Anu Vaman, 29, joined Wolters Kluwer as a finance analyst in 2014. Prior to this he was a senior management information systems (MIS) analyst at Hays, the recruitment specialist.

What made you choose accountancy as a career?

I actually studied economics at university but all my friends were studying accountancy. When I started looking into all the different accounting qualifications, such as CIMA, I realised that this is what I was interested in. However, I am not interested in the traditional sort of accounting as I find this quite boring but more of the macro economic impact accounting has on other things.

What qualifications do you have?

I have just qualified in CIMA, the toughest aspect of it was working whilst studying. It is almost like doing a degree whilst working at the same time, the juggling of the two aspects is the toughest thing about it.

Do you have any regrets?

I came out of university saying that I would never study again but I am really glad that I changed my mind as a couple of years down the line I think I would have regretted it. I feel like having a CIMA or ACA has become a prerequisite in accounting.

Why did you choose business over practice?

I looked into a lot of the practice accounting modules and realised that this was not my strong point. Business accounting looked like it had the ability to go into different areas whereas I could be doing the accounts for a music company but would never be able to really help them. The CIMA qualification has a lot of strategy behind it so therefore in the future I may be able to advise and see how my advice has been taken on board and see the changes which are made because of it.

What is your dream role?

I have always said I never want to be the top job person, I want to be one below because I feel the top role comes with too much responsibility. I want to be in a role where I would be consulted quite a lot and be able to give my opinion on strategy changes in a large corporate business. So I do not want to be a chief financial officer, but maybe a financial director.

How did you get to your current position?

I came out of university not knowing what I wanted to do, whereas a lot of my friends joined graduate schemes. It was very difficult to go straight into a job without experience so my aim was to try and get any experience within finance. I started in a temp role at Hays, the recruitment agency, working in their back office doing the finance and invoices. I realised that this is not what I wanted to do forever and that is when I started looking into CIMA and decided I wanted to go into business accounting.

What are your favourite aspects of the job?

I enjoy reconciling. I like the numbers and keeping everything together and figuring out why something is happening, so the analysis side of it. Also I like to understand the end to end aspects of the business, so I enjoy going around and speaking to sales, marketing and IT to understand how the business works as a whole. We are lucky in finance because we get to touch all the different areas if we want to.

What do you dislike about the job?

Some of the constraints on the reporting standards I think are really silly. In corporate finance we have a lot of corporate reporting  which sometimes does not give you a full picture of what is going on and you have to fill in a template and I really dislike the templates.

What do you think is the most important skill for an accountant to have?

You have to be eager and willing to find out what is going on. It is good producing the numbers and saying ‘we have made 80% of what we expected’ but you need to have the drive to ask why.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I have just started doing a more commercial finance manager role so I would to continue at that level and push forward from there. The ultimate goal for me is to become a business finance partner in a business.

Anu Vaman will leave Wolters Kluwer on 3 November to join law firm Clyde & Co as a senior financial analyst.