In an article titled: ‘Accounting Trends Of Tomorrow: What You Need to Know’ by Nick Chandi who is the CEO of PayPie, some interesting ideas are presented.
Set against a background of rapid technological acceleration, most accountants already use digital tools and are optimizing processes to go paperless. Interest turns to the prospect of human-less accounting.
Will Accountants Be Replaced By Robots?
Accountants who embrace the trends below will have a greater capacity to advance their roles as trusted, value-added advisers and analysts – currently, three trends are very apparent.
Harnessing The Power Of The Cloud
Accelerating Automation
Breakthroughs Via Blockchain
Chandi felt that the functions that are hardest to automate are those that apply specialised expertise to decision making and planning. There is always a need for an expert conversant in the business language of accounting who fulfils the role of most trusted and valued business advisor.
When one considers different languages across continents; the different legal frameworks and the large differences in how rules are applied between first world and third world countries - the challenges of globalisation remain high. Robotics currently has not been able to touch on these differences…
We live in times witnessing continued globalization of reporting/disclosure standards and new forms of regulation. The accounting discipline is an ever-changing one and is heavily reliant on interpretation and creative thinking. The ultimate goal of accounting is how to interpret the rules and select the best option for a business scenario.
Sophistication in robotics are not to the degree that they are capable of selecting the best interpretations across business languages, set against different legal systems, meeting onerous disclosure requirement when dealing with third world countries, or simply understanding the difference between legislated law and what is done in practice.
It is to be expected, that with the turning of time, robotics will close this gap. However, the ever-changing landscape of accounting thrives on different interpretations…and whether machine can ever successfully replace interpretations that have their roots in experiences and practices specific to geographic, business cultures, and human experiences, remains to be seen…
At ACS Plus we share the view that accountants will look to harness improvements in technology to deal with transactions that are of a repetitive nature.
The essence of accounting is classifying all business transactions correctly and then interpreting the numbers reported. The recurring transactions tend to follow a pattern and modern accounting software allows for rules that offer a consistent outcome for capturing transaction. This certainly saves time. However, anything different or unusual still needs human assistance.
Accounting often integrates with taxation and like any program, who will reprogram the robot for changes in rules and laws and how will it pick up the subtleties of outcomes in case law that will have a direct bearing on tax planning.
In conclusion, Technology will assist the accountant in working smarter, but caution to placing too much reliance on robotics. Common sense still leads the day and often a suggested match or classification is not correct, or may not appreciate the best tax consequence arising.
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