Navigating the staff shortage by embracing technology

The accounting talent pool is drying up, a trend that has been widely reported, including here in Accounting Today. The scary fact is that the decline may be accelerating. 

The Wall Street Journal noted the record year-over-year drop in students graduating with accounting degrees, and accounting graduations have been trending lower since 2016. While the profession desperately needs solutions to bring more talent into the field — through equitable compensation packages and career paths — even the most successful efforts to recruit prospective accountants into degree programs, and subsequently into the field, will take many years. And then, those efforts will only begin to slow down the evaporation of the talent pool. The lean accounting staff is here to stay.

Thinner staffing brings thinning expertise and experience. Companies need to multiply the impact of the expertise in the ranks without burning out staff and losing even more talent. When addressing this issue, companies have given much lip service to employing better technology solutions to aid accounting tasks, with artificial intelligence increasingly cited as a panacea. Moody's Corp and S&P Global mentioned AI a combined 58 times during their earnings calls this last summer. 

But the benefits of adopting new technology often fall short of promises, leaving already-stretched staff even more frustrated. This happens for a few predictable reasons — the features of the technology fall short of promised expectations, the workflows are designed from the top down (without accounting staff involvement), and the support is insufficient for staff to learn how to get the most out of the technology. Let's take a deeper look at these issues and how financial leaders can embrace solutions in addition to new technology. 

Current solutions at play

For many repetitive tasks in accounting, the technology to automate those tasks has come a long way in a short time, with cloud-based solutions available on any device, automated data entry, and data matching technology that has eliminated entire approval processes. Platforms with sophisticated automation workflows driven by machine-learning AI can complete critical-but-repetitive tasks like reconciliations and test balances in a fraction of the time that traditional accounting takes, sometimes with near-flawless accuracy. 

While the technology is available, finding the right vendor to deliver it often proves difficult. From AP automation to payroll to fund accounting, there are broadly about a dozen types of software solutions addressing core accounting markets, but not all programs are collaborative or optimize front to back operations. Within each category, buyers can find hundreds of vendors, each promising the same features. A cloud-based software marketplace crowded with knock-off technology, unstable platforms, an ever-changing web of APIs and hit-or-miss support has left companies to sort through subpar vendors with great technology and decent vendors with subpar technology. Because of this, these companies face a lot of risks.

After implementation, some companies find these solutions don't do much more than move spreadsheets from Excel into an online form. While this can be helpful for small companies that need to centralize their recordkeeping and require only some automation solutions, most staff accountants end up adopting workflows that don't work for them and deal with glitchy integrations between systems. User critiques on software review sites commonly complain about the inflexibility of these systems, steep learning curves and lengthy integrations. This is likely the reason accountants revert to the status quo of Excel spreadsheets, which often fails to comply with our increasingly digital workplace.  

What the future could hold

Intuitively, there's a need for an elegant, well-thought-out implementation of technology that places the accountant at the center of the workflow design process. When accountants are prioritized by software vendors, the resulting technology supplements and amplifies their skills and experience, rather than threatening them or creating competition. To this end, vendors should provide service during and after implementation directed to the accountant's personal experience.

Vendors can also focus on providing low-code or no-code development tools that allow accountants to design and customize workflows themselves. After all, accountants know the nuances of accounting better than IT professionals, but burdening accountants with highly technical customization processes won't result in a great user experience. 

Ultimately, advanced technology can help retain top accounting talent. Instead of seeking technology to replace existing staff or forcing talent away from the field because of top-down, inflexible workflows, partner with vendors who offer technology that puts the accountant first.