hey it's patti scharf CPA and co-founder of catching clouds the leader in
e-commerce accounting welcome back to our Saturday slowdown where I like to
remind everybody to work on their business and not just in their business
all right so today I want to talk about a message I saw on LinkedIn from one of
my peers in the industry i sat months ago it's been on my list for a long time
it's just taking me a while to get here but what the question was was if small
accounting firms are having this like moment of digital disruption where
there's all this AI machine learning all this stuff that's making things better
faster easier then why is the number one challenge for accounting firms finding
good talent so so the question is shouldn't if you've got like more
automation and everything shouldn't that translate into excess capacity instead
of the other way around so I had a lot of things to say about that and so I
like kind of earmarked it for later I would say that today's economy is not at
all like the economy of yesteryear like if you think about factories where you
would just have whatever warm body would come in you'd show them do this and this
and this done and they would do this and this and this and be done and it didn't
really matter who was there or doing the work or whatever one person was as good
as the next so if you have automation then oh you've got an extra person maybe
that person gets laid off or whatever like that that's kind of the premise I
think that's being posed in that question but I think that we've got a
different economy going on now where people aren't like I think about my
clients and they really see they see the automation that's going on in the world
they they know like maybe 20 years ago they they knew that there are
alternative for keeping track of their books either they would hire somebody to
do it or they would have to do it themselves
and they didn't want to do it themselves on pen and paper maybe this is more like
30 years ago because it predates me but they didn't want to have to learn
accounting or they just didn't know where to even start
whereas now you know things like QuickBooks where they are really
targeting the self-employed person the person who owns are in business and
they're like you know what you can do this yourself we make it so easy for you
just follow our prompts you know same thing with like tax returns just walk
through our little interview process and it'll be okay you know I mean I remember
like ten years ago I had a client who basically was saying you know why is
this why does the accounting cost so much I could have just hired a typist
for 24 $12 an hour to just key this all into QuickBooks and be done with it and
I'm like dude you've got like no concept whatsoever of how much skill is involved
in learning and being able to execute on accounting like it's just it's not the
same as typing you actually it's a skill all right I think in today's economy
though like our clients aren't looking for somebody to just crunch the numbers
they're not looking for that automation it's it's something that's required from
us as accountants because we know that we need good accurate information before
we can provide that next level of service which is actually what our
clients are looking for our clients want to know like hey what do I need to do
today that's gonna make my business healthy and successful and keep it safe
and outpace competitors and what kinds of actions do I need to take
operationally that's going to create better returns and stuff yeah I I want
to know about returns on investment I want to know what like if I have an
operational system how is that going to talk to my accounting system what what
do these numbers even mean like let's say I have financial statements that I
just cranked out of QuickBooks what is it telling me how does house knowing
this information actually help my business and that right there is the
shortage that we have going on in the industry we have so many people who
learned how to be really good technicians who learned how to do debits
and credits and and put this in the right place and how to print out checks
and line things up and what and not so many people who are working
on the skills that they really need to succeed in the future they need to know
how to communicate both in writing and speaking and just general communication
with the clients to educate them on the health of their business or
troubleshooting like learning different processes like obviously learning the
technology knowing accounting so that when you see that something went off the
rails like wait that went off the rails if you don't know accounting you don't
know if you're getting garbage out of the system that you're putting in and
you need to be able to understand what the challenges are for the clients you
need to unlike speak their language understand their industry everything
else so that you can understand their challenges so you can help them
troubleshoot answers and come up with a process that's going to help them move
forward in like a real helpful efficient profitable way you know so I think these
are all the skills that I think are really lacking in our industry that we
need to focus on and I think it's really why there's a people shortage I think
that developing a team of people who can actually offer these types of qualities
to their client which is what they are looking for and what they need I think
that takes years to develop and I think that finding somebody who already has
these skills it's like looking for a needle in a haystack and and that's why
it's such a challenge for small accounting firms that old factory model
is all about automation and standardization and I think that's
critical to becoming an effective firm but once you have everything automated
and you have everything standardized and everything is humming along then what's
left the only thing that's left is the human element and that's what we need so
I guess that's it for today I hope you liked my video if you did please like
comment and share if you haven't already please subscribe and I'll catch you
later