hey it's patti scharf, CPA and co-founder of catching clouds, the leader in
e-commerce accounting and today we're gonna talk about the future of
accounting so I know a lot of people who are accountants or thinking about going
into the accounting industry are really concerned about where they're gonna fit
in this new changing landscape that's going on with technology and accounting
so in case you don't know or you're kind of new to this even two years ago I want
to say I was at Zurich on 2016 in San Francisco and Roger II who was the CEO
and and founder of Xero was speaking and talking about how they're already
working on artificial intelligence and machine learning so they are working
towards getting zero to automatically code transactions for you so it pulls in
the transactions from the banker credit card it knows based on all of the
information that's accumulated over the years how that should probably be coded
and then coat it that way so the actual bookkeeping part of bookkeeping will be
going away and everybody in the crowd is like yeah that's awesome except for a
few were just like what am I gonna do if the software does that what am I going
to do and that's actually the right question to be asking so is bookkeeping
going away no bookkeepers are gonna have to adapt their skills though they're
going to need to make sure that they they know accounting inside and out that
they if something gets coded and it's wrong that they understand that it's
wrong why it's wrong and what to do to fix it they need to understand the
fundamentals of business you know cash is king and you need to understand the
ebbs and flows of business how to save for a rainy day or whatever else you
need to understand your clients businesses so they have questions and
they need help answering those questions and you're going to have to
understand their business enough to be able to point them in the right
direction and you're also going to need to be able to understand technology
enough to be able to point them in the right direction one of the things that I
see most often it just drives me insane as I'll be like looking through Facebook
or LinkedIn or something and I'm in a bunch of different communities of
accountants and they'll ask hey what is the best tool to pull in all the
transactions for Shopify or Amazon or something like that
and I'm just like no no you're asking the wrong questions so if you really
know your clients well you'll know the right questions to ask and and you'll
know how to answer them and then if you have a niche if you don't have a niche
I'd say get one if you if you do have a niche stick with it because if you're
trying to be all things to all different industries like you've got you've got
some attorney clients and some ecommerce clients and some construction clients or
whatever you're you're spreading yourself too thin if you just have one
type of clients you can dive really deep into that topic and and you're going to
gain a lot more experience faster that you can share with your clients so
that's a really important thing to have and then then also just find a community
of people who especially if if you can find like an accountant who also
specializes in e-commerce like go find those people and where they hang out and
you can share tips and tricks and amongst yourselves this is really the
time of co-op petition there's plenty of work to go around and sharing knowledge
is a great thing because you help each other and you help all the clients and
everybody Rises as a result so so I hope you liked this video if you did please
like it comment share if you haven't already please subscribe and I'll catch
you later