The digitalisation of enterprise processes has a huge impact on a lot of jobs. The job of an accounting responsible will also change drastically in the coming years. More and more tasks of humans will be done by computers in the near future. In the accounting world we're talking about Robotic Accounting.
Robotic Accounting
Robotic accounting enables enterprises to transfer manual actions (for example: the booking of invoices or banking extracts) to a computer. This is not really new: a lot of accounting software solutions already do this automatically. For example, managing sales invoices through automated interfaces, or booking banking extracts. More and more of this type of tasks are already automated. Today, it's perfectly possible that 90% of the daily operations of the accountant are already done at 9.00 o'clock, when the accountant arrives at his desk.
Machine learning in accounting software
A recent evolution in Robotic Accounting is the Machine Learning part. Machine Learning gives computers the ability to be self-learning, without any explicit programming. The software builds his own accounting intelligence, based on electronic treatment of invoices. Thanks to this, the software will be able to treat more and more incoming invoices without any human interaction, including the analytic splits of the costs. It's only a matter of time before this principle will be scaled to other operations that are still done manually today.
Of course, the choice of the accounting software is important. Make sure you choose a software solution that is "Robotic Proof" and that supports at least the following features:
- Electronic invoicing (in XML ) for outgoing invoices
- Electronic treatment (in XML ) of incoming invoices
- Scanning & OCR features
- Digital treatment of banking extracts
- Digital treatment of salaries
- Digital account extracts from banks
- Digital management of payment reminders
- Digital deposit of legal documents (VAT, etc).
- Digital deposit of annual accounts
- Digital reporting on cash flow
- Exchange of data with other systems through web services
- Automatical analysis of figures
- Digital newsletters with relevant data
- ...
Does this mean that the role of the accountant will disappear? Of course not. But his role will evolve towards a specialised advisor for the companies general management. More about that in future articles.
