Nowadays, instead of focusing on historical data, accountants are taking more strategic roles to become business decision makers. The digital world has enabled companies to capture massive data for their decision-making processes, and financial intelligence professionals shall face up to this radical change. This blog demonstrates what an accountant does in a non-digital context and how the profession is affected by digitalisation.
The role of traditional accounting
In traditional accounting, financial accountants mostly prepare and confirm the accuracy of companies’ historical financial data, ensuring taxes are paid on time while organizing and maintaining firms’ financial information. According to a study (IMA), around 50% -75% of accounting teams are repeating low-value tasks, while 56% of them are under heavy workloads at the same time.
How the digital world disrupts traditional accountants
As businesses go digital, the duty of traditional accountants is being revolutionised. Digitalisation generates big data, which radically changes the way enterprises make decisions, from experience and gut-based to data-driven decision making. With financial data savvy and a deep understanding of companies’ operations , accountants shall upgrade their daily tasks to a strategic level. According to Bhimani (2021), the following three trends are inevitable:
- Accountants should focus more on predictive insights. With an increasing demand for foresighted data analysis, descriptive financial reports can no longer fulfill the requirements of companies’ executives. New-era accountants shall therefore capture the value of big data and come up with insightful predictive reports to serve managers’ needs.
- Create insights from new types of information systems. Digitalisation do not only provide more economic data , but also capture more non-financial information with a great potential facilitating organisaitons’ change. Hence, accountants shall equip themselves with skill sets generating insightful findings from all types of information system, such as data-collecting device and IoT system.
- Subject to more ethical issues and responsibilities. Due to the amount of data collected from people and entities, accountants are naturally poised to encounter more ethical dilemmas, thus more responsibilities. For example, accountants shall stay updated with data privacy regulations while implementing their daily tasks.
Overall, technologies should support accountants rather than killing them. Accounting professionals are actually freed by automation and data-driven technologies, not constrained (Higgins, 2021). On one hand, it requires more qualitative input from accountants as businesses go digital. On the other hand, accountants have more chances to participate in strategic decision-making processes. Therefore, organisations should wisely invest in information technologies to free the hands of accountants from repetitive tasks, transforming them into creative strategic decision makers.
References:
Higgins, M. (2021, May 19). The Future Of Accounting: How Will Digital Transformation Impact Accountants? Retrieved October 8, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/05/19/the-future-of-accounting-how-will-digital-transformation-impact-accountants/?sh=2d02ddc853fb
As businesses go digital, accounting takes on a new meaning. (2021, June 17). Retrieved October 8, 2021, from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/06/18/as-businesses-go-digital-accounting-takes-on-a-new-meaning/
