Digital Transformation and the Accounting Industry in 2022

Digital Transformation continues to be a growing topic in today’s age and the fear of several industries seem to think that they are affected by it. As it is true where some industry may be affected, it’s important to understand whether that industry is being affected or if your business strategy is not utilizing the right factors through digital transformation. Accountants today believe that technology will take over their jobs, though this is not the case. There are human elements still needed to conduct accounting tasks that many are not aware of.

Learning how to lead a digital transformation for your people is the number one key to embracing digital transformation into your business. Being able to involve key members of your team to understand the idea of digital transformation turns a mediocre project into a success. The digital world itself can still seem like a gray area for most as technology is a complicated thing. Before looking into the relevancy of the accounting industry to digital transformation, we need to first understand the key steps to making your digital transformation hits the right spot.

Go deep into your business.

When going through the journey of digital transformation in a large scale, you must think about how you’ll be involving your team members. When you think about it carefully, everything you need lies within the inside of your business already, all it needs is a team that can carefully extract the information. Smaller organizations will find it easy to conduct this task as there are fewer people and departments allowing alignment of the company’s vision easier. As opposed to larger corporations with bigger teams in different sectors with the chance of information not being available. All in all, once the information has been located, your team will need to join the dots and paint the full picture to find the best technology solutions that can bring your business up.

Ask yourself “how ready is your team for a digital transformation?”

When you’re looking into digital transformation, understand that you’re transforming the whole business. This means that every team member of the business will have to be aligned and on board with the idea of embracing technology into several sectors or departments of the business. This will allow your team to work together in an efficient manner and see the areas to improve. Without alignment within your team members, you’ll be setting yourself up for complications and issues down the line.

This leads to the point of embracing change as well. Having a successful transformation means that your team members are willing to do whatever it takes and not look back. Once one department embraces digital transformation, all departments must prepare and investigate how they can apply the transition to themselves. 

Communication. Communication. Communication.

This should be an obvious factor as communication, leadership, and ownership results to success in any objective trying to be accomplished. These are the foundations that need to be laid out to the team to understand the direction you’re going to go through. Having the right people with the right information and goals leads to the holy grail.

Now that we understand digital transformation and how you can successfully go through that transition, we can look closely into how the accounting industry is affected. As mentioned, digital transformation will affect all areas of the business, and this puts the fear in several members that their jobs may be on the line.

Mr. Ademola Adebise, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Wema Bank, states that there are still skills required by humans that can be applied. As technology can simply tasks in the accounting field, skills like having an innovative and creative mindset, knowledge of several business models, business reviewing skills, and data reading skills is vital for accounts to be able to operate in the digital economy. To be able to use these skills, accountants need to learn how to adapt to change and seek into the areas that may need these skills and knowledge.

“As the business environment rapidly changes with the business requiring adaptation, the accountant must be able to review business processes and produce effective processes suitable for the new era”, Adebise says. The digital era itself approaches things differently than the traditional era. Understanding business models can assist accounts to understand customer’s businesses and journeys.

Though, embracing digital transformation in the accounting industry is not necessarily a negative impact. When you look into the banking industry, the use of robotics and artificial intelligence drastically simplifies tasks as robots can ease tasks like customer messaging systems on ATMs, for example. Software applications in both computers and phones make work easier for auditors and this can be applied for accounting solutions. Which is why adopting technology can help apply an efficient working manner to the team, but can help cut down costs of governance. 

Pimclick is a digital marketing agency that has gone through and helped others with the process of digital transformation. With a lot of trial and error, we now understand the right strategy that can be implemented to make sure your transition is as smooth as possible. If you would like to know about digital transformation, you can reach out to us by contacting us.