How Accountants Can Use Automation Their Advantage – Accountingweb.com (blog)

According to a recent report from Xero, it was found that accountants of today take technology very seriously. In fact, 83% of the accountants in a survey said that it was as important for them to understand technology as it was to understand accountancy.

This is a big change from how accountants were in the past. Accounting has always been a very traditional profession. Nothing much changed in accounting for over 50 years, but the advent of accounting technologies such as QuickBooks started making things happen in this highly traditional profession.

QuickBooks from Intuit was the earliest accounting software. It simplified a lot of things for accountants, allowing them to get more done in less time. But QuickBooks is so 1990s. There have already been new developments in accounting technology, such as cloud accounting.

The cloud-based technologies of today, such as Drake Tax Hosting, QuickBooks Hosting, Sage 50 Hosting, ProSeries Tax software Hosting, Lacerte Tax Software Hosting, Quicken Hosting, ATX Tax Software Hosting, etc. are more sophisticated than ever before.

They allow accountants to diversify their services and spend their time more productively, on things that are more important, such as strategizing on growing their business and reaching out to more clients.

Cloud accounting is the technology of the future, and it has automated a lot of things for accountants. In the survey that we spoke about at the start, 71 percent of accountants said that they considered knowledge of automation to be critical to their success.

That is true. By 2020, automation will be very common in accounting. A number of accounting and finance professionals will be dependent on a number of different analytical tools that would help them take their business to the next level.

Seeing how quickly things have been changing in accounting, it is so very important that accountants undertake relevant training on cloud accounting and automation. A number of accountants already are. In fact, a survey found that 48 percent of accountants were taking at least some course in different types of accounting technologies. Many were taking external courses in new technologies such as Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

BI is expected to be the next big thing in accounting. It helps accountants to harness data more effectively, especially in the financial context. BI can change how a business operates completely. It is one of the most revolutionary changes in accounting and finance saw recently.

In the UK, a number of accounting firms have been using BI to conduct skills risk analysis and management consulting. BI and other forms of automation are likely to be an integral part of accounting for years to come.

Over the next few years, accountants will look to expand their service offerings to include business intelligence and other forms of big data analytics. They are expected to grow their data warehousing capabilities. We expect cloud accounting to play a big role in that. The cloud is critical to accounting. The question is, are you on the cloud yet?

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How Accountants Can Use Automation Their Advantage - Accountingweb.com (blog)