This is the third in a four-part Cloudoffis series exploring the next five years of accounting, drawing on insights from a recent roundtable with accounting professionals.
The accounting profession has spent much of the past decade focused on technology adoption. Cloud platforms, workflow tools, automation, data integrations and now artificial intelligence have all promised to make practices more efficient.
Yet as firms plan for the next five years, a different technology problem is emerging.
In many practices, the challenge is no longer a lack of software. It is the complexity created by having too much of it.
That was one of the clearest operational themes to emerge from Cloudoffis’ recent industry roundtable.
Participants described mounting subscription costs, duplicated functionality and workflows spread across multiple systems. One practitioner spoke of having to move between six different programs simply to complete their work, each bringing another login, password and authentication process. Others questioned how much value firms were actually receiving from an expanding collection of platforms.
The issue is not that the technology itself is unnecessary. It is that adoption without an overall operating model can create its own inefficiencies.
The pace of change makes this problem harder. Every new technology cycle creates another set of products promising to solve a particular task. Generative AI has accelerated that process, giving firms more options to automate reporting, analyse data, document meetings and build internal tools.
But the roundtable highlighted how quickly experimentation can run into practical limitations.
Some AI use cases produced immediate time savings. Others required so much instruction and configuration that practitioners concluded they were not worth pursuing. This suggests firms need to resist starting with the technology. A better starting point is the underlying workflow.
Where is time being lost? Which steps are duplicated? Where does information need to move between systems? Which tasks create frustration for staff? Which processes create delays for clients?
Once those questions are understood, technology can be assessed against a genuine operational need.
The same applies to AI. One of the recurring observations during the roundtable was that increasingly sophisticated technology does not remove the importance of reliable data.
AI can help interpret, monitor and automate information, but only if the information sitting underneath the system is accurate and accessible. Participants repeatedly returned to the importance of clean practice data and the limitations created when client knowledge sits in disconnected systems – or solely in the heads of individual practitioners.
That makes data management and integration less glamorous, but arguably more important, than adopting the newest tool.
Technology strategy is also a leadership issue. A revealing example from the roundtable involved a practice where managers had researched a new technology stack, worked through the available options and developed a proposal, only for the project to stall because there was insufficient time to implement it.
The discussion captured a familiar tension: firms may want transformation but still struggle to dedicate the resources needed to achieve it.
Buying software is relatively easy. Changing how a firm works is not. It requires decisions about processes, data, responsibilities, training and sometimes the removal of existing systems. It also requires senior leaders to understand enough about the proposed change to support it.
For some firms, the next stage of digital transformation may therefore involve consolidation rather than expansion. Which systems are genuinely important? Which overlap? Which connect effectively? Which platforms reduce the number of steps involved in completing work?
These are less exciting questions than asking what the latest AI application can do, but they may deliver greater productivity gains.
The firms best positioned for the next five years will not necessarily have the longest technology stack. They will have a deliberate one.
Start with the free Cloudoffis Certification Program. It covers the move from spreadsheets to digital workpapers, integrations and opportunities for automation.
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Stay tuned for part two of this series – coming soon
