Accountancy Age speaks to Martin Naraschewski, global head of line of business finance at SAP about how future disruptive technology will impact accountancy careers as part of the technology and accounting series Accountancy Age’s new series sources expert analysis to take a look at how technology is impacting the accountancy industry now and how it will continue to disrupt it in the future. Martin Naraschewski, global head of line of business finance at SAP, spoke to us about how jobs in accountancy are altering as technology grows, changes, and disrupts our world. 1. There’s this worry of robots taking over jobs. What would you say to someone who is concerned? One thing to remember is that we have had automation already for years, and if you look outside of IT, it’s much longer. Ultimately, if you look back, it has improved conditions for a lot of people. Yes it may have abolished certain jobs but it has also created a lot of new jobs. The media are sometimes altering the story. If you take developments in predictive forecasting, technology has made the whole system better but it has not taken away the need for jobs that are currently there. It does the mundane administrative work but it isn’t replacing people. This is the same when it comes to the identification of business trends. It’s very likely that it will actually create a much more significant need for people with an analytical mind such as data scientists to really do the necessary analysis and not just put numbers together. So from that perspective I don’t think AI is abolishing jobs it’s just creating richer opportunities for better jobs and for more effective jobs. There is clearly tension when we talk about full process automation that certain transactional jobs will be replaced. But a lot of the benefit of machine learning is to make things more flexible. When it comes to new systems, yes there is more productivity at the end helping people to do their job faster but it is also teaching people to do their job better. Even in the expert jobs there is still a lot of mundane tasks, like getting the right information together before a decision is made and this is not allowing the expert to spend more time on what they are good at in terms of making the right decisions and doing complex metrics. It’s helping to make the right people more effective. We are seeing a shortage of high talent in the finance industry and so time management is a big topic and new tools are allowing organisations to leverage the talent they do have. 2. What new skills do you think an accountant needs now to succeed in the job compared with in the past? I think the classic accountant is spending less time on working with systems, so their jobs have been made richer and better because they can focus on what they are doing to grow the business instead of working out different systems. The change is probably less in classic, financial accounting but more on the side of financial analysis and managerial accounting. It will be shifting from getting the numbers out of the system in an error-free way into PowerPoint into really doing something meaningful with these numbers, becoming a business partner and advising the counterparts in the business. So that may be understanding drivers, reviewing trends, and coming to conclusions. Also there’s the interpersonal skills. It’s about not just working with the numbers but working with the people on the business side. There are loads of opportunities for data scientists, mathematicians, people with a statistics background, who can really help with building models that do automation or better prediction and are then being used again by the managerial accountants to do more of the business side. 3. How do you think AI is disrupting the accounting industry now and how will it in the future? Like many disruptive changes, it’s starting now and it will take its time to fully come to fruition. There is a learning curve that the industry will have to go through. It will take some time, we will find that some problems will lend themselves better to the algorithms we have today, and the algorithms are getting better all the time. So from that perspective it will take time but it’s clearly starting and companies that are early in kicking off will get a competitive advantage – it’s better to be early. 4. Do you think a major priority for businesses is teaching their accountants – is a skills shortage a worry? The skills shortage is definitely a worry, there is definitely a shortage of data scientists. People don’t know how to apply these algorithms. So far we are not yet in the stage which is about rapid education for everyone in the company, it’s about finding the right use cases for a pilot and early education and then the right people with the expertise on dealing with the emerging software built in. Companies need to start experimenting and finding, in a very focused way, how to address a certain problem, testing it, and bringing it to a maturity, before going to the next problem. 5. Do you think productivity is an issue? Could businesses be more productive and use automation tools better, and how? In finance there are many opportunities to improve automation which has multiple benefits, including cost, less room for human error, and time saving. So there are definitely pros of automation that go beyond the pure cost saving aspects. The main challenges is the complexity of many organisations to automate them efficiently. So the potential is clearly there but how to capture the potential we believe that ideally will be a more heterogeneous approach, more of a portfolio of automation rather than just machine learning and robotics. 6. Can you sum up how you think technology will impact accountancy over the next few years? Accountancy per se, just like the role of the CFO, is not going to change. The challenges are the same, the objectives are the same and so, at the end of the day, it’s fundamentally not going to change. What will change is that the role of the accountant will be much less about getting numbers together and instead about evolving the entire system. One aspect of digital we are seeing is that everything is getting faster and more disruptive, and so accounting must adapt more quickly to changing business processes and so it’s getting more complex and business models are getting more detailed. The move towards digital businesses will create more complexity for accountants. Better systems are giving accountants more time to tackle what is complex decision-making and transactions rather than spending time on what I call mundane activities, which will increasingly be taken over by the systems. 7. What do aspiring CFO’s need to focus on? You need to be able to interact with the business in the right way and be helpful to the business in the sense of the business partnership. From a finance perspective, CFOs need to move closer to finance roles, we see a lot of CFOs having strategy functions under them, and on the other side the CFO is becoming a master of the number systems, including IT systems and finance systems. They are often also getting closer to becoming a chief information officer in the literal sense, providing analysis, which is why more CIOs are reporting to CFOs. The number of challenges are getting broader, from getting closer to the IT systems to getting closer to the business. Author Lucy Skoulding Date published November 6, 2018

