Let’s try a little thought experiment: Start by imagining a present-day accounting firm. Like many of its peer firms, it has plenty of work to do—and plenty more it could do, were it not struggling to find qualified employees to staff its engagements, manage its teams, and simply get the work out the door.
Not that hard to imagine, right? It’s the day-to-day experience of the overwhelming majority of firms in the profession.
Now I want you to imagine something else about that firm — and be warned, this is where you’ll have to stretch: Imagine that no one there has a smartphone. A few employees may have flip phones, but there are no iPhones or Androids or Samsungs, so they can’t check emails on the go, or answer a client call on the road, or scan documents, or approve a payroll from their kid’s soccer game. What’s more, this firm doesn’t have access to the cloud; in fact, let’s imagine the cloud doesn’t exist. To get client data, they have to go to the client’s office. And when their staff are outside the office, they basically can’t do any work.
What’s more, imagine there are no PDFs or CSV files — and even if there were, there’s no email to attach them to, so when clients want to send this firm their tax documents, for instance, they have to bring them to the office in a shoebox. Oh, and also this firm doesn’t have tax software, so calculations are done on a calculator (or sent out of house to be handled by a service bureau) and then added to the paper return. (They have no accounting software, either — imagine that!)
As unimaginable as all this may seem, it’s exactly what most accounting firms looked like just 30 years ago. What they had in place of all that technology was people — the people firms can’t find now. And that brings me to the point of this little thought experiment: The flow of people into accounting started to slow down in the 1990s, at exactly the same time as firms began to adopt more and more technology.
The point is not that there’s any causation here — there isn’t — but that the advent of technology has masked just how dire the staffing situation is. It’s difficult for a firm in the 2020s to operate at current staffing levels; it would have been impossible for a firm in the 1990s. Only technology has allowed the profession to keep up, which begs the question: It’s common enough to say that accounting is a people business — but how much is that still true? It seems much fairer to say that it’s a people-and-technology business, and with the trends all seeming to point to a greater and greater focus on the latter, IT is going to have to move more and more to the center of firms’ thinking.
Now — imagine that!
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