This is the final article in a four-part Cloudoffis series exploring the next five years of accounting, drawing on insights from a recent roundtable with accounting professionals.
Much of the discussion about technology in accounting has focused on productivity. If software can complete routine work faster, the logic is straightforward: practitioners can spend more time on higher-value activities.
But that argument creates another question that accounting firms will increasingly need to address.
If junior accountants no longer spend as much time performing foundational work, how do they develop the judgement that traditionally came from doing it?
This issue surfaced towards the end of Cloudoffis’ recent roundtable on the next five years of accounting.
Participants reflected on the traditional pathway into the profession: younger accountants learned through repetition, supervision and sitting alongside people who had more experience. The work itself formed part of the training.
As one participant questioned during the discussion, if technology increasingly does the “doing”, who fills the resulting training gap? It is a problem that goes beyond technical competence.
Technology can accelerate parts of an accounting process, but professional judgement develops through exposure to situations where the answer is not obvious. It involves recognising when something looks unusual, knowing which questions to ask and understanding how the same technical issue can produce different decisions depending on the client.
These skills are difficult to develop solely through formal training. The roundtable discussion repeatedly returned to curiosity as an increasingly important capability. Practitioners need to understand not only how to complete a task, but why the information looks the way it does and what might sit behind it.
As routine processing becomes more automated, those skills are likely to become more important rather than less.
The same is true of communication. Participants discussed the importance of knowing more about clients than the basic information captured in a traditional practice management system. Why did they start the business? What are they trying to achieve? What matters to them personally? How do they prefer to communicate?
These details shape the relationship and often help experienced practitioners understand a client’s decisions.
The roundtable discussion suggested that accountants of the future will need to become particularly good at these “human-human” skills, while using technology to support rather than replace them.
That has implications for how firms recruit and train. If software performs more of the routine work that once occupied junior practitioners, firms may need to expose younger accountants to client conversations, interpretation and decision-making earlier in their careers.
Technology may also provide part of the solution. A significant amount of knowledge inside accounting firms is tacit. Experienced partners often know details about clients that are not reflected in formal systems. They understand history, preferences and context because they have accumulated that knowledge over years.
The roundtable explored whether technology could help capture more of this information so that it becomes part of the firm’s institutional knowledge rather than remaining with one individual.
Meeting transcripts, richer client records and better-integrated data can all help make that knowledge more accessible to the wider team. That becomes increasingly important as firms manage succession, workforce shortages and changing career paths.
The challenge for firms is therefore not simply to introduce more technology while keeping the existing development model intact. The two need to be considered together. If technology removes a task that previously played an important role in training, firms need to ask what replaces the learning that came with it.
That may mean more structured review, earlier client exposure, deliberate mentoring or better ways of sharing knowledge across teams. Technology will continue taking work out of the accounting process. The profession’s longer-term challenge is to ensure it does not accidentally take the learning out with it.
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