The evolution of accountancy in a digital age

Garreth Hanley:
This is INTHEBLACK, a leadership strategy and business podcast brought to you by CPA Australia. Hello and welcome to another episode of INTHEBLACK Career Hacks. In this series, we bring you the latest strategies and tips to help you supercharge your career. Today, we are speaking to Guy Ioppolo FCPA.

Guy is a member of CPA Australia's Digital Transformation Centre of Excellence, and he's a managing partner at business software consultancy group, Ioppolo & Associates. Guy has 35 years’ experience working with software and technology that improves business operations and outcomes. In this episode of Career Hacks, we talk to Guy about the potential impacts of AI, the benefits of building skills beyond the Excel spreadsheet and how accounting skills can easily transfer to other roles. Welcome to INTHEBLACK, Guy.

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
Thanks, Garreth.

Garreth Hanley:
Now, Guy, you advise on business software for a range of organisations. Can you give us a brief overview of what you do?

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
Sure. We started out life in business back in 1996. We started out as an Oracle partner, implementing budgeting and planning, data warehousing, and their suite of business intelligence solutions, predominantly for large enterprises, and we still do that. Through client interactions, over the early years what we observed was that small to medium enterprises had pretty much the same needs as their bigger brothers and sisters, but there was very little on offer for them in that space at the right price point.

So, about 10 years ago, we decided that this area might be a good space for us where we can take some of our big enterprise know-how and apply it in the small to medium enterprise segment of the market. Over the years, we have also added additional components to our solutions offerings, which includes robotics process automation, enterprise resource planning, payroll, time and attendance. And our aim is as much as possible to be a one-stop solution stop for our clients with the focus being on business outcomes.

Garreth Hanley:
And do you still focus on the small to medium size?

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
Yeah, we do. In fact, that's a growing part of our business. We still have the larger enterprise work that we do, but we're finding that there is an insatiable demand for what we do in the mid-market.

Garreth Hanley:
That might lead us into our next question, accountants, and I guess the small and mid-size accountants particularly, their love for Excel cannot be understated. But is there a danger or career risk if accountants do settle on Excel and don't lean into new technologies?

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
Look, I think Excel is an extremely powerful and useful tool. And we in fact, have integrated aspects of Excel into some of our solutions because we do a bit of product development in that mid-market space to accommodate the price points that the mid-market can afford. And the reason we do that is everyone knows that, to a certain degree, it is intuitive that it's got powerful reporting and analytic features and it can produce outcomes for you very quickly, compared to a lot of the higher-end solutions that are out there. I mean the higher-end solutions are ultimately better in lots of ways, but they often require a lot more setup and that tends to deter a lot of people and organisations, But it does have its limitations.

I'm not going to dwell on this because it's a topic that a lot of others have covered really well. However, at a high level, Excel is not meant to be a data store, but a lot of people use it as one. So, you end up with all these islands of data all over the place and duplication of numbers across different spreadsheets that don't match up, all that sort of stuff. It doesn't work well in the distributed use cases and everyone knows that spreadsheets are prone to error, particularly as you increase the complexity of the spreadsheets. And then, the big one that we find really often is the key man risk associated with it. Some of these spreadsheets are monsters and you've got people that have developed them, and they're the only ones that can go anywhere near them.

So, most accountants love their Excel, but I've encountered many instances where Excel has been used in place of more suitable systems. There is a perception out there that Excel is a cost-effective solution for solving many of these business problems. However, when you add up the time people spend producing these spreadsheets and the cost of spreadsheet errors, this is not necessarily the case. I think an accountant's time would be better spent analysing data rather than producing the data. However, the reverse is often the case. Numbers often get produced and sent off to decision makers without the recommendations that come from the analysis of those numbers, which is often far more important for a decision maker than the numbers themselves. I think that historically there's been a general lack of awareness of new technologies amongst the accounting community, but I think that's starting to change in recent times.

