I like change. Change it back to the way it was please.

I think many people today have this attitude to change. Let’s go back to the good old days. When products were built to last more than just a year or two before being thrown away. When people were nice to each other and we never locked our front doors.

But change has been a constant in our lives yet for some reason we seem to think that AI and machine learning is disrupting our lives more than before. I am not so sure about that. The railroad was disruptive to barge men on the canals. The motor car was disruptive to people who rode horses. The telephone was disruptive to the postal service. The mobile phone is disruptive to the landline.

I suppose the big difference is that these disruptions came over time. Perhaps many years to have their full impact. Today things seem to be changing constantly. By the time we have gulped and thought ok let’s get used to this new thing it’s changed again.

For accountants struggling with change the whole idea that AI is doing so much of the bookkeeping for them that they may not have a job in the future has left them paralysed. Perhaps this is why they have not been telling their clients about Making Tax Digital and preparing them for the digital filing of VAT returns from April 2019 and quarterly reporting from April 2020.

Seriously guys this is not far away and business owners need to be switching to cloud accounting now because if you wait until just before the deadlines you may as well accept the chaos and confusion which will result. The ill prepared accountant will not be able to support their business clients because they will have so many of them demanding attention. Plus unless they are themselves trained and prepared they will not be able to use the software either. The expression “blind leading the blind” pops to mind.

It would appear a relatively few number of accountants are truly prepared for Making Tax Digital which is just appalling given that HMRC announced this back in December 2015. Although we had been using cloud accounting for a few years already by that time it was not a popular option for our clients so we still knew we had a massive task ahead of us to convert the remainder of our clients across to a cloud digital solution. So we started in February 2016 with a massive program of training for our team and informing our clients of what needed to happen. We set monthly targets to transition our clients to make sure we didn’t miss anyone and although I admit not everyone of our clients are ready yet, the vast majority are, enabling us to focus on adding Apps to our clients’ systems to improve efficiency and grow their profits.   Those who are ready are also benefiting from knowing their potential tax liabilities every single month and the tax planning that this enables us to do. They are also seeing growth in profits because we can help them make better decisions based upon real time information.

So we do not fear that AI is reducing our bookkeeping work because with our knowledge and experience we can offer a much more valuable level of support to our clients.