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.
Duran Alabi is the chairman of The AGIC Group (TAG) Holding Corporation, a California Holding that oversees all the company's worldwide assets. TAG owns an International Business Corporation (IBC) dully registered in Belize, Central America to manage all the global activities of the holding in different continents & countries.
TAG features companies in banking: Fintech and micro finance, renewable energy development: PV Park investment, ownership, power generation and clean energy storage devices with mobile applications, organic commercial agriculture development, ownership and processing. Duran Alabi oversees the entire global operation of the holding with companies present in North America, Africa, Caribbean, Central America, South America, Europe, Middle East and the Pacific Rim. The focus of TAG holding and its affiliated companies are to be very active in renewable energy, environmental sustenance, remediation, organic agricultural development and Fintech.
TAG's renewable and clean energy focus includes technology areas such as solar, wind, Ethanol generated power conversion technology and power generation floating vessels utilizing LNG. Duran Alabi is a top-tier professional with over 37 years of strategic business development and acquisition, Alabi has tangible experience in emerging enterprise technology, evolving energy innovation solutions and services market. Insightful and articulate with strength in analytic, problem solving, strategic planning, and savvy investment motivation.
Duran Alabi possess proven ability to lead the development, implementation, and successful completion of a diverse range of strategic businesses in publicly traded, pre/post-IPO, start-up environments. He is a leader with quantifiable results in building new businesses, strategic relationship / merger, improving gross profit, sustaining market share growth, and delivering increased customer / venture partner satisfaction. Duran Alabi currently resides in San Diego California, United States of America with his wife and children.
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.