And I refer to recent INTHEBLACK editions where there's been a big focus on technology as an example. Having said that, I have dealt with a lot of accountants in the normal course of doing business and I often find myself, for example, explaining to them what ERP stands for. Human resources are a rare and valuable commodity, especially in the context of a small to medium enterprise. Business owners would prefer that their resources be deployed fulfilling high value-add functions and not fulfilling data entry functions or spending their time creating spreadsheets that are necessary to glue the business workflows together.

Business owners are not necessarily going to know that there are solutions out there that automate the business's end-to-end workflows, store information securely and logically, and help them to save on manpower, nor are business owner is going to be aware that there is technology out there that can automate repetitive data entry processes for them. These owners often rely on their accountants to at least make them aware of these technologies, but what they often get is a myriad of spreadsheets produced by the accountant to fulfil these business requirements.

Garreth Hanley:
Sounds like there's a lot of inefficiencies that accountants might be able to help businesses with just by changing technologies. So, what are the technologies that... I mean you touched on ERP then, but are there other technologies as well that are in demand or that should be in demand?

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
Sure. I've alluded to some of them, as you have pointed out in my previous answer, but many small to medium enterprises out there use bespoke systems for many of their business functions. There are some very useful CRM applications out there. There are also inventory systems, accounting packages, field services applications, document management systems, and e-commerce portals out there to name a few. Whilst these systems are very useful in their own right, they often don't talk to each other.

There are processes or workflows inherent in every business, and these systems are key stepping stones of these processes. What many businesses do, often through their accountants, is create spreadsheets to link all of these bespoke systems together. An ERP, which is what I mentioned previously on the other hand, combines the functionality of these bespoke systems into one integrated application. They typically have, for example, CRM, inventory, sales, purchasing, accounting, all the things that I mentioned in my previous answer and all built into one integrated application.

So, what this means is that your processes or workflows become fully automated from the inception of a transaction through to its conclusion, often without the need of creating a single spreadsheet along the way. All of the relevant information is stored in its rightful place, rather than in islands of data, sitting in spreadsheets, and it's at each step of the workflow. They give you the ability to add additional supporting information pertaining to an individual transaction as well. Some of them log user activity, who did what and when. And they also facilitate rich reporting because all of your data is stored in one centralised database that can be easily accessed.

And then, if you find reporting out of an ERP inadequate, then you have your business intelligence tools, which is just another step up from the sort of features that ERP delivers in that space. And these tools are a powerful reporting tools that can leverage, amongst other things, the rich data that is captured in an ERP. The features of these types of tools help you to surface insights which may not be immediately obvious when you are looking at your data. And then, when you're looking at your data in the context of the ERP, it tends to be in silos at that phase or in that part of the ERP system.

Whereas what BI tools do for you is they allow you to bring it together across the various functions that you might be looking at. They also allow you to combine and report data from different sources and come with features such as drill down, rotate, traffic lighting. And what this does is it facilitates the creation of intuitive dashboards and reports that are much better placed for focusing on decision making. The next thing I'll cover is the whole area of AI and robotics process automation. When people think of AI, they think of solutions like ChatGPT, Gemini, Siri and Google Assistant.

If you unpack this thing that they call AI and look under the hood, what you actually will find is a big ecosystem of elements and enablers. Some of these elements and enablers include things like the actual data itself, algorithms, machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, expert systems, APIs, quantum computing, large language models, and there's probably a few I haven't thrown you to the mix there. You could perhaps run a podcast on each of these in their own right, so I'm not going to dwell on them today, but I will give you an example of one of these areas, which is the whole robotics process automation area.

