Let us discuss the below The majority of my career has been in non-profit accounting in private higher education. Most recently, I've moved to a role with a public school district for K-12 grades. Speaking from an education background, the private accounting profession is a very service-driven industry with clients that range widely from internal customers like other administrative departments and a Board to external stakeholders, that include the city's general community. Both customer bases seek an accounting team's expertise in advising and performing services to serve their processes more effectively and accurately. Private accountants are the resource for processing accounts payable, internal financial statement preparation and tax and audit guidance. As such, out of Porter's Five Forces, the power of buyers is the strongest in the accounting industry. Although it seems contrary to my non-profit experience, managers must still recognize that "profits are a signal - if your business earns superior profits, existing and potential competitors will do their best to get a piece of the action" (Porter pg. 7). In education, profit is relative to higher student enrollment. However, for an internal accounting team that mainly serves our internal customers (i.e. budget department), our goal to to provide exceptional customer service and accurate and timely knowledge sharing.

In an accounting manager role myself, developing a strategy that works to optimize the bottom line of my school district would take into account Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For example, data driven analysis of my accounts payable team would allow me to create quantifiable measures of a service-oriented role (i.e. aging of incomplete invoices, volume of invoices processed, etc.)

In his article analyzing the accounting profession, Hooper contends that "while switching costs remain high, the proliferation of cloud technology improves the mobility of customers, particularly for small business, general bookkeeping and tax services. Conversely, switching costs in specialist areas and corporate clients remain high, and are showing no signs of abating any time soon." Accounting as a service, in its various areas, needs to be managed with customer's satisfaction at its primary goal and strategy.