Ep: 89 Top experts answer: "What, if anything, will significantly change accounting in the next few 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, if anything, will significantly change accounting in the next few years?
You'll hear insightful and passionate answers from these 5 experts and influencers:
Amy Horner | Change Enthusiast, Business Strategy Consultant, Keynote Speaker, and Podcast Host
Amy Vetter | CPA, speaker, yogi and CEO of the B3 Method Institute
Andrew Argue | Founder of Instead.com and Corvee.com for smarter tax decisions
Anne-Kathrin Steinröder | Head of the ETL GLOBAL Network of accounting firms
Apoorv Dwivedi | Founder of Fixyr Marketing, strategic marketing advisor for accounting firms
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.
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Hi, I'm Rob Brown and welcome you accounting finance professionals tech enthusiasts to the Accounting Answers podcast. We've embarked on a captivating exploration of the future of accounting and its profound connection to the ever-changing technology ecosystem. Think for a moment how access to the minds of a range of accounting experts, influencers, vendors, and leaders would keep you super informed about what's going on in this wonderful profession. You'd stay relevant and future focused. You'd make better strategic and career decisions if you know what forces are in play and what factors are driving change. To unravel complexities, an envelope future of accounting have personally interviewed 111 leading, accounting professionals, tech leaders, and industry influencers each bring in their unique expertise and insights to the table. And together we'll delve into the five critical questions that will shape the accounting world. Through the eyes and minds of people living the accounting life or talk into accountants every day, we'll talk about five critical topics that ignite in passion debates and stimulate minds across the globe. We'll map in the transformative trajectory of the accounting profession and its symbiotic relationship with the technological revolution. We'll be asking about the next-gen accountants, how far down the advisory line firms are, what's going to change the accounting world, what the software vendors and tech providers could do better to serve accountants and what's coming up in the future. Let's get straight into the answers for today's topic. Today we're focusing on the evolving accounting landscape and what's driving transformative changes in coming years, the rise of cloud-based accounting software, the growing adoption of artificial intelligence or AI. The increased emphasis on data analytics, these are just some of the forces in play. There are plenty more, so have joined our experts and influencers as we decipher the changes that lie ahead and how accountants can best prepare to thrive in a fast-moving world. Let's hear from Amy Horner, a change enthusiast, business strategy consultant keynote speaker and podcast host who brings innovative ideas and strategies to businesses looking to thrive in changing markets. It's going to be a technology. About 20, 25 years ago, all our jobs were supposed to be replaced by accounting systems and online bill pay and hey, we're still here. We are being challenged and asked to do different things and the professionals who can rise to that challenge and repurpose their time. I call it repurposing our time from the pushing paper and the number crunching to the true business partner. Those are the people who are going to be successful and that is how this is going to change. We have the benefit now of AI. It's really interesting to see AI succeed in the more technical realms. You can't ask AI to design a painting. Actually, you can, so that's wrong. You can, but where it's really good is that there's technical, tactical things that have taken us so long through Excel spreadsheets and through pushing buttons into accounting systems and all the other associated apps. AI can do that for us. Being able to be in charge of AI instead of in fear of AI, step number one, and finding a way to incorporate it in your organization or for your role so that you can repurpose your time to be more of that business leader that all of us want to be. Doesn't everybody want to be in the boardroom and be strategizing versus reconciling the AR ledger? I certainly do. I think that AI is really going to, if we can get our arms around it, is really going to be the big change. I mean, it's not just our industry, it's every industry. When we think about the AI and when we look at any of the applications and tools and automations, your AR, I made a joke a little bit earlier about the AR ledger. Your AR ledger is no longer this standalone thing that sits on its own that you have to bring over into your GL. There are many more examples of where tech has has changed so much in the last 20 to 25 years. The risk, of course, is that you are not looking at everything in that granular detail when it is automated, that you were when you were manually moving those numbers around that that's certainly a risk. However, you get ahead of that risk by when everything is set up, working with your brain, your leadership team's brain, and your consulting team, hopefully everyone is using outside consultants to implement any kind of major tech. Anything, whether it be an enhancement or a full systems change, anything back office, you're not trying to do that on your own, and you're using their expertise to mitigate those risks so that you can trust this was set up. I watched the workflow two or three times. It's locked down. I'm confident that these numbers are accurate so that I can move on to repurposing my time to be a true business partner, to really drive strategy and change and innovation, and then to look at the business, not just from the accounting lens, but from the language of everything that's going on in the business. So there certainly, there are risks to everything. There's always risk to change. The concept of the chrysalis, it's a little painful when it happens, but the end result is much better. We don't see people who have gone through an innovation strategy or change implementation who say, "I really want to go back to manually reconciling." Our next is Amy Vetta, CPA speaker, Yogi, and CEO of the B3 Method Institute, blending our expertise in accounting with mindfulness practices to promote balance, leadership, and well-being in a professional world. The thing that I believe changes the county in the next few years is that we are seeing different demographics come into the profession, whether that be ethnicity, whether that be your sexual orientation, whether that be race. All of those things are some positive things for the profession, which is going to change the face of the profession, is going to change the opportunities out there for so many communities that didn't