And what this does is it allows you to automate tedious, repetitive, time-consuming tasks, so that you can deploy your valuable human resources to higher-level duties, rather than having them sit there doing data entry. So, if you like, robotics process automation, or RPA as it's referred to in the market, provides you with the hands and feet. And what AI does on the other hand is it provides you with the brains. When you put these together, you can get some really powerful outcomes out of these technologies. Examples of use cases that deploy this combination is the automated entry of vendor bill sourced in varying formats from vendors into a vendor bill module of an ERP, and the automated extraction, interpretation and entry of bill of materials from an AutoCAD set of drawings that then needs to be input into an ERP's bill of materials module. And that's probably as far as I'll go on just giving you a bit of a flavour of some of the technologies that are out there today.

Garreth Hanley:
It sounds like there's a lot to choose from out there and I think we'll talk in a little bit about what people can do to start moving down the road of learning new technologies. But before we do, maybe you can explain what some of the benefits are for people who decide to build these technology skills.

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
The first one that I'm going to throw out there is tenure. As I've previously explained, a lot of the traditional accounting functions are being automated now, so you need to shift your mindset away from compilation to interpretation, and how you can add value through the identification, implementation, and adoption of efficiency. Whilst you need to be at least a little tech-savvy, you do not need to be, dare I say it, a propeller-head these days to engage with these types of technologies. Tech companies are designing their solutions for the masses these days.

As an example, a catchphrase of one of the big RPA vendors is, "A robot for every worker," and that is by design because they've built their tech to make it easy for end users who may not be computer programmers to be able to work with their technologies. Another big benefit is going to be your market value. You're likely to be worth significantly more to an employer, current or future, if you have these skills and can demonstrate how you have used them to achieve positive outcomes for businesses that you've worked with. The third thing I'm going to mention is job satisfaction. Playing with a bot, for example, and perhaps a large language model or a combination of the two, it's far more fun than having your nose buried in a myriad of spreadsheets every day.

Jacqueline Blondell:
We hope you're enjoying INTHEBLACK's Career Hacks series. If you are interested in the latest news analysis, policy updates and business insights, you should check out CPA Australia's With Interest podcast. Join us as we dive into the news and delve into the business issues of the day. We talk to thought leaders from across the accounting, finance, strategy, economic and business spectrum, and you get their expert opinions. Now back to INTHEBLACK.

Garreth Hanley:
Does sound like that's going to be a lot more fun for people. I'm wondering what roles and opportunities have you seen open up for accountants who do learn these new types of skills?

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
There are some very clear directions, Garreth. I'll give you a few examples and I'll give you one that's close to my heart. At the moment, we employ accountants in particular roles in this sort of area. As I previously mentioned, our firm offers solutions in the area of RPA, ERP, budgeting and forecasting, data warehousing and business intelligence. We exclusively recruit accountants into business analyst roles to work with our clients and our technical teams. The business analyst role in our organisation is a key role. They're involved from the inception of a project all the way through to the project going live.

The responsibilities of a business analyst in our firm includes spearheading the scoping and requirements gathering by liaising with the client and the technical team, formulating and writing up the proposal documents, getting involved in project management once the job enters the implementation phase, getting involved in coordinating client training as well. By the time the project goes live, the business analyst has become somewhat of a subject matter expert on that particular client's business and maybe referred to also when it comes to support post-implementation. And also, of course, be likely to get involved in future projects phases if they were to occur. And the reason we recruit accountants as business analysts is because they tend to be more business rather than tech-focused.

They tend to understand why certain things need to happen and they perform well at problem solving, how to achieve a business outcome, given the functionality they have at their disposal. Another example is robotics process automation. Becoming a robotics process automation consultant or RPA consultant is another example of where accounts can excel. RPA typically involves a lot of process mapping. Accountants tend to be procedural by nature, so process mapping tends to come natural to them. Once the process mapping is done, building out the robotic steps that mimic these process maps is probably no more difficult than developing a spreadsheet, but a lot of accountants perceive that as a daunting thing to be doing.

