During the opening Ceremony, Assistant Undersecretary of Domestic Trade Hameed Rahma delivered Minister’s speech through which confirmed that companies are required under the Commercial Companies Law, to present audited financial statements, so it was natural that we would witness all the big accounting firms being present in the Kingdom to cater to this requirement, and also to provide other value-added services to the companies which engaged them.
“Of course over the years there has been some considerable debate over the role of auditors in providing other than audit services to their audit clients, but nevertheless the role of the Financial Accountants, has rather more been a focus on financial metrics, by way of presenting historical financial accounts, than providing management with any operational or value chain information that would support productivity and profit enhancement; this is the role of the management accountants.”
He added that management accounting includes both financial and costing accounting, and is a function which provides continuous reporting of cost and financial data as well as other information relevant to management decision making, that affects both productivity and ultimately profitability.
Moreover, the role of the management accountant is of relevance to service providers, it has a particularly important application to industrial and manufacturing operations, and as such is of great value to a country like Bahrain which is striving to enhance the productivity and performance of the economic entities in the country so as to grow the Gross Domestic product.
“The Government continues to support economic growth in the country, both by positioning the private sector as the growth engine, and at the same time providing support and assistance by means of improvements to the legal and commercial infrastructure. The Government is also sparing no effort in the continuous development of the hard infrastructure components,” the Minister said.
“Direct support is also offered to companies in order to improve the performance of their labor, production and marketing through Tamkeen, which partners with a number of third party service providers in order to co-invest with companies to enable applicants of the scheme to take advantage of these numerous services,” Dr. Fakhro added.
In terms of the commercial climate we have achieved a great deal, and one only has to look at the international, ‘business friendly’ indexes, to see that Bahrain is highly ranked as a leader in the region for the easy of doing business. However, we are still lacking in terms of productivity and performance of our private sector enterprises, and I believe that Management Accountants can be a valuable asset in helping to drive performance forward.
“The careful management of the productive processes through resource optimization can have a considerable impact both on productivity and profitability, and I would urge all companies, if they do not already do so, to involve management accountants in their business teams at all aspects of the management cycle, to provide the range of methodologies at their disposal, such as lifecycle costing, activity based costing, lean accounting, resource consumption accounting as well as the various analytical and forecasting techniques used by the profession.”