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"position of strength". I'm in awe to know how not having the up to date technology can make you give out of date advice.
Answer the question and stop waffling, Trent.
Sorry Trent you look nothing like Hugh Jackman more like Alf Stewart with hair (joke).
"Waffling" is the art of saying the same thing but in a different format. You can't go into politics or sales without having "the art". What you said was that you can't give good advice if you're not up to date with technology. Or as you have just changed it to "real time information". "Cobblers", with experience comes the ability to advise. Technology in Accounting is only there to allow you to give that advise slightly quicker (perhaps).
You certainly have more hair. Now if you used modern technology you could actually look like Hugh Jackman or Kylie (whatever your preference).
"It’s not your country or the amount of cloud accounting subscriptions sold in your region that determine how progressive your business is or will be. It’s the choices you’ve made for your clients, your team and your infrastructure."
Great comment Trent. UK accountants can be up there with the best. In my experience, I've found that the Australian mindset seems to mean an earlier adoption of ideas and a more relaxed approach to change but, here in the UK, once we are onboard, we embrace development with a passion.
Your first paragraph is spot on. However your second indicates that the reason we are not up there with the best is because we are too slow to embrace change. Well I'm sure we are up there with the best because we are cautious about change, especially when it doesn't appear safe, as has been proved with "the cloud" many times.
Quite honestly I can't see the point in this article.
I thought I had fallen, somehow, into a black hole type time warp... and, by mistake, somehow, migrated into a typical 1980s motivational rah rah spiel!
Now what on earth is "Real Time Advice"???
"We eliminate debtors and automate your invoicing through our digital proposal and engagement letter builder solution. "
Eh???
Eliminate debtors, eh. Well, the old "Day Sales Outstanding" metric, which dates back to the 1970s, allows any operation to measure its absolute penalty cost for running a sales ledger, badly.
Seems to me, ignoring all the BS ersatz "Management Speak", the writer is conflating Management Accounting with Financial Accounting. In any case, Enterprise Accounting Systems (which are old hat in any case; holistic systems such as SAP, encapsulated EA years ago.), ought to be the Gold Standard; but aren't. Anymore than has been (but very much ought to have been!) Integrated Front-Back Office Systems. Etc...
And, then, of course, we finish up with the Cloud Myth - once again. The Cloud: a combination of the Philosopher's Stone, The Touch of Midas and the Golden Fleece.
I am losing the will to live...
You missed out opening Pandora's box and unleashing what lurks within.
My doubt with the zeal for tech solutions is that the tech, in itself, does little to improve the users' analysis of the data, it merely gives them the data ,possibly sooner than otherwise.
And tech has an alarming ability, as seen on A Web, to reduce individuals' understanding of matters, the reliance on tech seems sometimes to reduce analysis- the machine gives x so it must be correct.
Hands up who is still 100% comfortable doing tax computations without software, I will openly admit that there are odd occasions I need to look at a worked example to determine why a machine gets x tax due, I , like others ,have come to rely on the software most of the time and am far more rusty re this than say twenty years ago.
I see this first hand at work where staff cannot/do not do a sense check with something so trivial as y divided by z, the calculator relied upon has reduced the ability for fast mental arithmetic- if I add up a column of figures with a calculator I tend to have a rough idea of the total as my brain roughly adds as I key in the numbers, not so with most staff these days, they accept rubbish because it comes from the machine.
So embrace tech, fine, but if it leads to less frequent , that does not look right, pauses, as reliance has overtaken critical thought, be very wary of the data.
As an example my son was working on wealth management software for a large bank, whilst writing parts he noticed that the software, re the reports it was to produce, was wrong, the price data being used re securities was being extracted from the incorrect data field and an investor could, on paper ,have bought x thousand AA today and by tonight have a 20% profit on them, this was software being developed by a large team, lots of developers working on it, had seen it,yet none had spotted the obvious flaw until he applied a little commonsense
Well, DJKL, since the earliest days of EDP (Electronic data processing) as it was called and the roll out of IBM Digital Business systems and the archaic, today, System 360 Digital Mainframes, what we used to call Magic Black Box Syndrome has grown and grown. It is the contemporaneous equivalent of The Emperor's New Clothes.
Since few were or are suitably qualified to offer any valid (Technology Based) critique.
As each new Quantum Leap in memory and processing power (Usually expressed as MIPS - Millions of Instructions per Second) has rendered earlier systems and approaches redundant, then hardware and system vendors have proliferated with their product offering Snake Oil! Additionally, young coders and system developers always burn to exploit the latest technologies.
The "Content Rich" websites of today are an excellent exemplar; brain curdling images and interactive drop-downs, pop-ups etc, make users heads spin and are bloody irritating when one simply wishes to carry out a simple task!
The true raison d'être, or if you like, objective has been forgotten, in a blizzard of some spotty faced nerd trying to out-do all the other nerds...
The core problem, of course, is that the executives tasked with commissioning a new mega-billion ICT project, haven't a wee clue about such systems, nor a focused vision of precisely what the desired outcomes should properly be. MTDfb is a wondrous example!
Missing amongst the plethora of Programme Managers and the Project Manager is a rare beast: A Systems Architect (SA): a demanding discipline, since the SA must possess real knowledge and developed skills in the subject area AND the Hardware-Software systems areas, too.
Thus in the final event, the old adage still rules true: G.I.G.O. Garbage In - Garbage Out!
Add the final immutable component: Sales: High Pressure blathering from guys who don't actually REALLY understand the nuts and bolts of their supposed product offering/s, flogging "Solutions" to the gullible, for a "Problem" which actually doesn't really exist!
Add the final immutable component: Sales: High Pressure blathering from guys who don't actually REALLY understand the nuts and bolts of their supposed product offering/s, flogging "Solutions" to the gullible, for a "Problem" which actually doesn't really exist!
I think that's more or less exactly how we ended up with MTD.
I only wish I was joking.