[animalwithin]

I work in my dad’s accounting firm and while the business makes a lot of money, I’m consistently shocked as to how much of this field is not automated.

I spend most of my time bookkeeping: sifting through receipts and bank statements to create financial statements, hand calculating sales tax figures for quarterly sales tax returns, plugging in numbers into payroll software to create checks (I hate all of this).

Either my dad’s firm is behind the times (very possible) or shockingly much of this industry remains unautomated. Can any of this be outsourced? Is there a way to incorporate tech so that we don’t have to do so much manual/repetitive/mundane work?

[jeff]

You will be as automated and systematized as the clients who drop bags of papers off at your office to be gone through.

It's a manual process – it's just a matter of who does it.

Your average restaurant or mechanic shop doesn't want to mess with it – that's why they pay you (in their mind).

[Silent]

I will second what Jeff said. It's much cheaper for restaurant, mom/pop store to drop off their papers off at your office and all they have to do is pay for your service. Their time worth so much more compare to what it will cost them. Sure they can set up a quickbook to download bank statements from the bank, they can enter the invoices etc but again it will cost them money.

[vbmer]

Yes, it is absolutely automatable. I actually lead identifying automation opportunities and developing solutions for various practices within the firm. We can take a box of hand-written paperwork and automatically enter the data into where it needs to go. The only menial task leftover is scanning the documents, which a Staff or Intern does. We can read documents and determine if a certain approver signed them or not. Menial entry-level duties, at least at the Big 4, are being eliminated fast, which is great, because while there will be fewer entry-level accounting positions in the future, they will be spending time doing “real” work, rather than low-value, repetitive tasks.

[animalwithin]

I understand how it's largely a manual process. What I don't understand is how has the act of manually inputting the data not been automated?

Are there not technology systems that exist that can at least take paper information from receipts, invoices, and checks and digitize it so that one doesn't have to sift through all the paperwork? Or is that largely dependent upon the clients and whether or not they digitize everything or use paper for everything?

[turo9992000]

@VBMER what software do you reccomend?

[CPAHOPE]

Dont worry man, we will get there during artificial intelligence era. It will stunk for low skilled workers as many will be replaced by robots and automated machines. It will be costly however. Since you do increase operating leverage, you will be highly dependent on generating more sales than ever before as your fixed cost will be higher. In other words, there will be more pressure to increase sales

[vbmer]

@Turo, we mostly use proprietary solutions developed by internal service line tech teams or innovators within various practices.

As far as software, I like Alteryx, ABBYY, SSIS, and Python, which covers a large portion of business applications. On the RPA side, which I'm not involved in other than occasional go to market collaboration, they use all of the main RPA platforms – Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath.

[animalwithin]

@CPAHOPE, hopefully that comes soon. I'm all for spending more time on higher-order tasks for humans in general.

@Vbmer, so what you're saying is that it's possible to take boxes and stacks of receipts, invoices, etc. and sort/categorize the information found in them? Or does the material have to be digital first before it can be sorted out?

[FutureCPA]

@vbmer, you totally get it. you have now become my favorite user. *Runs to see all Vbmer post”

I need to pass before busy season.

[vbmer]

@animalwithin, a human will still have to scan physical paper documents. Once it's in digital form, though, the data can be extracted and loaded into various systems. The difficulty depends on things like document quality and the similarity of the input documents, and the more difficult it is, the more expensive it will be to automate. Things like typed tax forms, receipts, or financial statements are usually on the lower end of complexity.

[Author]

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