It’s a downer these days to be an accountant. Business literature overflows with ominous articles proclaiming the anticipated demise of many accounting jobs, with robotics and other automated software solutions playing the role of villain. In an era of lightning-fast machines processing traditional accounting tasks, companies are told they need fewer accountants on the payroll.
That’s good news for businesses eager to trim labor expenses, but not much of a ringing endorsement for the future of the profession. Like everything in this era of hyperbole and superficial “hot takes” on Twitter, the implications are more nuanced than robots trampling accountants.
Here’s my gist: It actually will be machines that unlock an accountant’s ability to share their judgment, enriching their employment experience and perceived value within the organization. No matter how proficient machines become in automating transactional accounting tasks, they will never come close to the abiding value of an accountant — his or her judgment.
I’m not attacking automation, which is a boon to every profession, accountants included. What’s wonderful about machines is that they do the same things the same ways all the time. But that’s also their downside — once programmed, the math doesn’t change. At least not yet.
If there are two things in my career I’ve learned, it’s that the accounting rules constantly change and when this happens it requires accountant judgment. As much as accounting is mathematical, it is also sophical — requiring intellectual assessment.
This is not to say that certain aspects of an accountant’s job won’t vanish. If 75 percent of an accountant’s work involves rote processing of spreadsheet-based data, software automation tools that can perform these tasks more efficiently, accurately and rapidly will assume these labors. Accountants are left with the remaining 25 percent of work they currently perform, involving discernment and judgment. The more these aptitudes can be applied to the strategic needs of the enterprise, the greater an accountant’s employment value.
In other words, rather than marginalize the importance of an accountant in an organization, financial and accounting automation software increases it. It unlocks the business analyst, entrepreneur, and manager within accountants, emancipating us from the mundane work occupying a majority of our time.
Progress is unstoppable
The current pressures on the accounting profession are nothing new. In my former job as an audit senior manager at PwC, I remember a few of the audit firm’s more seasoned partners laughing about how they audited in the old days, cranking out sums on their 10-key mechanical adding machines, with the white tape running through the night, all prior to the development of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets.
I also vividly recall my college accounting professor describing what it was like to study accounting when he was in college in the early 1970s. Students used to roll out 10-20 feet of general ledger paper in the dormitory hallway to line up debits, credits, and T-accounts — the set of financial records using double-entry bookkeeping
Spreadsheets blessedly replaced the practice, yet there was an initial reluctance to relinquish traditional practices. Many accountants were put off by the idea of entering numbers in “cells” instead of a calculator and saving analyses in a computer rather than physically filing them as paper. Today, using spreadsheets is a virtually subconscious behavior, despite what then appeared like a ground-breaking tectonic shift in the profession.
Past is prologue, with financial and accounting software automation now untethering accountants from spreadsheets. The profession shifts with the advent of new technologies, as do all occupations. In the early 20th century, for instance, cars were built one at a time. Twenty generalists circled a car and attached different components. Then Henry Ford came along with the assembly line. Each worker now became a specialist doing one thing, focused on a carburetor or an intake manifold instead of every component, vastly increasing the speed at which a car was manufactured.
Technology marches on, often leaving people behind. Both auto workers and accountants are at risk of displacement by machines. But specialists remain special. This is certainly the case with accountants, assuming they continue to provide value. In today’s more porous and collaborative work structures, there are ample opportunities to do just that.
Retain and retrain
Accountants have long been relied upon to produce accurate financial information to ensure clean audits and compliance. This is still the case, but the tools with which they provide this service are much better today. With machines assuming repetitive transactional tasks, accountants are liberated to apply their intellects to the business needs of colleagues across the enterprise. Sharp accountants can offer penetrating risk analyses, precise forecasting and other strategic advice.
The challenge is that many accountants are not trained to flex their entrepreneurship skills, which are valued for effective communications and collaboration. I’m a case in point: All of my major courses in college were in finance and accounting. The university taught entrepreneurship, but the class was outside the core accounting curriculum. Historically, the profession is one where people work in isolation — hence the stereotype of the accountant in a green visor crunching numbers.
There is an obvious solution here: For companies to retrain accountants to provide strategic advice across the enterprise value chain. Let the machines generate the numbers; accountants can analyze their significance for varied business and process owners to enhance the organization’s long-term financial performance. In these collaborations, the job of the accountant is to interpret the meaning of the numbers on behalf of those closest to the business.
As accountants strategically assist their colleagues’ decisions, they become more exposed to the risks and opportunities of different corporate functions and departments. The more they learn about the nuances of the business, the more valuable their analyses and advice.
What a waste to pare the ranks of these highly skilled individuals. By empowering accountants with powerful software tools to gather and make sense of wide-ranging performance data, decisions across a business become more informed and insightful. And a job in accounting is anything but a downer.
