With every new wave of technological advancement the accounting industry has seemed to embrace and grow from these changes.
From the humble calculator, through to computers and then spreadsheets, the cloud and now artificial intelligence, accountants have adapted and worked these technologies into their businesses.
So what’s coming now and into the future for accountants?
Cloud
The cloud is already here and many accountants have embraced this technology, but there are still many more that are yet to take the leap.
The cloud can open your firm up to be more collaborative, productive and accessible.
Being able to access your business from anywhere means you can work from anywhere! You don’t have to waste time waiting at the airport because you can’t access the latest file to work on, or stall a project because a key member is out of the office.
The other thing the cloud has over servers is the ability to quickly and easily scale up. The problems with a growing business using servers is that they have to guess how much they will have grown by in the next 5 years. Say you have a staff of 20 and you think you will probably double your staff within 5 years to 40 employees. Typically you keep your servers for 5 years, so in year 1 you need to buy enough server power for 40 employees, even though you may only have 20 for the next 2 years.
The Cloud means you only ever use as much as you need, paying per user means you can scale your IT as you need it, whether you are hiring new staff or downsizing.
Blockchain
Still slightly confused about this latest buzzword?
Put very simply, blockchain is essentially a database that maintains a continuously growing list of records called blocks. These blocks are then shared with every party involved in a transaction, who then verify, clear and store the data in this block before linking it back to the preceding block, and creating a blockchain.
Blockchain can essentially be used to remove the ‘middleman’ of transactions that would strip time and costs from all different processes.
Morgan Stanley, for instance, says blockchain could strip billions of dollars of costs each year from financial markets, while improving security, speed and market visibility and reducing disputes and fraud.
The benefits of this include standardisation and increased auditing efficiency. It will allow auditors to automatically verify a large portion of the most important data relating to financial statements.
AI
The rise of chatbots, self-driving cars, smart assistants and creepy robots are testament to the increasing abilities of Artificial Intelligence.
As AI has the ability to process vast amounts of data at very high speeds, it actually makes sense that it will complement accounting and its vast quantities of complicated data.
There is the potential for AI to revolutionise the auditing side of accounting, where it can trawl through entire databases looking for red flags, avoiding the need for manual and individual review.
Of course actual human accountants are still the staple of the accounting industry, but they will be able to free themselves of repetitive tasks and focus on adding more value to their clients.
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