Accounting Best Practices (Third Edition)

The accounting department is a cost center. It does not directly generate revenues,
but rather provides a fixed set of services to the rest of a company, and is asked to
do so at the lowest possible cost. Consequently, the accounting staff is called
upon to process transactions, write reports, create new processes or investigate
old ones—while doing so as an ever-shrinking proportion of total expenses.
This cost-based environment is a very difficult one for most accountants, for
their training is primarily in accounting rules and regulations, rather than in how
to run a very specialized department in a cost-effective manner.