Well, I believe that this Question ‘Should Finance Professionals Learn to Code’ is going to a be a buzzing question for 2022 and beyond among the accounting and auditing professionals as well as students. The need for embracing technology and digitalization will be felt not only for those who are into the Practice for their clients, but also for our other fellow Chartered Accountants who are in employments with the large Corporates across varied Industries.
First, Let’s talk with Facts. So, in February 2015, there was a White Paper released by PWC titled “Data Driven- What students need to succeed in a rapidly changing business world”
In these 25 pager documents, I would want you to focus on Page 17 & 18, where it mentions the utmost need for technical skills in a Graduate Accounting Program. There is a clear mention of the importance of having a basic programming skills like Java & Python and knowledge of Databases like Mongo Db & My SQL. So, this is not just a random article, but being said by a Big 4 accounting firm, back in 2015. I was just so shocked when I first read this…!!
Not only this article, you can find multiple articles by ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountant for England & Wales) & AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) over Google which have highlighted the need for accounting students and professional to have a basic knowledge of programming language, which will not only assist them to manage their spreadsheets in a better way but also to automate most of their mundane tasks.
Now, Let’s Check Practically…Take a Good look around our office, and the tasks which have been assigned or being done by your peer executives and articled assistant. What percentage of the tasks you think are just a Logical (Yes/no), Steps Driven Task, Template filling, Tally Data Entry, Reminder Mails, Making MIS, and what percentage tasks are actually Intellectual and involves a technical analysis / Interpretation of law or Ind AS.
I am pretty sure that in majority of the case, the percentage of the repetitive task will be over 50%. In some case, even over 80%. Anyways, if this percentage, is anywhere even more than 20% in your office, we must stop and seriously rethink on whether these tasks, which we have been doing for so many years manually, are actually required to be done by Humans or we can make use of technology to do these tasks.
It will take time to convince yourself that, this task can be delegated to Computers to be done on their own, but believe me, we are living in a world where majority of the task can easily be automated and delegated to our machines and these machines will do these for us.
Again, Let’s take a very practical example. If the Client has Provided you a Sales Ledger in an Excel Spreadsheet with all the details of Invoices No., Inv Date, Tax Rate, Description, Amount, do you really think that an articled assistant is required to make these entries manually in Tally? Should not such tasks be assigned to computer itself through a program which will pick the data from excel and make the entries in Tally?
Also, Let’s take another very common Example. If you have a purchase register (with GSTIN wise Invoices) and a monthly GSTR2A of the client. So, is it really required that this merging of monthly GSTR2A to be manually done by an article and then he one by one does the reconciliation in excel using some VLOOKUP or PivotTables? Isn’t this reconciliation just a mundane manual task and requires very less or no Human Intellect. A machine is better equipped to do such tasks rather than Humans.
After reading these 2 cases, the very first question that must be cropping out of your mind will be “How do I tell the computer to do these tasks for me??”
(In many cases, it is also possible that your office has purchased some software to do this reconciliation or even make these Tally entries automatically. So, in case you are fully satisfied with the automation you have implemented in your office, then you might not gain much value out of this article)
But, in case your firm doesn’t use any of this software or is not fully satisfied with the level of digitalization that their firm has undergone, then this article will definitely open new and better doors for you to bring the digital revolution in your office without any substantial investment.
Now, coming back to our two tasks examples (Tally entry and GSTR2A Reco), what if I tell you that, it is super easy to make the computer do all these manual tasks for us in fraction of time with much more accuracy than Humans. Yes, you read that right. We can instruct computer to do all these tasks for us and computer will do and give us the output.
Just like, we need to know English / Hindi Language to give command to the office boy in our office, similarly, we need to know the language of computer to give command to the computer.
Once, we are able to learn even a bit of the language of the computer, we can very well give instruction as we want and make the computer do whatever we want it to do.
So, learning this Language of the Computer is Known as Learning to Code. Over the years, Computer has learnt many languages like C, C+, Php, Java, Python, so we can give instructions to the computer using any of these Languages. Now, among all these languages, it is always said to start learning the Python language as this is the simplest to learn among all other languages which a computer understands.
Hence, though we are Finance Professionals and have an expertise on Finance, still we must develop this skill of knowing a computer language so that we can make the computer do the tasks which we want it to do…!!
And to learn this language, you don’t need to compulsorily join any courses. If you are really interested, you can even see many free resources available over YouTube and self-learn this language. Once learnt, you can simply start using this to instruct computers to perform the tasks for you.
But I agree that, learning this is not going to be easy…! It is going to be equally tough as learning French / Spanish. So, how should we go around it? Just like, the best way to learn French language will be to speak French as much as possible and talk with people who speak French. Similarly, the best way to Learn Python Language is to start using the language and to join a community or a group of people who belong to the Finance Domain but have an interest in coding and want to learn it.
There is an existing community which has been working on this domain for some time now named “Efficient Corporates” across many platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora. Also, it has a YouTube Channel with many videos on how automation can be done in the Finance Domain and how the coding language can easily be learnt by the Finance Professionals from the very basics.
So, if you really are looking to become a Finance Professionals who keeps pace with the growing technology and digitalization, this is something which must be on top of your bucket list.
To conclude, I think that the Topic of this Article should be Changed from “Finance Professionals Should Learn Coding?? Seriously??? to Finance Professionals Should Seriously Learn coding…!!
I would love to know your thoughts on this. I am available at [email protected] for anyone wishing to upskill themselves and work towards the greater good…!!
Thank You…!!
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