I entered the world of accounting by force. It was either that or end up on the streets as my mother made very clear to me in 1971. I’m not numerate by nature but forced myself to understand the rigours of double entry, ending up as a young partner in a provincial firm of accountants by the age of 30.
Prior to, I’d spent my life in industries as diverse as housebuilding, civil engineering, batch manufacture and farming. Throughout that time, numbers meant nothing to me unless I saw them in the context of the business upon which I was reporting/analysing. For me, numbers were a jumble on a page to which I could apply learned theory but which made it impossible for me to interpret in a way that my peers could understand.
When I ended up in practice I was faced with a different problem. For the firm, business performance was all about time and materials yet I knew from other businesses you are always constrained by time and therefore the thing to create is value. To me the time/materials modus was madness. Instead, I sought out clients with real world problems from which I could learn, understand and reinterpret into the numbers they needed for growth, acquisition or tax mitigation.
I was good at it. I had the smallest but the most profitable portfolio. Alongside I put my hand up to both consider and revamp our tech platform. This was 1983 and we used Wang 2200 machines. I ended up nailing network cables to walls, writing IP tables and menus plus macros that generated auto letters for a variety of compliance related admin issues.
10 years on and a bunch of consultancies later I retired from that world, convinced that technology would take business a leap forward, principally through the endeavours of SAP which promised automated processes, a topic with which I was familiar having automated many of the rote processes accountants in practice need to undertake.
Fast forward 28 years and guess what? Most of the accounting fraternity are stuck in that 1993 mentality. Back in that day, we were mostly digitising not automating. NOTHING much has changed yet organisations of all sizes are stuck in that past with no obvious way out.
Most recently I was asked to participate in some work around the future of finance. Having been on the sidelines most of the last year I contacted a couple of trusted colleagues, asking what has changed. I pushed hard on questions that have been unresolved in my mind for 20 plus years.
The response was depressing. On one call, a colleague railed about the inability to incorporate external data into the CFO’s decision making process. On another call, my colleague told me how much his head hurt at the prospect of automating what he thought are simple processes yet which turn out to be horrifically complex.
I said it doesn’t help that he’s using a sack of shit with which to achieve an automated nirvana.
Where to next?
As I said, I’m engaged on a project that hopefully will talk to the future of finance in a meaningful way. But that requires a fundamental rethink BY finance as to its role in the organisation. I’ve always understood that like it or not, everything comes back to a number but unless you have a sense of what those numbers represent then you’re little more than a bean counter that deserves the derision that title generates.
Looking out at my (former) profession I see tremendous opportunity to add value. But…that starts with getting alongside people who do stuff, understanding their dreams, desires and pain points. Then it’s about getting into the processes with a sense of shared authority and finally, going to tech vendors with a laundry list of problems they can surely solve.
That, to me, is the future of finance.
PS - long live ERP…yeah - I said it.