know that the accounting profession was available to them. But once this starts working into leadership positions and partner positions and into our associations, which we are already seeing now, it makes such a big impact into the overall economy and livelihoods of so many small businesses and potential accountants that the profession can be able to protect in a sense and be able to help grow as well. My fearfully affirms that don't embrace this concept is that your pipeline is going to start shrinking and shrinking and shrinking even more. So the problem is that if I go to your website and I don't see me, I don't think that there's availability for me. If I come to an interview and I don't see me, I don't think there's availability for me in your practice. So it is actionable and it can't be that you're recruiting in the same ways that you've always recruited before, that you've got to seek people out and let them know that this is a possibility for them and give them the resources and tools to be able to achieve it. Joining the conversation now is Andrew Argu, the founder of Instead.com and Covery.com, dedicated to helping businesses and individuals make smarter tax decisions through innovative software solutions. I think right now, people think that there's a giant staffing shortage. That is about to be completely reversed. And I think people are going to wonder, you know, what do we do now that we have too many accountants? And I say that because most people don't know this, but the experience of using some of these new technology and tools is such that you can effectively create employees, digital employees, and those digital employees have no limit to the amount of work that they can do, the amount of information they can process. And very soon, they'll work overnight, they'll work weekends, they'll work, you know, hundreds of them deep, as opposed to today when you're in some of these chat interfaces and you're doing it. And so I think very, very soon, you know, instead of feeling like, oh my gosh, we have a staffing shortage, I think that the narrative is going to change to what do we do now that we have functionally an unlimited number of employees? And now insights from Anna Catherine Steinrodar, head of the ETL Global Network of Accounting Affairs, where she spearheads initiatives to foster collaboration and innovation across the global accounting landscape. I think there are two things that are going to change accounting in the next few years. One is technology with the advance of innovation and the tools we are using for accountancy in artificial intelligence, automation, et cetera. That's going to change our work quite a lot. And well, make it easier in a way. At the same time, workplace arrangements will change the way we are working. So we have seen that, well, basically, the pandemic told us or taught us that we can work and do our accounting service from any place anywhere in the world at any time we want. So the combination of technology, modern communication tools, and this general, well, flexibility we are experiencing in our workplace arrangements is going to change a lot, even in the next couple of years. And I said, well, another change based on this technological changes will be that the where and when accounts to their work is going to change completely. If there's one thing that the pandemic has taught us on our daily work routines is that technology helps us to do our work whenever we want, wherever we want. That means at the same time, then offices will become smaller because more people will work remotely, which gives flexibility also from an employer's point of view. We now turn to our poor Duyvedi founder of Fixer Marketing, a strategic marketing advisor for accounting firms, bringing and cutting edge strategies to the forefront of accounting firm growth. Probably not a bit surprising. And I'm sure you're hearing this from a lot of folks, but AI and automation, like that whole tech is going to be a complete game changer. So last year, you know, we saw the broad scale launch of a chat GPT. Now we've just seen an absolute slew of AI tools being launched out there. Most large software vendors are now looking at adding or plugging in or embedding AI into their platforms. But I think that's honestly, even just the start of what we're seeing. So we've already started to see some low value tasks being automated. But we're also starting to see things like complex tasks like, for example, tax strategy research, having AI applied to that as well. So you know, I think in the next couple of years, you're just going to see how this technology is going to manifest itself and impact a whole bunch of different areas of work within the accounting profession. So I mean, look, like there's there's people that still do paper based general ledger accounting, right? It works for them. That's what they're familiar with. The customer's happy with the outcome. And you know, why change that? You know, why why need to change that if it works? So you're going to have a lot of folks that are going to be, hey, you know, I'm doing this thing over here and it's working. Do I need to adapt or do I need to change or modify to this new tech? But I think what you will see is there's going to be firms and there's going to be accountants out there that understand the tech and they understand how they can apply it to do things better, faster, cheaper, smarter for their client. And as a result, you're going to start to outpace the folks that are not using it. So is it going to change the profession wholesale right across the board, impact 100% as everything that accountants do in the next couple of years? Probably not. It can take maybe a long period of time, but what you will see is very rapidly over the next few years, the accounts that are adopting that and they understand how to apply it for the benefit of their customers are going to start to be a lot more successful than the ones that don't. So there you have five great answers to the question. What, if anything, will significantly change accounting in the next few years? Have you worked in depth a week, Monday through Friday, we give you the insights of five top influencers in the accounting world on this critical area of what is coming up, change wise for accountants? That's 25 valuable perspectives, viewpoints and best thinking every week. And with a fresh week comes a fresh question and more thoughts from the best influencers and leaders we can find in the accounting world. Thanks for listening to the Accounting Answers podcast and sharing this brand new show with your friends and colleagues. 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. These are great opportunities to raise your profile, build valuable connections and share your thoughts with influential peers. Until next time, this is your host Rob Brown saying stay informed, stay relevant and stay connected.
