Accounting Professionals: Are They Necessary?
The accounting profession is one of the oldest in the world. But how necessary is it, and how much longer will accountants be needed in society? Our blog post delves into this contentious issue and explores whether or not accountants are going to become obsolete.
I’ll start by giving you a quick rundown of what an accountant actually does. An accountant is essentially a middle-man between the client and the rest of the world, who is hired to act as an intermediary in financial transactions or any other form of exchange. There are two main types of accountants; those who take care of business affairs, and those who perform financial computations.
We all know that accountants can be classified into four main categories. They are: bookkeepers, treasurers (people with business administrator qualifications), actuaries (medical professionals who help calculate insurance premiums), and tax accountants (people licensed by the government to prepare tax returns).
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the company of accountants in the country were called "Accounting Bureaus" or "Auditing Bureaus". They were run by a board of trustees. They had their own legal status in the country, and they were governed by national law. They provided students with a qualification to perform accountancy work, and they performed independent audits on companies. Their main purpose was to ensure that companies adhered to their constitutional laws.
Up until the 1970s, accountants were required to undertake graduate level studies in accounting and audit to be qualified to practice their profession. Their job was highly regulated and they had to get special consent from the government before they could embark on a career as an accountant. In the UK, students would study business organizations and accounting information systems before they got qualifications in auditing.
The idea of accountants going out of fashion is something that most budding students ask themselves when they make the decision to pursue a career in accounting. This is mainly because so much of what an accountant does is repetitive, routine tasks that don’t require tremendous amounts of creativity or imagination. This means that if there is a better alternative, you can always choose to go with the latter.
The following are some of the tasks that accountants are tasked with nowadays:
1. Handling petty cash and bank cheques.
2. Selling off accounts, stocks and shares or making stock options or buying back shares.
3. Recording changes in asset and liabilities, such as the acquisition or sale of assets or liabilities.
4. Maintaining cash reconciliation records, including cheque books, petty cash book and any bank account items used to record payment in and payment out of assets and liabilities. This includes recording payments made into assets from clients, customers and suppliers etc.
5. Preparing accounts for tax purposes - collecting and recording information etc.
6. Keeping records of income from sales, profits and losses sustained from the sale of goods or services.
7. Distinguishing between current assets and current liabilities.
8. Assessing income tax by keeping a record of how much money you earn e.g., commissions, product sales etc., which helps you work out how much money you need to pay in tax at the end of the year.
9. Handling various forms of insurance, such as health and life insurance, by calculating premium payments.
10. Creating, modifying and applying accounting policies in all business transactions.
So is this enough to make accountants go out of fashion? Well, yes it is! This is because accountants have been rendered obsolete by the introduction of more efficient accounting software and computers that have been developed to do all the repetitive tasks for them. There are programs that can do everything an accountant does, but better! In fact there exist apps for smart phones and tablets which can keep track of customer income, calculate commission payments and even handle your invoices. They are far more efficient than a human being could ever be.
What’s more, if you wanted to get an app developed for your business, it would cost you far less than hiring a professional accountant to do the job. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to get an app that does everything?
But what about when things don’t go according to plan? How will accountants be able to help their clients in the event of a business failure or when things go wrong? Well, the reality is that very few accountants are actually needed nowadays. In fact, most of them are stuck in routine work like keeping up financial data and recording transactions. The world has evolved so much in technology that record keeping has become extremely efficient and fast. As a result, an accountant is far less likely to be needed in the near future.
So what has brought about this change? Well, it’s mainly due to the fact that technology has made everything so much cheaper. For example, if you want to do business internationally, then you can simply buy products from overseas for a cheaper price and sell them for more locally. You don’t need to pay an accountant because you can do it all yourself using your smart phone! It may not be as simple as just buying stuff from the internet and then having them delivered at your doorstep... you have to have a warehouse and store them somewhere... but you can’t do that on a small scale. If you want to be able to sell your products in multiples of thousand and send across a cargo of goods, then you will need to rent a warehouse, hire staff and pay for equipment. But with an app, your job is done for you! You just need to supply the software and the shoppers will come out of the woodwork, looking for bargains.
In addition, accountants are no longer needed because all business transactions are recorded electronically nowadays, which means that accounting needs no additional skills apart from being able to use technology effectively.
Conclusion
The overall conclusion is that accountants are becoming obsolete in the modern world. There are far more efficient ways of doing business and controlling finances, which means that accountants are far less necessary nowadays than they have ever been before. They can still be useful to certain businesses who need to perform routine audit tasks, but most businesses have figured out an effective way of taking care of their financial issues. So if you want to get a career in a completely different industry, then you may have missed your chance... but there will always be more things for accountants to do!
So what do you think? Is it true that accountants are going out of style? We would love to hear your opinion on this matter.