Automation has brought significant changes to the accounting profession over the last decade. While some tools have made accountants’ lives easier, others have chipped away at their roles as startups seek to disrupt a legacy industry. The tech companies that developed these tools have also created and perpetuated a false debate about whether automation will overtake the industry completely and make accountants irrelevant.
It’s time to end that debate. A valued accountant is a holistic business advisor to clients, solving human problems that technology simply cannot — and will never be able to — solve on its own.
The question should not be whether automation will take over accounting, but where its real value lies. This technology has an important role in upleveling accounting, but there are clear limitations for its use. ScaleFactor offers an example of these limitations and a cautionary tale. The startup promised to replace human accountants with software and AI, but it was mostly smoke and mirrors, with people doing much of the work behind the scenes. The irony was palpable.
No software stack can match the financial acumen, critical thinking and trusted counsel that a human advisor offers. That’s particularly true today, as valued accountants have become business partners, not just number crunchers. Where software is limited to evaluating concrete inputs, accountants also leverage their financial acumen, understanding of clients’ business goals and observations of communication subtleties like the inflection in a client’s voice to make decisions. This allows them to serve as advisors to their clients, whether by adjusting business models in real time, building balanced and inclusive teams, or managing employee wellbeing.
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of this advisory role in the face of high-stakes decisions. As many businesses have navigated changing unemployment laws, federal aid initiatives and revenue loss over the past several months, accountants have stepped up. The accountants I’ve spoken with emphasize that their clients increasingly rely on them for much more than “numbers” problems, like payroll. They are solving the “people” problems that can make or break a business and its employees’ livelihoods, like hiring or conducting layoffs in the midst of a crisis. Accountants need technology to solve the former so they can focus on the latter.
Fatemeh Khatibloo is a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Fatemeh serves B2C marketing professionals, with a focus on the shifting global consumer data ecosystem. She helps marketers navigate the complex connections between privacy, trust, and ethical data use, including the practices and vendors that can help them bridge the privacy/personalization paradox. Her seminal research on personal identity management (PIDM) describes how consumers will soon manage the sharing of their personal data with each other and with businesses. Her report "Adaptive Intelligence" further defines a framework for privacy-compliant data sharing between organizations to gain insight, reduce risk, and increase profitability.
Fatemeh focuses on privacy, identity, customer insights (CI) services, CI strategy, data monetization, data sharing, adaptive intelligence and consumer preference.
Previous Work Experience
Prior to joining Forrester, Fatemeh was principal of Times Two Marketing, where she built social and multichannel marketing programs designed to engage consumers, drive brand loyalty, and deliver relevant, actionable data to her clients. Prior experience at Binger Catalog Marketing, Abacus, and HagginGroup (now Epsilon) provided her with a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing multichannel organizations across a spectrum of channels, market verticals, and disciplines. She has also held multichannel marketing positions on the client side, with firms like The Flax Companies and The Sharper Image.
Fatemeh is a member of the International Associate of Privacy Professional (IAPP) and is a Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM). She has served as a judge for the Multichannel Merchant Awards and the ECHO Awards.
Education
Fatemeh studied journalism at The George Washington University.
Mr. Allburn is a 20+ year industry veteran and President/CEO of DataDelta, Inc. which provides CDI-MDM consulting and patent-pending, vendor-neutral match accuracy analysis software used to analyze & optimize the match accuracy of Data Quality, CDI & MDM vendor match engines including custom, in-house match engines. Mr. Allburn has held senior technical and strategic management positions in the fields of Database Marketing, Data Quality, CDI and MDM for industry leading companies such as Metromail / Experian, the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Firstlogic and Group 1 Software. During his career Mr. Allburn has been responsible for over 200 successful CDI projects in banking, telecom, catalog and other industries. He is an international speaker and instructor for CDI-MDM Workshops, a contributor to DM Review and other publications, and a recognized Expert Witness in the Data Quality and CDI-MDM industries.
Jim Kane is director at Information Services Group, a leading global technology research and advisory firm.
Empowering and supporting employees will become an increasingly important driver of business success, as studies continue to prove. Using software to automate repetitive processes gives accountants the freedom to focus on advising their clients through tough moments by leaning into their most human skills, like problem solving and relationship building.
Tech-driven tools and insights can’t replicate these skills, but they can enable them. As the transformation of industries like health care and manufacturing have shown, automation is most effective when used to save time, ensure compliance and improve accuracy by handling routine, tedious, time-intensive tasks. By using software to automate payroll, tax filings and payments, accountants can focus on their clients’ higher-level business challenges and opportunities. They can also more easily identify trends based on recent and historic data, then apply these insights to make recommendations informed by data.
This is tech at its best. At its worst, technology makes accountants’ jobs harder and can erode their clients’ trust. Software might generate recommendations based on broad generalizations, failing to account for a business’s nuanced situation or economic context. During the pandemic and ensuing recession, we’ve seen that much of the data and algorithms feeding into advanced business tools have been built for a world that no longer exists. They fall short of helping businesses solve the complex, intersectional problems they face in 2020 and beyond.
Accountants can add tremendous value in this new world by leaning into their advisory role. A strong accountant is pivotal to maintaining a client’s business, which in turn supports employees’ livelihoods and helps economic recovery. It’s good for accountants’ businesses, too: it’s estimated that practices providing advisory services can generate 50 percent more in monthly client revenue. Technology has a role to play, but only as a boost to the advising, problem-solving and business strategy accountants already do on a daily basis.
