The Future of the Accounting Industry
The Clarity leadership team are entrepreneurial accountants who, for the last 11 years, have provided small business owners of all shapes and sizes with a satnav for their business. Whilst there is a lot of change occurring in the accounting industry, and the pace of change is increasing, there are some constants. In their separate firms, all four founders have been at the forefront of the industry’s technological advances and have provided businesses with underlying security amongst the tech evolution.
The majority of small business owners are passionate people and provide a good product, however having never been taught business or financial theory, they do not know exactly where their business is and how they can achieve their objectives.
A satnav alone is not enough. Clients always want to discuss exactly where they are now; the possible destinations they could achieve, and all the pros and cons of the various options they have to get there. The relationship between accounts and business will become ever more key as technology improves and so much more of what is going on in the business becomes visible.
The accounting profession is being disrupted because so much of the generic labour can be automated, outsourced or offshored. People are already employing qualified accountants in the Philippines to reduce costs for clients and using new technologies to automate processes even more.
The biggest players in our industry are QuickBooks and Xero. These two giants are growing their user numbers very fast and have huge reserves of cash to constantly improve their products. Right now, the use of artificial intelligence is primed to be included to accurately post transactions in a company’s books.
Blockchain is a very exciting innovation and we are already seeing the shoots of big and great ideas coming to our industry. For example, Ledgerium is a business creating a “triple-entry” bookkeeping system where transactions between two companies are posted in both their books and a separate single ledger. Another start-up, Evident Proof, is using blockchain to publicly verify the validity of contracts saving huge amounts of confusion and cost in the process.
We ourselves are founders of a blockchain built software platform; The Clarity Project. We’ve received consent from the Jersey Financial Services Commission and are currently raising the money to build our platform and acquire customers through our own digital currency.
This currency is really just a digitally transferable gift voucher for our future services and we already have token holders from all over the world buying CLRTY tokens at a massive discount in comparison to what they will be worth when our platform goes live in Q3 2019. Token holders will either be able to use the tokens themselves, or they will be able to sell them back to our customers through our website at a later date.
So, whilst huge technological advances will cause a “Blockbuster” or “Kodak” style collapse of many accountancy practices, our business model of innovation and embracing of technology means we will be protected and focus on our goal of working with clients through technological change in order to provide an ever better satnav for their business.
