more than half the work world is embracing automation. why not accountants?
why accountants won’t automate:
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by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 research
for all the talk of automation among tax and accounting practitioners, they are still falling behind, even as other professions race ahead.
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more than half the work world is embracing automation.
among accountants: it’s less than half, according to a broad new study.
guess who came in last …
marketers are benefiting the most, saving 25 hours a week, according to the survey by zapier, which allows users to automate repetitive tasks by integrating disparate web services.
it pros come in second at 20 hours a week. customer service reps come in close behind at 16 hours a week.
human resources pros are saving half as much time as those in customer service, just eight hours a week, and sales reps reap only six hours of automated savings.
who comes in last? accountants, who on average can’t save more than four hours a week with automation apps.
the survey notes that time savings aren’t the only benefit of automation, and the benefits depend on the roles of knowledge workers.
accountants may not save a lot of time with automation, but 33 percent of them cite reduced errors as the primary benefit. the survey said, “given the detail-oriented nature of this (accountancy) – where human error can be detrimental – that makes sense.”
how are accountants improving productivity with automation?
- 43 percent import hours into payroll
- 41 percent use it for team communication
- 40 percent apply it to receipt collection
- 38 percent use it to streamline purchase approvals
- 38 percent use it to streamline budget approvals
but for cpas, it’s more than productivity, strictly defined.
the main benefits are indirect though crucially fundamental:
- 33 percent report reduced errors
- 30 percent report improved competence
- 30 percent report improved morale
no surprise, then, that a whopping 67 percent of accountants say they intend to implement automation software “in their next role.”
accounting is more than accountancy
as all accountants know, the accounting business is more than accountancy. it encompasses all the professions surveyed. as marketers, it professionals, customer service reps, hr managers, sales reps, and one-armed paperhangers, accountants – especially those who own their own shops – juggle a lot of functions. automation can streamline all of them.
the main efficiencies of related non-accounting functions were in
- automated team communication
- identifying target customers
- scheduling email sends
- managing subscriber databases
- scheduling appointments and calendar events
- promoting internal events to employees
- integrating hiring and onboarding systems
- creating scalable onboarding processes
- keeping project lists up to date
- testing proof of concepts
- sales and revenue forecasts
- invoice and payment collection
much of basic office automation, zapier says, boils down to using software to set up rules that tell other apps, “when this happens, do that.” set up right, workers can be relieved of much inter-app shuttling of information.