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Changing role of accountants in the digital age

27 Mar 2014

Traditionally accountancy played a fundamental role in facilitating tax compliancy, financial reporting and management of accounts - whether it is a blue chip corporate or a small business. Today, in the digital age, most of the compliancy, account management and reporting have been digitalised and the accountant's role in business has shifted.

Changing role of accountants in the digital age

Any astute business leader wants regular input from their accountant - not just profit and loss. They want reporting as well as advice on how to grow their enterprise, how to increase sales, speed up internal processes, reduce overheads, expand into new markets. They want to be able to make quick decisions such as ordering another shipment of stock, hiring more employees, investing in a new product, CAPEX spending, or expanding their premises.

"The role of accountants has become more important to general society, and the focus is on social value opposed to just reporting on profit and loss," says Karen Smal, acting head of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) South Africa. This reference to value in a wider sense contributes to society in some way whether economically, socially or environmentally. In February 2014, the ACCA released a report dealing with social change in accountancy, titled 'Creating value through governance - towards a new accountability'.

Creating value

The report looks at what causes economic growth and at the nature of money and debt, it researches how companies create value and find that some activities - which may be very profitable - do not create value so much as extract or transfer value from somewhere else. The report encourages a proposed accountability framework based on performing, informing and holding to account which can be used to assess and to improve corporate and social governance.

The digital age is allowing the opportunity to evolve, to become role players and social changers. Digitalised accountancy processes allow accountants to focus more time and energy on company growth strategies opposed to bean counting. Ethics, good governance and social upliftment will become a key component of the accountant. In South Africa, where social change is vital in the success of business and government, the evolving accountant will flourish.

To request a copy of the report, contact ACCA South Africa on 0860 021010.