accounting professional – Page 21 – Cooper Mann Consulting

Building Smarter Businesses: Staying Relevant in a Cloud Accounting World

They are pretty interesting commercials, and they get you thinking. You know what I mean: those IBM commercials about developing models for the prediction of traffic conditions in Singapore, and “infusing intelligence into the systems and processes that make the world work”. What they’re saying makes sense, but most business owners would likely say that it addresses bigger issues and doesn’t really speak to them.

The Wikipedia entry on Smarter Planet is introduced as “a corporate initiative [which] seeks to highlight how forward-thinking leaders in business, government and civil society around the world are capturing the potential of smarter systems to achieve economic growth, near-term efficiency, sustainable development and societal progress”. You see, the ability to leverage technology to collect data and analyze that data in real time can make a huge difference, whether it is in a small business or a global system. With an intelligent approach to enabling the enterprise, we can build smarter businesses and introduce new relevance for accounting and finance professional involved with them.

“Together, we have to consciously infuse intelligence into our decision-making and management systems, not just infuse our processes with more speed and capacity . . . We are moving into the age of the globally integrated and intelligent economy, society and planet. The question is, what will we do with that?” IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano

Our software and systems have reached the point where data collection and raw business intelligence is being gathered in real time by businesses small and large. This new world of information management is no longer focusing on paper-based systems or business process automation; this is the world of real time information, big data and analysis.

For accounting and finance professionals, this is your time. Accounting is not simply the final dumping ground for after-the-fact financial data; it is the department responsible for turning collected data into actionable information. Data is just data, but information is power.

Information management and computing paradigms are shifting, and for accounting and finance professionals, the solution to the relevance problem is quite simple: shift your thinking of what accounting and finance is, and use it to your advantage.

The competitive landscape for businesses of all kinds is changing along with the progress and adoption of technology. Accounting professionals in particular should be paying close attention to what’s happening out there, and learning to use the tools which will help them find the patterns and trends in the system which can help to forecast more accurately – coming closer to having that crystal ball than ever before.

Whether the attention is on small business or large enterprise, accounting professionals and information management specialists need to work together, and use the cloud and connected technologies to help achieve the benefits of growth, efficiency, sustainable development and progress envisioned by the Smarter Planet initiative.

Make Sense?

It’s not my father’s accounting firm any more.

Nobody’s bringing in paper forms and shoeboxes full of stuff, or plastic tubs full of paperwork, and we’re not trotting off to the bank to pick up a lot of bank statements, and we’re not manually reconciling checks and that sort of thing anymore. It’s not like my father’s accounting firm any more. We’re beyond that.

You’ve got to be, maybe, 50 plus years old to remember what it was like to do things with the old computers, the batch processes… or before that, when everything was done with paper forms, and almost everything was done completely manually. Even with computers, you had to re write-up the check register, you actually had to write-up all the information, so you could input it into the computer and come up with a trial balance, and then do the rest of the work from there.

But anybody who’s maybe 55 or less (you see a focus on these people in a lot of technology awards programs – like the 40 under 40 and those sorts of things)… these are the guys that look at network and running the programs on your local computer as being the “old” way, and these are the guys that have adopted the technologies and work with the clients who demand the capabilities that these technologies can afford. These people are more competitive, they’re more agile, they produce a higher quality of service to the client, and at the same time they’ve been able to leverage these technologies to increase the efficiency of the practice to the point where they’re not working harder, they’re working smarter.

They’re taking advantage of the fact that the technology does a lot of the work and the mechanical processing, allowing the professional to really use the talents and skills they’ve developed in providing insight and guidance to their client businesses. And it is these people who have adopted the technology and who have adopted the way of thinking that’s going to allow them to continue to be more relevant and more important, more critical, to their client businesses, and to the market in general, on an ongoing basis… because these people know that there’s no fear and loathing in accounting.

These people know that accounting is exciting

Accounting is every aspect of the business. Accounting is process automation, it is data collection and control, it is business analysis. Accounting in today’s cloud economy is a cornerstone of making the most of every asset and every resource and every capability that the business has. It starts with the professional practice, and once the professional practice adopts this mindset and this way of approaching business, then the mindset will flow down to the clients, and the professional practice will be in a position to grow the small business clients into midmarket clients and into enterprise clients and beyond.

Make Sense?

What’s up with the bunny feet? Well, it’s all about the bunnies. You know… like being able to work when and where it’s right for you; being able to work from home or on the road or on vacation – or at the office if you really have to. But mostly it’s about mobility and access and being able to work in your bunny slippers.

Just remember: they can’t see your feet on a conference call 🙂