The fourth part of our Accountancy Revolution definition found on the first post was summarized this way:

“…which will ultimately become digital conduits…”

Here is the full Accountancy Revolution again:

Rapid technological means of data creation and production are allowing the former manual manipulation of raw accounting data to disappear, forcing the profession of accountancy to be redefined towards enhancing and developing internal business processes which will ultimately become digital conduits of paperless productions of varied financial reporting.

Bear with me as I predict the future here, dang it.  We addressed how the “Accountancy Revolution” is changing the practice of accounting into bigger and better types of service.  And we mentioned that ‘no paper’ was part of that future.  In this post, I want to take that just a bit deeper and say that financial statements are one day going to simply be digital conduits to hold digital data flowing smartly into cloud-based accounting software.  Again, accountants won’t be manually manipulating that data, we’ll just be managing the data flows that will be smartly presented in our financial software.

I see two future implications:

1.  Cloud-based software accounting vendors must build smart systems.  And they are.  As the new breed of accountants, we just have to be able to bring these smart systems (and their intuitive APIs) into our customer’s processes and retool their companies to make the best use of the systems.  Thanks to the innovative vendors that are leading the way with smart accounting systems, we can now focus on these digital conduits of data and how they help our customers.  The future is made up of smarter vendors.

2.  Accountants must become experts at manipulating and interpreting these digital conduits of data.  We are already running into systems that don’t talk to each other (even though the vendors are getting smarter and smarter).  We have to be able to walk our customers through attaching these systems as best we can.  At the least, we are having to research and explain how one system should talk to each other.  The future is made up of smarter accountants.

Are you comfortable within digital conduits?  What other implications do you see?  Leave it in the comments.