Technology is the balancing entry to retain top accountants
By Jeff Ryan, Senior Director of Growth, ERP – UKIA, a Platinum Sage Business Partner
The financial services industry, like many other sectors, is facing a wave of resignations. In South Africa, this phenomenon has resulted in skilled financial services professionals leaving their jobs at an increasing rate, with many seeking better opportunities abroad.
Also, the changing multi-generational workforce is introducing a distinct set of job requirements, where younger, tech-savvy professionals are more likely to accept and demand new technology while being less tolerant of dull, unchallenging work. There is also a demand from top employees for their employers to respect their work-life / work-anywhere requirements.
This perfect storm is causing disruption, which can abruptly halt corporate growth plans.
Retaining skilled accounting team members or human capital has never been more important
The cost of replacing a employee is estimate at about 1/3 of their annual salary. This cost does not include the disruption caused by this turnover in staff. However, accounting automation technology can help.
Accounting automation technology is not only a crucial and effective method for increasing team productivity, but it can also transform the work your finance team does, making their role more stimulating and less likely to respond to the “other” job advert elsewhere.
Accounting automation can be utilized in the following ways to get the most return on human capital investment:
- Use automation to appeal to new accounting hires by making your workplace more contemporary and technologically advanced than other opportunities being considered. Everyone love new technology, particularly younger generations. Learning about predictive analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning will be enticing to many applicants. In addition, this will support budgeting, forecasting, and planning processes, and manual manipulation will become increasingly impractical given the enormous amount of data being produced.
- Automate tedious, routine Excel-based tasks to keep your team happy, engaged, and productive. Automating allocations and consolidations can speed up manual tasks and guarantee timely book closings, freeing your team to take on more strategic work, and complete more work accurately and quickly.
- Use automation to ensure and improve accounting accuracy. For routine projects and initiatives that might not be fully staffed, automation can help ensure accuracy. For example, intelligent general ledgers and error/anomaly detection tools can automate consolidations and automatically remove errors.
Forward-thinking businesses will keep using technology as a differentiator in their search to attract and keep skilled employees as long as the skills crisis exists. While some may use technology to automate repetitive tasks, others will utilise it to enable team members to develop new software and analytics skills.
The time is now for businesses to leapfrog their competitors by investing in technology. In the ideal world, this investment will reduce further headcount requirements, keep top employees happy and get more (automated) insights on what is happening within the business.
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