It’s no secret that accounting is a profession that is driven by technology. New equipment and technological advances change the standard almost daily. So, what does this mean for the accountant? Here are a few industry leaders’ insights.
Jennifer Warawa
Jennifer Warawa | Executive Vice President of Partners, Accountants and Alliances at Sage
One by one, changes to the accounting profession are landing. Many firms have slowly adopted new technologies, and at the same time are facing a new set of financial policies and legislative reforms that will change—and continue to shake up—the status of their business. In 2019, accounting firms will no longer have the luxury of time. It will be time to adopt new technologies and business models, or risk being left behind.
Joe Woodard
Joe Woodard | CEO of Woodard Events
The accounting and bookkeeping professions will accelerate their adoption of technologies that automate workflow, especially in the areas of Accounts Payable automation, document fetching and OCR (with parsing). As a result, developers of leading accounting solutions like Intuit and Xero will partner tightly with (or perhaps continue acquiring) solutions that contribute to “no touch” bookkeeping. Also, in an attempt to maximize the efficiencies of process automation, practices will increasingly focus on solution-to-solution integration (using tools like Zapier) in an effort to maximize automation and the profitability increases that follow. On the less positive side, I predict a continuation and possible increase in systems breaches, and I believe the bad actors driving these breaches will increasingly target small to medium-sized businesses, especially those businesses that process credit cards and/or store medical documents.
Randy Johnston
Randy Johnston | Owner and Executive Vice President at K2 Enterprises
New software tools will be introduced to automate Client Accounting Services (CAS) practices.
Murph Mugshot
William ‘Murph’ Murphy | Sr. Editor at Insightful Accountant
More technology than ever will be infused with ‘artificial intelligence’ in order to improve the efficiency of that technology. That means there will be less reliance upon ‘manual set-up.’ As more sophisticated algorithms are designed based upon historical designs and trends, there will less need to have anyone ‘map’ data. After a minimal learning curve of corrections, the built-in-Bot will have learned everything there is to learn about the data that is being presented and it will all become routine. At that point, the ‘human job’ will be to ‘maintain the Bot’ not the work the Bot is doing.