Accountants are actually great at iteration

It’s common to stereotype accountants as resistant to change or stuck in their ways. I have experienced this on both sides, as the person trying to push change and the person being asked to change; change management is hard. I don’t think accountants are bad at change. We just change on longer time horizons than other professions.

If you aren’t familiar with accounting workflows, typically compliance work is done on an annual basis. Sometimes indirect tax and bookkeeping work is more focused on a monthly or quarterly cadence, but by and large accounting work in the tax and audit space is done annually. It would be a mistake to think that every annual engagement is performed the same as last year (as much as accountants like to joke about “SALY”).

Individual annual engagements iterate on an annual basis (shocking!), and the best accountants make updates and time investments now to save time next year. This gives a huge advantage to established practitioners and professionals that have been involved with their clients over longer time horizons (over 5 years). This isn’t looking at a problem greenfield (starting from scratch) and building a solution or process around it; it’s instead a sort of Darwinian evolution. It’s jobs and templates where successive generations evolve to fit the problem. You match a workpaper to fit a client export; you proactively ask for the client support document that gave you trouble in the past upfront so it doesn’t drag you down as you try and wrap things up.

That said - accountants are excellent at iterating. It just happens at a slower cadence than is immediately useful for redesigning jobs from scratch. There is also the headwind of trying to iterate during busy season. Accountants make the adjustment leading into or during an engagement when time is crunched. These processes can also evolve to the point where they become very sticky and hard to break away from. I’ve seen audit working papers that have been carried forward and slightly adjusted each year for nearly 10 years. At that point it’s hard to look at the workpaper big picture and ask “why are we doing this again?”

I think accountants have built really strong slow-twitch change management muscles. Every seasoned accountant I know is excellent at spotting opportunities for improvement while buried in messy client work, making a note for next year or whipping up a fix that will pay dividends down the road. I’d challenge the tech-forward, automation-friendly accountants to spend more time training their fast-twitch muscles. The ones that help you experiment quickly, throw away what isn’t working, and occasionally start from scratch.

I think this is part of why accountants haven’t been particularly quick to adapt to the new capabilities of artificial intelligence. AI is great for greenfield problems; it’s more difficult to stitch it into an existing workflow and expect immediate time savings or accuracy gains unless the foundations of that workflow (clean, organized and standardized data and deliverables) have been solved. So accountants aren’t necessarily resistant to change; they are just used to a different frequency of change that feels jarring to many non-accountants. And increasingly, I think that frequency is becoming a problem.