French philosophers and modern introverts both like to tell us that hell is other people, but for accounting firm leaders over the past decade or so, hell has actually been the lack of other people.
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From the war for talent to the pipeline problem, the profession’s most pressing concern has been not having enough people to do all the work that needs doing. Not enough people are coming into accounting, and not enough people are becoming CPAs, and not enough people are staying in public accounting.
Sounds like a people problem, right?
Unfortunately, there simply aren’t enough people to lure into the pipeline to do all the work that needs doing. The profession still needs to do everything it can to bring in everyone that it can, but it won’t ever be enough, and as the demand for accountants’ services grows, it may well become increasingly insufficient.
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The answer is to stop thinking of it as a people problem. Instead, think of it as a capacity problem. You may say it’s the same thing — after all, “capacity planning” at most firms involves figuring out which people you have available to staff engagements — but the definition of capacity is rapidly expanding these days to include ways of getting work done that simply weren’t available before.
To start, regular technology has enabled the automation of huge swaths of accountants’ everyday work, and now artificial intelligence promises to automate much, much more. Meanwhile, a new generation of offshoring talent has emerged that is reliable, secure, highly responsive, and ready to pick up a lot of your slack. (I know that they’re technically people, but they’re other people’s people, and working with them opens up a vast pool of talent that you couldn’t easily hire from.)
None of this is a secret; everyone is (or should be) aware of how automation and offshoring can help firms. In fact, large firms have already eagerly embraced both. The real trick, as in so many cases, is mindset: Not thinking of them as what you deploy when you can’t find people to do a job, but as solutions that are coequal to human talent and that should be applied depending on the type of work at hand. They aren’t replacements for the people you can’t find or keep; they are the levers you pull for particular tasks or specific engagements — adjuncts that free your precious human staff to focus on the sort of thing they do best.
Start building a capacity strategy that treats talent, offshoring and automation as coequal solutions, and that matches each to the appropriate need right from the start, rather than applying people first and trying to fill gaps after, and you’ll soon be able to back to thinking that hell is other people, like the rest of us.
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