Ep: 96 Top experts answer: "What are your top 3 predictions for the accounting world in coming years?"
The Accounting Answers Podcast, hosted by Rob Brown, asks critical questions of the experts, leaders and influencers who shape the decision-making of accountants, CPAs and finance professionals. Today we ask:
What are your top 3 predictions for the accounting world in coming years?
You'll hear insightful and passionate answers from these 5 experts and influencers:
Karen Chalmers | interVal's VP Marketing, helping firms grow revenue efficiently with AI
Kate Serpe | Former CAS leader and recovering accountant, current SIAP Partner Executive
Katie Thomas | Helping accountants stand out online and owner of Leaders Online
Ken Schmitt | Recruiter, Author, Podcast Host and Founder of TurningPoint Executive Search
Kevin Steel | Founder @ ClarendonFS: Fractional CFO & Strategy for B2B Service Companies
Tune into more on this daily show for short, sharp episodes that keep you informed of what's happening in the accounting world and the whole ecosystem of consultants, organizations, vendors and advisors who serve them.
To participate in our international virtual speed networking events for the accounting community, book your place at the next gathering. Great for building your personal brand and making valuable industry connections in return for a small donation to charity: https://accountinginfluencers.com/events
◣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◢
Thanks to our sponsors:
CPA Trendlines. Actionable intelligence for the professional tax, accounting and finance community. Facts and figures, insights and implications, news, trends, tips and research serving more than 500,000 tax, accounting and finance professionals from around the world. go to https://cpatrendlines.com to sign up for free email updates.
Dan McMahon and Integrated Growth Advisors. IGA are the CPA firm experts in Growth, Building Infrastructure, and Exchanging ownership. This management advisory firm focuses on empowering CPAs to grow their revenues and increase their profitability and firm value. IGA’s methodology delivers on services built upon "IGA GBX" which represents the firm’s value creation model of "firm Growth, Building infrastructure, and eXchanging ownership. https://www.integratedgrowthadvisors.com
If you'd like to sponsor the show and elevate your brand with our audience, reach out to show host Rob Brown on LinkedIn and his team will reach out to fix up a chat to explore.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/therobbrown
You can also check out other Accounting Influencers Shows on YouTube:
https://bit.ly/AI-youtube
But you go for the insights and intel that keep you informed. It's easy to find tons of news and how to stuff, but what about the commercial acumen, the business awareness that separates the good from the great professionals, the insights, the trends, the nuances, the patterns, the predictions, the drivers of change. Well, I'm a brown and that's exactly what we're doing here. With this brand new accounting answers podcast, I've interviewed 111 people who care about accounting, who talk to tech experts, fellow professionals and clients every day. These people are on the front line and seeing what's working on what isn't. And you can't be a variety of experts that comes from not just a couple of conversations or talking to your people in your own bubble. You need diversity of thinking and perspectives. So we're asking a range of experts in accounting finance and tech the same five questions about change, talent, people, tech and the future of accounting. And in this daily show of 10 to 15 minutes, you get over 500 brilliant passionate and articulate perceptions, insights, viewpoints, a professionals with a stake in the game. And each episode gives you five answers to one of these questions. So you step ahead of everyone else in knowing what the world is thinking about the topics that matter. Let's jump into today's episode. For the next five days, we're getting future focused and asking our experts leaders and influencers for their top reproductions for the accounting world in coming years. We used to have a good idea about what was coming up. Progress was linear, transformation was gradual, non-exponential, but now we're in a period of rapid transformation. Tech and people are complex things. And we need our experts to share their best thinking on what's ahead. Let's hear from Karen Chama's Intervals VP of marketing helping firms grow revenue efficiently with AI leveraging advanced analytics to drive strategic marketing decisions and foster sustainable growth. So number one for me is retention. So figure out how to retain your clients and do it proactively with client advisory services and the health of technology. I think retention is the first thing that you have to figure out how to do because if you don't have retention, you're not going to have a business for the long term. The second thing beyond retention and new technology is the adoption of AI. And, you know, like it's we can avoid AI. We're at this tipping point where technology is absolutely required to make you more productive. And with that, you'll fall behind. And you don't want to fall behind in this day and age and you don't have the access to talent in the way that you did 20 years ago. So you're going to have to adopt something to make you more effective and use it to to your benefit to sift through the data, to dig into client files, to find insights and give better advice to the clients that you serve. And, you know, that becomes circular to my first point of retention and retaining them with exceptional service. And without just preaching AI, I think you also have to figure out how to adopt it. So I guess it's like my third point is like, we can adopt AI, we can use it, but use it in a human way. So, you know, the idea of having these large language models or, you know, you can use that to write your holiday greetings say at the end of the year, but, you know, refine it, use it in a way that's actually going to make it sound like you make it more human. And then focus on the personal human interaction. So use the AI, use it to do those things are quick and easy, but then focus on those personal human interactions, right? So really kind of figuring out how to use technology to benefit you for speed, and then focus your time on those personal human interactions that really are the thing that is what makes you attractive as an accountant and makes your farm attractive to clients. And if you streamline that with technology, you'll actually get more time to be present to nurture the humanists of it all. I'm next to the case of CPA and expert and ex-quiet advisory accounting solutions and pond executive at Sage intact helping the county environment leverage their technology to drive practice growth and innovation. My top three predictions for the accounting world and tech in the coming years. I definitely think that we will continue to see emerging of technology and the accounting profession. I think we're going to see more accountants with a deeper understanding of technology. And I think we're going to see more people in the tech industry that are going to have migrated from accounting. So I think there's going to be this convergence of accounting and technology coming together more and more. Number two, I think no doubt AI will continue to creep into the lexicon in all products and all advisory services. I think working together to