The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting | Hacker News Reader

The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting

nytimes.com

19 pointsmgav6 comments

Makes sense. I'm a CPA working in audit, and see a huge untapped market. The dirty secret of the audit industry is, at least outside Big 4, the way audit is done is largely the same as it would have been in the 80s - except with Excel. The procedures themselves are pretty similar to what can be done on paper before computers.

I think the issue is that there is not a lot of overlap between accountants and programmers, and some deeply ingrained beliefs in the accounting industry that are pushed by all training materials and university. Accounting is pretty conservative and expectations are always that things this year will be the same as last year. It might be just that the senior leadership came up through these processes so there's no expectation that things should change, since it is just the way it is.

I'm working on a startup that aims to automate sections of my job. It started as a realization that a lot of my job is grunt work that can be done by a machine, so I've created it. I already have a proof of concept program that I'm currently pushing towards becoming a product. It allows me to do better work quicker. I already have interest from my employer in paying for it since it proves it value quickly.

A lot of work in compliance and accounting is really about making the organisation legible.

There's a certain amount of box-ticking for sure, but the analysis and reporting are really about getting the data into a form that allows people to create narratives and have conversations.

There is no ceiling for the amount of legibility that management can want.

From an external perspective, the amount of legibility that external organisations can demand (via regulation) is sensitive to what seems possible. Reporting requirements seem to inexorably increase in scope and detail over time.

I predict there will ultimately be no job loss due to efficiency improvements in these areas. It may in fact increase demand.

So much can be done within Excel to automate the spreadsheet processes that people are already using Excel/Office to do.

What platform are you using for your product?

None of the examples in the article were related to accounting!

That aside, the cost savings on eliminating "white collar jobs" seems hard to quantify in an economic structure where such tools tend to require their own overhead. I'm thinking about payroll software or job application tracking systems that require either in-house developers to maintain or outside agencies to manage.

If you have an in-house accounting department, chances are that their role involves more than just taking the outputs from their ERP dashboard and pulling them into Excel. They likely have leadership roles or institutional knowledge that can't just be replaced with software.

Executives generally spin these bots as being good for everyone, “streamlining operations” while “liberating workers” from mundane and repetitive tasks. But they are also liberating plenty of people from their jobs.

This is the paradox. On the one hand it frees people from "mundane and repetitive tasks". But on the other "creative" and "accounting" are not normally words you want to see together.

But on the other hand there is another paradox too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

"... between half and two-thirds of all the tasks currently being done at their companies can be done by machines. Ultimately, he sees a future in which humans will collaborate side-by-side with teams of digital employees, with plenty of work for everyone, although he conceded that the robots have certain natural advantages..."

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