The final example I'm going to give you is where I got my opportunity to transition, albeit many years ago, and that is in the field of financial planning. There are many opportunities out there where accountants can get themselves involved with high-end enterprise performance management systems, or EPMs, such as... This world is full of acronyms, but there's another one for you. EPMs such as Oracle Planning and Budgeting, Anaplan and Workday. These are financial modelling packages, budgeting and forecasting packages, et cetera. At the end of the day, instead of creating financial models in a spreadsheet, you are instead using one of these sophisticated applications to fulfil these requirements. It's these types of environments that are often deployed to produce projections for big organisations like airlines, banks and telcos, for example.

In these environments, you're effectively modelling the entire business using algorithms, which at the end of the day are the same as your Excel formulas. It's just that you have a lot more capability at your disposal to do a much better job at it. This stuff is really interesting. And accountants understand financial statements, so the lines that make them up and what the key drivers are to produce projected outcomes for these individual line items is something an accountant understands really well.

Garreth Hanley:
Thanks, Guy. It's almost like shifting from paper ledgers to computers, which happened a long time ago. And there's a march of technology and it allows us to do so much more when it arrives. So, I'm wondering if there are accountants out there who are listening who do want to build their technology skills, do you have any tips for how they can start?

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
Sure. Thanks, Garreth. That's a good question. Look, there's probably lots of things that you can do, but I'll give you one pathway. You're going to have to have some understanding of these technologies and how they can be applied, so some level of training is going to be necessary. So, if you've had your nose stuck in spreadsheets your whole career, the first things you need to do is lift your head a little and look around and start to get your reading up in the areas of some of these technologies. There's lots of online courses out there, many of them are free. A lot of these software vendors put this stuff out there, and the robotics scenario was a good example of that. There's also TAFE, of course, and university training. Universities and TAFE are really starting to step up in this space.

Once you have enough of this knowledge, you can start looking for opportunities in your own workplace that will facilitate business improvement. And then, potentially, once you've identified these opportunities, start applying some of this knowledge. And I've mentioned RPA is a good example of where this approach works. I mean, with RPA, there are the free online courses, as I mentioned. Many of the vendors will provide free access to their software, identify an automation use case in your workplace and go ahead and automate it. Use this as a proof-of-concept to get some business sponsorship, and off you go. Unless you get proactive and get your hands dirty with this stuff and start using it, then siting back is not necessarily a good way to get into this space or waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder.

Garreth Hanley:
It reminds me of the saying that if you want to get somewhere, first thing you need to do is take a step.

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
That's it.

Garreth Hanley:
There are a lot of people out there who aren't taking a step in the technology direction. So, what do you see as the biggest hurdle for accountants when it comes to learning these skills? Is there anything that stands out?

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
Look, for some, it's moving out of their comfort zone. For others, it's simply not what they are cut out for. So, as an example, not every accountant I have recruited as a business analyst has been a success. Some accountants are just not prepared to step outside of that square box that defines a typical public or management accountant. In many cases, you need to have some technical inclination. You need to be comfortable and confident interacting with people. And for some of these roles, you need to be process-centric. You don't need all of these characteristics for each of these roles.

The roles and the requirements vary, so choose what is a best fit for you. But my experience has been with starting life as an accountant myself and interacting with so many accountants over the journey of my career, virtually all accountants have elements of what I've just put out there. It's just a matter of them developing and evolving those skill sets that are not necessarily at the forefront in your current roles.

Garreth Hanley:
Thanks, Guy. And that brings us to the end of today's show. Thanks so much for joining us.

Guy Ioppolo FCPA:
Thank you, Garreth.

Garreth Hanley:
And thank you for listening to INTHEBLACK Career Hacks. If you're looking for more great career content, please check the show notes for links to CPA Australia's resources. If you've enjoyed this episode, help others discover INTHEBLACK by leaving us a review and sharing this episode with colleagues, clients, or anyone else interested in leadership, strategy and business. To find out more about our other podcasts, check out the show notes for this episode. And we hope you can join us again next time for another episode of INTHEBLACK.