Details on the potential of blockchain, its implications for auditors, how the accountancy profession can lead and what skills are necessary for the future. The potential of blockchain Blockchain and the future of accountancy IT Faculty's report on Blockchain describes the technology and its likely impact on business, in particular on the accounting profession. Download now Blockchain is an accounting technology. It is concerned with the transfer of ownership of assets, and maintaining a ledger of accurate financial information. The accounting profession is broadly concerned with the measurement and communication of financial information, and the analysis of said information. Much of the profession is concerned with ascertaining or measuring rights and obligations over property, or planning how to best allocate financial resources. For accountants, using blockchain provides clarity over ownership of assets and existence of obligations, and could dramatically improve efficiency. Blockchain has the potential to enhance the accounting profession by reducing the costs of maintaining and reconciling ledgers, and providing absolute certainty over the ownership and history of assets. Blockchain could help accountants gain clarity over the available resources and obligations of their organisations, and also free up resources to concentrate on planning and valuation, rather than recordkeeping. Alongside other automation trends such as machine learning, blockchain will lead to more and more transactional-level accounting being done – but not by accountants. Instead, successful accountants will be those that work on assessing the real economic interpretation of blockchain records, marrying the record to economic reality and valuation. For example, blockchain might make the existence of a debtor certain, but its recoverable value and economic worth are still debateable. And an asset’s ownership might be verifiable by blockchain records, but its condition, location and true worth will still need to be assured. By eliminating reconciliations and providing certainty over transaction history, blockchain could also allow for increases in the scope of accounting, bringing more areas into consideration that are presently deemed too difficult or unreliable to measure, such as the value of the data that a company holds. Blockchain is a replacement for bookkeeping and reconciliation work. This could threaten the work of accountants in those areas, while adding strength to those focused on providing value elsewhere. For example, in due diligence in mergers and acquisitions, distributed consensus over key figures allows more time to be spent on judgemental areas and advice, and an overall faster process. Implications of blockchain for auditors Blockchain has applications in external audit. Performing confirmations of a company’s financial status would be less necessary if some or all of the transactions that underlie that status are visible on blockchains. This proposal would mean a profound change in the way that audits work. Ablockchain solution, when combined with appropriate data analytics, could help with the transactional level assertions involved in an audit, and the auditor’s skills would be better spent considering higher-level questions. For example, auditing is not just checking the detail of whom a transaction was between and the monetary amount, but also how it is recorded and classified. If a transaction credits cash, is this outflow due to cost of sales or expenses, or is it paying a creditor, or creating an asset? These judgemental elements often require context that is not available to the general public, but instead require knowledge of the business, and with blockchain in place, the auditor will have more time to focus on these questions. How the profession can lead with blockchain The move to a financial system with a significant blockchain element offers many opportunities for the accountancy profession. Accountants are seen as experts in record keeping, application of complex rules, business logic and standards setting. They have the opportunity to guide and influence how blockchain is embedded and used in the future, and to develop blockchain-led solutions and services. To become truly an integral part of the financial system, blockchain must be developed, standardised and optimised. This process is likely to take many years – it has already been nine years since bitcoin began operating and there is much work still to be done. There are many blockchain applications and start-ups in this field, but there are very few that are beyond the proof of concept or pilot study stage. Accountants are already participating in the research, but there is more for the profession to do. Crafting regulation and standards to cover blockchain will be no small challenge, and leading accountancy firms and bodies can bring their expertise to that work. Accountants can also work as advisers to companies considering joining blockchains themselves, providing advice on weighing the costs and advantages of the new system. Accountants’ mix of business and financial nous will position them as key advisers to companies approaching these new technologies looking for opportunity. Skills for the future The parts of accounting concerned with transactional assurance and carrying out transfer of property rights will be transformed by blockchain and smart contract approaches. The reduction in the need for reconciliation and dispute management, combined with the increased certainty around rights and obligations, will allow greater focus on how to account for and consider the transactions, and enable an expansion in what areas can be accounted for. Many current-day accounting department processes can be optimised through blockchain and other modern technologies, such as data analytics or machine learning; this will increase the efficiency and value of the accounting function. As a result of the above, the spectrum of skills represented in accounting will change. Some work such as reconciliations and provenance assurance will be reduced or eliminated, while other areas such as technology, advisory, and other value-adding activities will expand.To properly audit a company with significant blockchain-based transactions, the focus of the auditor will shift. There is little need to confirm the accuracy or existence of blockchain transactions with external sources, but there is still plenty of attention to pay to how those transactions are recorded and recognised in the financial statements, and how judgemental elements such as valuations are decided. In the long term, more and more records could move onto blockchains, and auditors and regulators with access would be able to check transactions in real time and with certainty over the provenance of those transactions. Accountants will not need to be engineers with detailed knowledge of how blockchain works. But they will need to know how to advise on blockchain adoption and consider the impact of blockchain on their businesses and clients. They also need to be able to act as the bridge, having informed conversations with both technologists and business stakeholders. Accountants’ skills will need to expand to include an understanding of the principle features and functions of blockchain – for example, blockchain already appears on the syllabus for ICAEW’s ACA qualification. Author -