Make Your Technology Resolutions for 2017
As we ring in 2017 and make our New Year’s resolutions, be sure to make your technology resolutions because the accounting profession is undergoing transformational changes. The clock is not going to turn back to the future and allow you to do what you did in the past. If you don’t become proactive developing your technology skills, you are going to get left behind. While you may think that surfing the internet, using email, and spreadsheet fluency are enough to sustain you, you need to look in to the crystal ball and become skilled in emerging technology trends.
Business analytics is the big news. You can keep building spreadsheet analyses, but anything more than a simple analysis can take hours and sometimes several days to create. Explore the potential of business analytics software like Tableau that you can use to develop models that can be automatically updated in future accounting periods. The productivity that you gain from an automatic update can be applied to analyzing the results. Your organization needs your analytical insight far more than it needs you to rekey information and data. Automatically feeding your model with data from your ERP system also improves the model’s accuracy and data integrity.
Analytics can also be applied to auditing. Audit Data Standards (ADS) are already being used by public accounting firms to transfer your accounting transactions to the auditors for automated audit analysis and testing. Work with your auditors to populate files from your ERP system that can be automatically transmitted to your auditors. Think of the time and money that can be saved through automating the process.
Keep an eye on blockchain technology. It processes transactions through a digital distributed ledger using encryption to secure the ownership of the assets and the transactions. According to XBRL US the blockchain “records and facilitates transactions using tokens which are representational units of an asset that provide the mapping of an account to an asset and maintain a record of ownership.” An example is smart contracts that are processed through the blockchain instead of using traditional paper based contracts. Each party in the contract can access their copy of the distributed ledger to approve or modify the contract, accept completed milestones, and make payments for example. Campbell Pryde, the president and CEO of XBRL US says that “Blockchain is the future for financial products and financial transactions.”
Get on board and embrace emerging technology trends in 2017 or you risk getting left behind.