What’s the first thing that pops into your mind when I say “accountant?” For me it’s: “boring,” “taxes,” “long-hours,” and “numbers.” All of that is mostly true. After being a prototypical accountant, I can assure you I will not go back to being a “boring” accountant. But I am staying in the field of accounting because it’s getting pretty darn cool.
Automating Accounting
I’ve previously written about machines automating our current jobs. The core components for automation are:
- Tightly specify all activities required to generate output.
- Highly standardize all of those activities so that they are done in exactly the same efficient way anywhere in the organization.
- Tightly integrate all of those activities so that we remove all of those inefficient buffers that often separated activities required to yield a specific output.
These elements are near identical to what we currently have for human accounting. The world’s financial infrastructure is quickly allowing for financial data to be read by computers. That’s where the cool-ness starts.
Accounting Getting Cool
You might be thinking, “But, machines are going to take over accounting, why would that be cool?” What’s cool about it is we can say goodbye to the boring accounting duties. Migrating the duty of an accountant from number-cruncher, and financial statement creator, to being a small business advisor. It becomes the job of the accountant to take the machine-created data and turn it into actionable business plans.
We’re Already There
Now, you might also be hesitant that I’m living in a machine-enthused world and am over-hyping the future of accounting. The future is already here. There’s a company called Xero that’s already doing this.
Xero’s CEO, Rod Drury, heavily believes in the machine-learning future of accounting. Instead of being a bookkeeper’s paradise, Xero is a completely customizable software that allows you to manage anyone’s books while providing all sorts of pertinent statistics. Most of the work done in the system is done by automated processes, turning the accountant’s job from data entry, to forward-looking projections and modeling.
To most people this probably isn’t that interesting. But anyone in the accounting world, or small business world that’s worked with bad accountants, things are about to get really cool. Accountants will no longer be the glasses-wearing paper-pushers but at the front-line of an automation revolution. Get your popcorn ready.