The combination of a fast-evolving regulatory landscape, emerging business trends and relentless technological innovation is changing the way financial data is collected, managed and interpreted. The COVID-19 pandemic spurred many of these changes, resulting in new regulatory and tax concerns, forcing dispersed accounting teams to find new ways to collaborate, and pushing more organizations to consider cloud-based technologies that could help them conduct business as usual from home.
Together, these forces are bringing a seismic shift to the role of the accountant. As the manual, transactional work that accountants have typically done is increasingly automated, accountants are being asked to pair their financial expertise with soft skills such as leadership, as well as the skills needed to extract insight from data analysis
This business guide aims to put the regulatory changes, emerging trends and key technologies contributing to this evolution in context so that accounting professionals and organizations alike can embrace this development and ensure they are supporting their accounting teams’ transition into a more strategic role.