” into these reports and re-orienting them to help the entrepreneur have better information for decision-making to drive the business forward. She acts as a coach and mentor to many small businesses. Her talk was very helpful for the AC320 students as the message was that one can be a “management accountant in practice” serving the needs of small business as well as having a career in large companies or consultancy firms.