make the accounting field more desirable, hopefully, because it's not about working long hours and slogging away during tax season anymore. It's going to be about using really cool technology to advise businesses and organizations to proactively help them instead of being reactive. And then I think number three, having been, again, on the practitioner side, now being on the vendor side, I think we're going to see a lot of continued mergers and acquisitions for better or for worse. But I do see this as being mostly favorable because I think this is going to help phase out a lot of that legacy accountant mindset. We've got a lot of big firms that are really heavily invested in technology that are taking on these smaller firms that maybe had a little bit of a legacy issue. And they're going to be able to evolve their practice areas to kind of meet the standards of what's needed today. Joining the conversation is Katie Thomas helping the accountant stand out online and the owner of leaders online where she combines her expertise in digital marketing with a deep understanding of accounting to elevate firms online presence. AI, this is a no brainer. It's going to continue to improve how we do the work, how we communicate with clients, how we communicate with our team, how we optimize our entire firm as a whole. Another prediction I have is the end of traditional financial reporting. So I predict that we will shift away eventually from traditional gap and ifers as companies adopt more flexible and customized reporting methods. And then something I predict for the future is an increased adoption of ESOP. So employee stock ownership programs as firms want to become more employee centric. I think this could really, really help in August of 2023, BDO announced their intent to launch an ESOP program. And I think other firms are going to follow in their footsteps. And now insights from Ken Schmidt, recruiter, author, podcast host, founder, turning point executive search, offering a wealth of knowledge and expertise in career development and talent acquisition within the accounting world. I think a lot is going to change going forward and I think one of the biggest things is really the definition of knowledge. Where does knowledge come from? And this has a very, very kind of broad application, but knowledge historically has come from an education, right? A CPA, a chartered accountant, an MBA, whatever it might be. And that formal education allowed you to kind of punch your card and get into those roles. These days knowledge comes from a lot of different places. You might have a side hustle. Maybe you didn't go to college and you started working at age 16, 17, running your own side business through Etsy or Redbubble or whatever it might be. You still have those technical skills for professional service organizations, but you don't have a four-year university or college degree. So I think the definition of what knowledge is and where it comes from is going to change. I also think that because of the cost, right, the actual physical dollar cost of getting an education is so high these days. And the salaries going into these roles into an early stage tech or professional services firm, those salaries have really not come up enough to really make up for it. That fewer and fewer people are going into school, going into college, university to get into the accounting profession or any profession, if you will, that's more technical. And it's going to require a change there in terms of the volume of hires, how people hire, how firms hire, and how they incentivize people to really come into that organization. And then third, I think once somebody does come in, once they do find someone to hire, I think the dynamic around what is expected of that person is going to have to change. Transparency is a big one, right, where historically professional service firms are very hierarchical and very traditional firms. And there hasn't been a lot discussed or shared with lower-level employees as opposed to what executive levels are focusing on. They tend to play things close to the vest. While Generation Z, they expect transparency. They don't care about the org chart. They're going to ask questions of anybody in the firm that has the answer. And so that transparency and that communication is going to change going to have to change these professional service firms to be able to attract top talent and for that talent to want to stay in the industry long term. We now turn to Kevin Steele, founder at Clarendon FS, fractional CFO on strategy for B2B service companies, providing strategic financial leadership and insights to help companies navigate growth and other challenges. So my first prediction would be a stronger shift to more of an advisory focus as opposed to back-end manual processing. And the reason for this will be due to increases in AI and technology. And the benefit of this to accountants is that advisory work is much higher priced and you can get much better margins on that as well. So this is only a win-win for the accountants sector. And then my second prediction would be actually a decrease in the quality of accounting graduates due to AI and technology. We can already see this kind of in the school/education sector where students are turning in papers using chat GPT, et cetera, which does have quite a big decrease in critical thinking skills across the board. And similar to chat GPT for an English essay, if accounting graduates and students are too focused on using AI to get to the end result, when it comes to a unique situation that AI may not be able to actually figure out, then that's whether it's going to be a problem. And then I would say my third prediction would be an increase in off-shoring to leverage cost efficiencies. This again would link back to my first point about the increase in AI and technology with off-shoring. I'll try that again. I'll try that again. So my point number three would be increase in off-shoring to leverage cost efficiencies. This again links back to my first point about AI and technology with labor available cheaper internationally and the increase in AI and technology. This is kind of a perfect combination of why more firms will be off-shoring in future to reduce costs, increase their gross margin, and then shift to more of an advisory-based model. So there you have five great answers to the question, what are your top three predictions for the accounting world in coming years? Every work in dev the week, Monday through Friday, we give you the insights of five top influencers in the accounting world on what is coming up prediction-wise, what are they willing to bet and what are they seeing their crystal balls. That's 25 valuable perspectives, viewpoints and best thinking every week, and where the fresh week comes a fresh question and more thoughts from the best accounting leaders and influencers we can find. Thanks for listening to the Accounting Answers podcast and sharing this brand new show with your friends. If you want to join the conversation, you can plug into our community of influencers at accountinginfluencers.com and check out our virtual speed networking events. These happen every few months for the North American region and the UK-Europe region. Great opportunities to raise your profile, build valuable connections and share your thoughts with influential peers. Until next time, this is your hoax Rob Brown saying stay informed, stay relevant and stay connected. [MUSIC PLAYING] (gentle music)
