Decision making in any organisation is critical and with the ever changing dynamic business solutions and models its importance is getting much more critical. Accountants have always been an integral part of a business decision making as they are the ones who have hold to all critical data including the G/L, contract systems, customer and vendor database, budget and forecast files, and even the IT function.
With the evaluation of the ERPs and big data handling, organisations started hiring experts in data science to explore and track fast the data exploration. This has taken away some of the Accountants involvement in the decision making which they had enjoyed earlier. In this case, Accounting is being looked at to provide historical information and organisations are hiring data experts for forward looking foretasted information. So across industries, entities are looking forward at data-driven experts to fulfill the gap which accountants can't fill in.
This has shifted the Accountants to work only on clerical part of data while at the same time Data Experts are facing challenges to report the key-trends due to lack of their accounting knowledge. Naturally Accountants are key players in indicating data-trends and advising organisation on their decision making but their lack of tech expertise are making them less favorable in front of decision makers.
According to a report from global staffing firm Robert Half and IMA (Institute of Management Accountants) – the association of accountants and financial professionals in business – finance leaders face significant shortages of accounting and finance professionals who possess the technical and nontechnical skills required for data analytics initiatives.
A new report from Robert Half in May 2020 compiles the Accounting Skills which are required by an Accountant to succeed on a job. It emphasis on the need to equip with up-to-date technology trend which includes big data handling, analysis, advance modelling techniques and knowledge of key programming languages i.e. SQL, Visual Basic and Python/R.
To minimize the gap between what is expected by decision makers and what Accountants are actually performing, accountants have to equip themselves with the data handling and analytical tools. Major tools available are;
1- Advance excel, Excel VB enabled working and knowledge of Visual basics
2- BI software's i.e. Microsoft Power BI and Tableau etc.
3- Advance knowledge of working on ERPs
4- Programming skills i.e. SQL, Python & R etc,
"Coding is value-addition skill" & "Learn Machine Language" are the sentences every one would have heard of. As the Artificial intelligence is taking over things, its not too far when the lack of coding knowledge will be a big hindrance for accountants to find a suitable market place.
Every accountant would agree with me that there are things which only Excel spreadsheet can not handle. Knowledge of computer programming can help to build faster solutions to daily tasks and reporting matters. Employers are placing higher value to candidates which are equipped with the programming skills.
The good thing in the present technological world is that everything is easy to learn as you do not have to go back to academia to restart learning. From many of the programming languages, Python is one which i started learning a few months back during COVID-19 pandemic and the more i am exploring it the more i am getting addicted to this. Python is numbers and data friendly. It was easier to learn than i thought initially. You may also opt to learn other programming languages i.e. C, C++, C# or Java as they all serve the purpose but with different functionality.
Coding is helping accountants in many of the ways:
Nature of Accounting profession is dealing with data. Manipulation, transformation, do computations, store and share data is actually a typical accountant job. For years, Excel has been the go-to tool of us accountants in doing our work. But with today’s volume and speed of data, new tools have appeared in order to process these. And most of them require knowledge of programming. Learning to program allows us to use these new tools and provide new insights to the organization.
Repetitive nature of task can be smooth lined by automating and creating a simple tool. For example, generation of automatic daily, weekly or monthly reports. Once you know how to program, you can create your own daily faster solutions which will make you much smoother and faster in your daily routines.
As the digital world is moving faster so is required to uplift our digital skills. Lacking these skill in the near future may make us irrelevant in the market. Accounting + programming skills shall embrace new level of self motivated challenge to us and would earn respect in return from the market and pears.
One may question the need of learning programming in era of BI tools availability in the market. Sure these tools are great i.e. Microsoft Power BI and Tableau etc. but these are not available at free of cost. Not all organisation have bought these for their employees. Even if you are using these tools, programming knowledge shall enhance your expertise to use these BI tools at their most useful manner.
Apart from all above, coding makes us more organised thinker and enhance analytical skills. we start by drafting a concept, write the code, run it, debug it, test it to make sure that everything is working properly and then roll it out. So, this bring a logical and disciplined approach to our daily routines in office.
It is no longer enough to possess only working knowledge of excel spreadsheets. If you want to move forward, you really have to equip yourself with the programming skills. Many free tools are available in the market to jump in and start learning. You don't have to move away just by declaring it too difficult. Everybody just started it by printing first "hello" word. The important thing is to start it NOW.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
"Anything we do 0 times = very hardAnything we do 5 times = hardAnything we do 10 times = not so hardAnything we do 20 times = easyAnything we do 50 times = very easy !If you want to get from very hard to very easy, start doing it !"
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