Catching Up: Trouble Keeping up with Tech? Fix Your Culture.

• Author: Oliver, Blake
• Position: Tech Talk

Why are SO many accounting teams slow to adopt new technology?

According to Accounting Today's 2018 Year Ahead Survey, only 53 percent of firms have implemented cloud-based accounting. Meanwhile, "keeping up with technology" is the top concern for midsized organizations. Compare those figures to a McKinsey study which says that "currently demonstrated" technologies can fully or mostly automate 61 percent of finance activities.

Given those stats, you'd think accounting leaders would be jumping to make their teams as efficient as possible. But they're not.

Why? Blame the culture of public accounting, which often discourages innovation.

Accountants aren't born averse to change. But the nature of our work usually involves doing tilings the same way month after month, quarter after quarter and year after year.

And through the years, one of the traditional first things an accountant fresh out of school learns to do is fill out a timesheet. Whether it's part of a firm's culture or just a product of continuing to do things the same way, timesheets value staff primarily on the basis of hours worked, not creative output.

This focus on time inputs as the primary driver of value can discourage technological innovation for two reasons:

1. The return on investment in new tools and processes takes time. Due to billable hour quotas, any time staff do spend on innovation tends to come out of their own pocket. Therefore staff learn to avoid change.

2. A successful technology implementation increases productivity. You'd think that's a good thing. But if you're focused on billable hours, it's the opposite. Becoming more efficient reduces billable hours since things arc getting done faster. Unfortunately, this has sometimes led to more productive staff seeing even more clients and more difficult work. As long as the focus remains on work inputs over creative outputs, the result will be staff that avoids taking risks. It means that decisions about what tools to use are made at the top without the input of staff. The result is often software that staff doesn't like to use, leading to costly, failed implementations.

   But the problems don't stay confined to CPA firms. Even after leaving public accounting for industry, CPAs continue to value their own work in terms of hours worked (inputs) rather than work product (outputs). It's hard not to when all you've known are timesheets!

   This is why I'm convinced many accountants fail to see the tremendous value in cloud...