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.
Butler, MS, MCHES, is the senior wellness program management consultant at SelectHealth. His career in healthcare and health promotion spans over four decades, including 17 years of hospital-based experience at Intermountain Healthcare's LDS Hospital and 24 years working with Intermountain Healthcare’s SelectHealth. Butler was manager of health promotion services at SelectHealth from 1992-2002 and pioneered initiatives to develop and implement health promotion and disease management programs that were integrated with SelectHealth insurance products. He has a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education and earned his master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling psychology from the University of Utah. He is also a Master Certified Health Education Specialist.
Groppel, Ph.D., is the co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute. He is an internationally recognized authority and pioneer in the science of human performance and co-chair of the newly formed Global Alliance for Health & Performance. Dr. Groppel currently serves on an academic appointment as Professor of Kinesiology & Community Health at the University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign, and served as an Adjunct Professor of Management at the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University for several years. Dr. Groppel has addressed the issue of worksite wellness and performance at such policy events as the United Nations Side Event for Physical Activity and Non-Communicable Disease, a U.S. Congressional Briefing on Worksite Health Promotion, and represented the worksite wellness industry at the historic Surgeon General’s Call to Action on Walking and Walkable Communities.
Jon Baron is managing director of the professional segment of the tax and accounting business of Thomson Reuters, which he joined in 1992. Prior to his current position, he served as president of professional software and services, and vice president of development, where he was responsible for the design and development of all professional products and services. He holds a BBA in Accounting from Siena College and an MBA from Boston University.
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.
