How Technology is Transforming the Accounting Profession

As breakthrough digital products, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools continue to revolutionize industries across the world, there is no exemption for the accounting profession. Accountants have experienced a shift in the way they perform their duties and the expectation of output. The average allocation a corporate accounting team spends on data entry has drastically changed in the last 15 years for organizations that have trimmed costs while improving the efficiency of their accounting team. It’s pivotal for successful organizations to continue to adopt new technologies and adapt to these changes to give decision makers accurate and up-to-date information.

Automation Tools

How many tasks in your day-to-day responsibilities require you to complete one routine process across several software products? If the answer is the entire day, there is probably a solution to automate much of your routine. Do you generate reports, modify the reports in Excel and send the finalized report to the same individuals on a daily/weekly/monthly basis? Let’s break down these steps and discover how automation can assist along the way:

• Generating reports: Most software applications have the capability to set up scheduled reports to be sent to certain users on a pre-determined frequency. This avoids potential human error when selecting criterion on reports and reduces the time spent pulling these reports.
• Modifying reports: Are you adding columns, formulas, filters and pivots to your report exports? If the modification process is repetitive and strenuous, there are solutions to truncate your process. Power Query, Alteryx, SQL or even improvements to the formula writing within Excel can help your team develop a more automated process. Again, this drastically helps reduce errors due to manual formula writing and adds efficiency to the process.
• Sending finalized reports: Sending finalized reports usually does not take a significant amount of time in the process, but setting up scheduled emails can help reduce the time needed, especially if final reports are being sent to several individuals or several groups of intended users.

Within the accounting function, there are many software applications available for month-end reconciliation (e.g., Blackline, FloQast, Cadency), expense tracking (e.g., SAP Concur, Bill.com, Expensify) and other functions related to your business (e.g., payroll, project management, client relationship management) that assist in the automation of routine tasks. Companies can now complete monthly closing processes related to these functions in a fraction of the time it once took.

Artificial Intelligence

I would be remiss if I did not inform the audience that I used AI to assist with brainstorming while writing this article. Generative AI programs like ChatGPT, CoPilot and Gemini are revolutionizing the industry by providing accountants with a tool capable of automating routine tasks. Asking a generative AI tool to draft an email to use as a starting point, complete a function within a Microsoft Office application, review and provide any suggestions for proposal decks, or summarize a transcript from a video call are some of the techniques I use to improve efficiency throughout the day.

Accounting software products are also starting to create AI add-ons to their respective packages. The most important skill accountants will need to acquire to work alongside AI in the future is prompting. Phrasing communication with AI programs, training AI tools and evaluating different AI systems all fall within prompt engineering and are the pillars to gaining a competitive advantage using AI. We are still in the gold rush phase of AI technology, and it will be fascinating to see how public accounting firms, corporations and governments determine how this technology fits into their daily operations.

AI and automation tools are not the only types of technology transforming the accounting industry. Cloud computing is continuing to help firms scale and operate in a remote environment while data analytics tools are configuring and leveraging data points faster than ever before. Technology is not only transforming processes within the accounting profession, it is reshaping the role of accountants themselves. Accountants who spent endless hours at college remembering the FASB Codification, GAAP standards and IRS Tax Code now need to add prompt engineering, logic writing and inter-application integration to their tool belts. As these technological advancements continue to evolve, they will undoubtedly redefine the landscape of the accounting profession. 

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Thomas J. Kleinhans Thomas J. Kleinhans, CPA, is a manager at Centri Business Consulting LLP. He is a member of the NJCPA and can be reached at tkleinhans@centriconsulting.com. More content by Thomas J. Kleinhans: Best Practices for Closing the Books