Programming will make you do more meaningful jobs
Published in · 5 min read · Mar 8, 2020
HelI believe that accountants should learn how to code. There’s a lot of reasons to do it and a quick Google search will give you tons of result.
But why accountants are great fit for programming in the first place?
There are of course other professions out there but we accountants are better positioned to take advantage of programming in our work.
Here are the reasons why I think we are a great fit to learn programming.
Accountants are exposed to data in their everyday work. We manipulate, transform, do computations, store and share data.
For years, Excel has been the go-to tool of us accountants in doing our work. But with today’s volume and speed of data, new tools have appeared in order to process these. And most of them require knowledge of programming.
Learning to program allows us to use these new tools and provide new insights to the organization.
I’m gonna make a bold statement.
All apps are just supercharged spreadsheets.
They are basically workarounds to the limitation of the traditional spreadsheets that we know of.
How do we use spreadsheets? — We usually put data in them, manipulate them, and store the results.
But they have limitations — not so aesthetic, data can be corrupted, duplicate data, invalid data, not so secure, etc.
So we solve these limitations by separating data, logic, and presentation.
In other words, we accountants are one step away from creating or understanding any app as we have knowledge of the problems that are commonly solved by these apps.
The accounting field is abundant with repetitive tasks like inputting invoices in the system, updating customer information in practice management software, calculating tax, etc.
And with the technological advances, most of them can now be automated, freeing our time and allowing us to focus on more value-added tasks — and thus continue being relevant in today’s world.
Accounting is a disciplined profession. You have to get the numbers right otherwise you risk misleading your stakeholders with false information.
Patience and attention to detail are practiced in each phase of accounting — from inputting the transactions to the accounting system, making adjustments, and creating financial reports.
Any accountant can relate to the experience of auditing your spreadsheet because numbers are not making sense — only to find out that you use the wrong cell reference in your formula.
The same is true with programming. Anyone with programming experience may relate to coding for hours but finding a bug when you run the program — only to find out that you use = instead of == somewhere in your code.
If you think about it — debugging is just the equivalent of auditing your spreadsheet — only it applies now to your script.
Nowadays, there’s a lot of hype about data science and business intelligence.
But we accountants already know these two even before the terms became popular. We call it management accounting.
Management accounting is simply the branch of accounting that focuses on providing relevant information to the management for decision making.
This goes beyond the conventional financial data and may involve data such as customer churn, inventory lead time, etc. — any data to use for business decision making.
The difference is that today’s technology allows these data to be collected and processed in larger amounts at a faster phase.
We accountants are the original “data analyst” of every organization and we’ll continue to be such if we adapt and learn to program.
Programming is a tool to solve problems. It’s a means to an end. Hence, to program well, you have to define first the problem being solved.
That’s where domain knowledge comes in. Accountants know the areas needing improvement and where programming can help.
We also have an idea on how to measure the benefits of any software solutions and its ultimate effect on the bottom line.
There’s no better time than now to learn to program. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right away — any programmer has been there. The important thing is you start.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
- Chinese Proverb
I hope that this article should serve as an encouragement for you to learn to program. It is a must-have tool in your toolbox.
Programming is a liberating experience — it will free up your time to tackle more meaningful work.
Checkout on my article on which programming language I recommend you learn first if you’re an accountant here. Hint: It is not Python.
Check out also my book on Gumroad, Leanpub, or Amazon to get started in programming.
