What are the political factors that affect accountancy?

Politics affects every different role out there. Every profession is riddled with politics - whether it's real life politics or work place politics.

In accountancy, nothing changes. Whenever you're working in accountancy you will constantly have to deal with office politics. Then again, depending on your role, then you will also be affected by real life politics.

• Office politics

Office politics is basically how an office runs 'unofficially'. You will know how different people you work with, work. You will know how they think and you will know how people you work with react to different situations. This will allow you to make judgments when it comes to asking them questions or assigning them different accounting roles and jobs.

Office politics can get in the way sometimes, but you must accept that it always exists. Hence, the best thing for you to do is accept it and use it to your advantage.

Learning to deal with people in the right way is a great way of getting work to be done efficiently. You might know who needs a more paternal approach to leadership, whilst you may know that other people need a more dictatorial leadership style. Different people work in different ways and knowing how to get work done is a great way to increase the efficiency within your place of work.

• Actual politics

With actual politics, you will have to be talking about a specific kind of accounting. There is 'mark to market' accounting that is heavily involved with actual politics. What you must remember is that behind the political world there is an explicitly 'normal' working world.

In order for politics to run, people of different professions must continue to work to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Accounting plays a huge part in the civil service role given that the government deals with an incredibly large amount of money.