Questões de Concurso

How Will Digital Transformation Impact Accountants?

     In business, as in life, change is the only true constant. From mitigating unprecedented business disruptors to adapting to new operational paradigms, professionals in all industries find themselves dealing with major changes — many of them driven by emerging technologies.

     Accounting is no exception. The profession has moved far beyond mere bookkeeping and payroll, and like its partner procurement, it’s taking an increasingly strategic role for forward-thinking businesses. While some pundits say accounting has a dim future in the digital world of tomorrow, technologies such as cloud-based data management, process automation and advanced analytics are actually poised to further elevate accountants in new and empowering ways.

     As far back as 2015, industry leaders were sounding the death knell for accountants, convinced emerging technologies — particularly automation — would end in death by digital for accountancy as we know it. And as recently as 2019, accountants surveyed by Robert Half on the impact of automation on their profession expressed concerns about being replaced, having fewer opportunities for creative problem-solving and an overdependence on tech in completing daily tasks.

     Yet, the events between then and now, including the Covid-19 pandemic, have instead shown that accountants, like other professionals, need to worry much more about adaptation than replacement.

     There's no question that digital transformation has radically changed the playing field. Big data has become a rich resource that needs to be tapped to compete effectively. But for businesses ready to leverage the potential of digital tools, this shift is an opportunity, not a threat.

     […]

     Both the skill set and the job description for tomorrow's accountant will be greatly expanded, while still hewing to the core competencies of the profession. Supported by technology in a collaborative setting, accounting teams will be populated with both dedicated accounting professionals and subject matter experts from other areas of the business.

     Tomorrow's accountants may play an advisory role, welcoming business intelligence and procurement professionals and working to chart a strategic sourcing plan. They could leverage data management tools, including augmented reality, to humanize and contextualize spend data for the C-suite to make better decisions based on long-term value rather than return on investment alone.

     With more diverse skill sets and greater technical acumen, accountants can bring their own expertise to teams in other business units, providing crucial financial intelligence, refining budgets or ensuring compliance. […]

     As a function, accounting may become less about refining one's skill set through certifications and more about core competencies that grow over time, with a focus on lifelong education and skill development required to take on a complex, ever-changing business environment.

     Automation and other data-driven technologies are poised to free accountants, not constrain them. Organizations that  understand the potential and importance of these technologies — and invest in the tools and training required to help their accountants take full advantage — will be ahead of the curve. Tomorrow's accountants will play a more creative and strategic role in their companies. As a result, their businesses will not only enjoy more efficient workflows and reap more useful insights from their accounting processes, but help strengthen their own resiliency, agility and competitive footing.

Adapted from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/05/19/thefuture-of-accounting-how-will-digital-transformation-impactaccountants/?sh=343b437853fb

     In January 1948, before three pistol shots put an end to his life, Gandhi had been on the political stage for more than fifty years. He had inspired two generations of Indian patriots, shaken an empire and sparked off a revolution which was to change the face of Africa and Asia. To millions of his own people, he was the Mahatma — the great soul — whose sacred glimpse was a reward in itself.

       By the end of 1947 he had lived down much of the suspicion, ridicule and opposition which he had to face, when he first raised the banner of revolt against racial exclusiveness and imperial domination. His ideas, once dismissed as quaint and utopian, had begun to strike answering chords in some of the finest minds in the world. “Generations to come, it may be,” Einstein had said of Gandhi in July 1944, “will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon earth.”

      Though his life had been a continual unfolding of an endless drama, Gandhi himself seemed the least dramatic of men. It would be difficult to imagine a man with fewer trappings of political eminence or with less of the popular image of a heroic figure. With his loin cloth, steel-rimmed glasses, rough sandals, a toothless smile and a voice which rarely rose above a whisper, he had a disarming humility. He was, if one were to use the famous words of the Buddha, a man who had “by rousing himself, by earnestness, by restraint and control, made for himself an island which no flood could overwhelm.”

        Gandhi’s deepest strivings were spiritual, but he did not — as had been the custom in his country — retire to a cave in the Himalayas to seek his salvation. He carried his cave within him. He did not know, he said, any religion apart from human activity; the spiritual law did not work in a vacuum, but expressed itself through the ordinary activities of life.

       This aspiration to relate the spirit of religion to the problems of everyday life runs like a thread through Gandhi’s career: his uneventful childhood, the slow unfolding and the near-failure of his youth, the reluctant plunge into the politics of Natal, the long unequal struggle in South Africa, and the vicissitudes of the Indian struggle for freedom, which under his leadership was to culminate in a triumph not untinged with tragedy.

B. R. Nanda. Gandhi: a pictorial biography, 1972 (adapted).