Reducing the gap between theory and practice: The case of accounting education in Ghana

I began studying accounting as a business student in the year 2004 and proceeded to study same at the university level from 2008 to 2012, I passed accounting with flying colours at the secondary level and was adjudged the best in accounting at my university graduations, literally, I have studied accounting all my life and I still do to this day, but an event that changed my perspective on accounting education is what inspired this article.

I was good in accounting in school and had little challenges during exams, but an event after school in 2013, gave me a rude awakening of my accounting skills, I had graduated less than a year before then, and it was a meeting for auditors of my church and I was chosen to represent my local branch, subsequently I met this fairly old man representing another branch, In his hands was a white sheet of paper with financial statements fully prepared on it for his branch, I drew closer and asked for a glance of the document out of curiosity, the man agreed, handing it over to me for some five minutes.

For readers familiar with accounting, the man had prepared full income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements, something I could not do for my branch at the time even though I sat and passed exams covering these reports.

I came to the realization that all I had studied in school only taught me how to prepare financial statements on paper or theoretically, but transferring that knowledge into practice became a challenge. I have always been grateful for that encounter as it opened me up to my flaws and challenged me to improve my practical accounting skills.

If the outcome of a carpenter’s training is to produce furniture and a pilot’s training is to fly a plane, then the outcome of an accounting student’s training is to produce financial reports, this is the basics; however if after seven years of accounting studies, an accounting student is not able to produce a financial statement practically without the help of software, then it exposes the flaws in the system of training, I say this because the old man I met was a “bbc” meaning born before computers and had little computer knowledge, all he did was manual accounting.

I am in no way championing manual accounting, however, a solid understanding of the design, testing and implementation of a manual accounting system reflects your in-depth knowledge of accounting principles and gives you the leverage to fit into any accounting environment regardless of the business type.

Before any financial reports are prepared, you need an accounting system, the profit and loss and balance sheets are only the outputs of the system and are dependent on the information fed to the accounting system.

This is poorly thought out in Ghanaian schools, and what is making it worse is the advent of accounting software, I did a survey of a sample size of 10 SHS graduates 10 university graduates and 5 working professionals seeking to test their ability to plan, test and implement an accounting system for any business of their choice, most of them chose manufacturing and retail entities because our accounting curriculum is biased towards these sectors, Ghana is gradually evolving into a service economy as such, it is imperative for the Ghana education service and relevant accounting institutions to take a second look at the accounting syllabus and review it to include a fair representation of other businesses aside the traditional manufacturing and retail entities.

The survey further revealed that most respondents had little knowledge about how to prepare financial statements from scratch for any business entity regardless of the nature of the business or ownership structure, after further discussions we came to an agreement that most of our education focused only on preparing financial statements with a given set of information, in practice however obtaining information for the preparation of financial reports requires a book-keeping and accounting system, one that needs to be planned and designed for businesses based on their nature and form of ownership.

The concept of accounting systems design and implementation needs to be aggressively taught in our schools to ensure that even our secondary school or even first-degree graduates will be able to produce financial reports practically, right after school, a practice-oriented accounting education is thus necessary.

The introduction of computerized accounting particularly the learning of computer programming languages should be introduced from secondary school through to the first degree levels and even beyond, at the basic level Microsoft Excel accounting should be introduced to give our young ones a good grasp of how to design an accounting system with Excel, or even Access, I suggest this because these two are easy to access and can be used to automate accounting processes with the right level of proficiency.

I am of strong conviction that a well-structured secondary education system can produce graduates capable of working in any corporate environment, subject to some orientation to get used to professional environments.

I use this medium to give credit to the Institute of Chartered Accountants Ghana for the integration of computer technology and practical work experience into their syllabus 2024-2029, this will help to produce practice-oriented accountants instead of those who will only study to pass the exams will little to no knowledge of practical accounting and finance.

An additional suggestion will be the introduction of a project work-related exercise where students will be required to plan, test and implement an accounting system for small, medium and large-scale entities, this will greatly enhance their creative thinking, innovative capacity and job creation skills.