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How about Accountants? Turbo Tax automated many of the individual needs for accountants, and plenty of investing / portfolio management advice can be found onli
by SamuelAdams 8y ago
How about Accountants? Turbo Tax automated many of the individual needs for accountants, and plenty of investing / portfolio management advice can be found online for free. The last big push is for enterprise / business / high net worth individuals to automate their accountants.
It's not to say accountants won't exist at all: we still need them as Subject Matter Experts to make changes to the software. But we won't need huge numbers of them like we do today.
- heartbreak 8y agoI think accounting is probably a bad example of this. TurboTax automates the job of tax preparation, not accounting in general. The national tax prep brands (think HR Block) don’t even hire people with accounting degrees to do their manual tax prep.
- rayiner 8y agoTurboTax can't handle even moderately complicated tax situations without forcing the user to learn about tax law. (E.g. where people live and work in different states, which is not unusual in the northeast.) Nor can they handle the human-facing job of sorting through someone's documents. We pay an accountant about $1,000 a year to do our taxes, and being able to simply forward him a bunch of W-2s and email receipts instead of triaging them myself makes it worth every penny. (Fun fact: even though tax preparation software is more than 25 years old, more than half of people still pay a tax preparer to do their taxes.) There is even less of a basis for thinking you can automate actual corporate accounting with known technology. Contrary to popular belief, that does not involve just applying clear-cut rules to ledger entries, but rather lots of judgment about how real-world transactions should be treated under the accounting guidelines.