Major Challenges in Finance & Accounting Profession

01-10-20 promisetrainingglobal 0 comment

The World Economic Forum reported a good news a few months back. The good news is that more jobs would be created than taken away due to the introduction of AI technologies in multiple job sectors. The report says that 133 million jobs would be there and 75 million jobs would be eliminated. That means there is a net gain of the jobs.

But this switch is not coming easily. There is a significant job disruption taking place. A lot of jobs are being eliminated, a lot of jobs are being created and people from many categories of professions are going through a disruption, oftentimes a major disruption. And this is all going to happen with the finance and accounting profession as well. Of course, it’s quite worrisome for us.

Currently based on the average, 71% of the work is done by humans and 29% by machines or robots or computers or technologies. As we move forward, it is expected that this ratio would shift to 42% work done by machines or robots by 2022 and by 2025, this could be more than half. So, you could see the trend very clearly that machines, robots and technologies are taking over our jobs very fast.

So, the criteria for you is to look from your jobs is that if it is repetitive, if it is routine, or if this is the same type of task which can be done again and again. You can beat the robots with productivity. Robots and machines can do repetitive tasks much better, much accurate, much faster, and much precisely. So, what we have to do on the human side going forward is look for more complex jobs with more tasks, related to innovation and creativity.

When it comes to the finance and accounting profession, we have to look at this from the perspective of roles and functionalities, responsibilities and skills. There are transactional processing or standard reporting job responsibilities. These areas of functions are already very much automated, through the shared service centers, through the ERP systems, through the computer automation. It’s pretty much already done, with some exceptions. But there are many areas in finance and accounting, which are not routine jobs and are performed manually. Take the example of ad hoc analysis. Finance professionals are engaged in this analysis job to do analysis of a business and create reports, which machines can’t perform.

But the speed of automation overtaking various areas of the finance and accounting profession, thus, constitutes the biggest challenges to the accounting professionals . In order to navigate those challenges, they have to upskill and reskill themselves.

Keep up with the industry change
Make themselves familiar with the cybersecurity management
Keep updating with the tax codes
Picking up skills of using technologies used for accounting solutions

Currently, the finance and accounting companies are facing the challenges:

Right Talent/Skills:

There is a talent gap, which is a real strain. Companies are looking for qualified and skilled human resources who can fulfil this gap. Given this, it becomes now necessary for finance firms to take a proactive approach to beat the challenges.

Technology

Division of labour between humans and machines is shifting fast. You have to judge and identify which roles would stay and which of them would go away. Based on that, you have to implement technologies for your business improvement.

Automation:

Automation is basically making hardware and software capable of doing things automatically without human interventions. Take the example of ERP. It’s accomplishing multiple jobs relating to finance and accounting automatically, from capturing data on invoices and sending it straight to the person with responsibility for signing the payment. To stay competitive and compliant with the trend, you have to implement tools for the service. At the same time, you will need trained employees who can handle those tools.

It substantiates that the number of jobs being eliminated are much lower than the number of jobs being created. And this trend is here to continue. Today’s finance and accounting professionals need to keep themselves updated continually to win those challenges.