The false accounting digitization and the profile of the external accountants

A lot is being said about the digitization of accounting in Brazil and in the world. To state that technology is part of the daily activities of all companies in all sectors, and that innovation and “disruptive” thinking are behaviors that every entrepreneur has a duty to implement, besides of being fashion, is an inexorable reality from the point of view of competitiveness.

However. After analyzing the available tools and acting actively in recent years, appreciating the development of the accounting profession in Brazil and around the world, we conclude that, in fact, very little progress has been made towards the actual digitization of accounting activities.

There is a clear worldwide apprehension that the accounting profession will be totally changed over the next few years or even become extinct as some researches indicates. To the accounting professionals, we can safely say that given the current tools that are said to be part of the “digitization of accounting” process, such a prediction is fallacious, incorrect, and contains a lot of “scary marketing” and “Fake News ”.

It is quite true that today in the world there is a lot of automation in the administrative tasks of a company, no doubt about that. However, it is also true that the accounting tasks have changed a lot in recent years. In our view, we believe that digital accounting technology (Contech) has not kept pace with this evolution and the new accountant has placed itself far ahead of its time compared to the advancement of technology in its industry.

The external accountants, who for many years had his service linked to the processing of accounting facts, now also participate in the generation of information, being very often also responsible for the financial and billing, inventory and HR (Selection and Training) of their clients. Thus, today we have a much more active accountant, participating in the day-to-day activities of their clients and their business activities.

The evolution of accounting technology (Contech), the one that seeks to optimize the workflow of the external accountant with its client, does not follow the same path as the evolution of the accounting profession itself, because it is focused only on the processing of the information and not on its generation. Today there are very few existing tools that really change the way the new external accountant works. There is a lot of technology available for storing information, or others that extend or facilitate the communication between client and office, but very little technology is seeking the daily tasks of the new external accountant.

There are also those who call themselves digital accounting firms, but in reality, they are accounting offices, covered by a plataform of communication, which has dozens of accountant behind of it in order to process the accounting of its clients, but in fact, regarding real digital accounting, we see nothing. Those are great fake services. Those digital accounting companies, using the capital they raise with private equity funds and others, very often make a lot of noise in the marketing area, but in practice are supposed to failure very soon. They charge an extreme low fee, deliver a very low quality service and the tendency is not to prosper, simply because there is no innovation at all. There is a lot of noise and fake service.

In this sense, we feel quite optimistic about the future, because the new external accountant has his focus on assisting the effective management of companies, conducting side by side with entrepreneur-investor the various areas of administrative management.

The moment the accountant has ceased to be a processor and has become a data generator, The digital revolution of the accounting area, which aims to automate processing only, does not cause any harm or risk to this profession that assists the entrepreneur from the beginning of civilization and moreover, which is the good news, the disruptive thinking in digital accounting still has a plenty of room to advance.