Artificially Intelligent Robot Tells it’s Creator It Will Keep Humans “In a People Zoo…”
Will the machines take over the accounting and bookkeeping industry? Will the applications put the traditional bookkeepers into the “National Museum of Accounting history?”
The short answer is yes! Unless you are ready to evolve.
Tell me if this defines best the traditional bookkeeping process. You hound your clients for documents for a month and the process to keying in the data takes close to 2 weeks.
By the time the financial data is ready, it is already close to a month late. Now in this day and age where we have real-time updates for pretty much anything we require, there is no time for such a long lag for financial information. The bookkeeper needs to adapt to the new ecosystem or find themselves in the Museum. The traditional bookkeeper needed to have good accounting knowledge and data entry skills.
Today though with the availability of the cloud and the myriad of add-ons that are available the bookkeeper needs to know the right add-ons to eliminate data entry as well as increase productivity, They must be on top of the add-ons so that they will be able to train their clients on how the application works. They have to have a strong accounting knowledge as well as be completely on top of technology because when some issues pop up for your client you are going to need to solve it for them.
The bookkeeper can no longer afford just give a financial report with numbers and expect it to be a job well done, but rather start interpreting the data from the various applications and give your clients insightful knowledge.
How Do you Evolve :
- Be an Accounting Wizard: Not only knowing Accounting Tools, but at the end of the day knowing your debt from your credit.
- Understand the Business: Rather than diving into the work straight away, find out why your clients need to do that. For Eg: Does my client really need Purchase Orders
- Cloud Accounting Tools and Application M.V.P (Most Valuable Player): Technology is here and it’s going to be around, so let’s make a resolution and embrace it. We asked our audience this question in one of our recent survey’s” How much of technology and tools do you use to increase automation of manual work? “ and only 29% of the audience responded that “I am completely on top of technology and i know the right tools to reduce my work” You must be Xero M.V.P’S but there might be some places where Xero can’t help completely so take a problem one by one and trying to fill the gap with the add-ons or applications. Talk to your peers and find out from them the applications that they use and the pro’s and con’s of each of them
- Pick a Target Audience:
Once you know who your target audience is, you don’t have to go behind all the add-ons but you can standardize the process with a lesser number of add-ons
