Want a commercial role? Here’s what you need to know

Jumping straight into a commercial role after qualifying is tough, but there’s a smarter way to get there. Understanding financial accounting first can set you up for success. Heather Gordon explains why it’s worth considering

A lot of newly qualified accountants want a “commercial” or “business partnering role” as their first step from practice into industry. The catch? Only about five percent of roles for newly qualified accountants are purely commercial. And, wow, are those hard to get straight out of contract!  

But we get it; you’ve just qualified and want to do something different, something commercial, where you can make impactful decisions. That makes sense.

Continuum of activity

Let’s take a step back and understand the options available to you at the end of your training contract and why it might be a good idea to pursue a financial accounting role first.  

Figure 1 below is what we call the continuum of activity. It is a simple visual to help you map out the activity in a basic finance team and understand the context of the roles you will look at after you qualify. 



Purely commercial roles sit on the very far end of this spectrum, influencing how a company makes and spends money. To get access to these roles and excel in them, it’s a good idea to spend some time understanding how the business works, how it makes money and the nature of the various stakeholders. 

Without knowledge and experience in these areas, your opinion will carry little weight, ability to influence will be negligible and you’ll lose credibility fast. 

The good news is that you can partner with the business and get involved in decision-making without having to jump straight into a “commercial” role.

How? Here are a couple of things you should consider about a financial accounting role:

1. “Financial accounting” can mean different things in different organisations. However, it is not audit or pure technical accounting – make sure you put those roles in different buckets. 
2. Spending time putting together a profit and loss statement (P&L) and analysing it is priceless if you want to learn how a business makes and spends money. The work is dramatically different from auditing and can be a breath of fresh air for many.
3. In financial accounting, you partner with the business. Business leaders live and die by their P&L; ultimately, you will partner with them to deliver their business results.
4. In financial accounting, you might not get to make decisions about the business directly, but you’ll have plenty of chances to make decisions about the “business of finance”. New reporting formats/visuals, processes and systems are all ways in which you can get directly involved in making decisions for finance in the business.

Beyond the job title

When you want to move into a commercial role, consider more than just the job itself. Here are some important points to think about before making the switch.

Organisation size 

Think of the continuum like a coiled spring—collapse it down for a smaller business/entity, and one person does everything. 

Expand it for a larger business, and specialisation emerges in various areas such as tax, statistical reporting and technical accounting. 

Why does this change? With size comes complexity.

Organisational structure

The nature of financial accounting activity and how much of the continuum it covers will often be a manifestation of the organisational structure (group function vs shared services sector vs small and medium enterprise, for example). 

Job titles mean nothing without context, and every financial accountant role will be subtly different depending on the structure in which it sits and the division of labour on the team.

Activity balance 

The balance of activity in a job specification can be very telling. Job postings list tasks, but they rarely give those tasks a weighting of time. This continuum can be very useful when reviewing job specs and understanding what the role you are going for actually involves. 

Smart accountants don’t get caught up in buzzwords but look beyond the job title to the context of the role. They look at their careers in a structured way and earn the right to an opinion in a business before giving one.