Technology
- How New Tech Can Transform Old Roles
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he advancements in technology and digitisation across all sectors of business have come on tenfold during the last decade. Gone are the days of manual finances, heralding an era of automation, technological advancements, and digitisation. Finance digitisation can revolutionise any finance or accountancy department, and one of its many benefits is that it can transform individual roles. One of the things we have been seeing in recent
years is a sea-change in the types of jobs that are coming to market and the duties they have to perform. After all, jobs such as app designer, blogger or UX designer didn’t exist a few decades ago. Within finance, a similar revolution has taken place. Given this seismic change in job roles and emergence of new finance considerations, it’s worth taking a look at how digitisation can aid finance departments and the wider business. - what is it? What we’re really talking about here is the widespread adoption of technology in finance and in particular web 2.0 and SaaS (Software as a Service) systems. Twenty years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find any company using a system delivered through a web browser with standalone, best-in-class apps. Typically systems would need users who had been specially trained, system man-
agers to keep them up and running and expensive upgrades if you wanted to do anything outside of the standard.
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However, over the past decade or so, SaaS systems have become the norm and now, it is difficult to find businesses that host their own finance software. Solutions now tend to emphasise user-friendliness, integration and more of a participatory culture. So when businesses talk about finance digitisation, they’re really looking at the impactful moments that technologies such as SaaS, Apps, and mobile devices have had on accountancy and the wider business. Technology has not only changed the systems we use, it has also transformed the way many people do their jobs - and finance is a perfect example. Let’s dive deeper into some of the roles that have been forever changed and how these roles could continue to transform in the future as we continue to innovate. The expenses clerk The expense clerk’s role is one that may either exist exactly the same as before or may have disappeared entirely, depending upon the level of finance digitisation a company has committed to. In the 2000s, almost every company was using a paper-based expense process. Some of them may have utilised a ‘fancy’ spreadsheet to send it through to finance, but you can bet that it would have been printed out (with receipts attached) and then manually entered into a finance system and payments processing portal. Still sound familiar? Don’t worry, many companies are still using this method even though there are now technology-based alternatives. In fully digitised finance teams, this role often no longer exists, or has been absorbed into another job role and completed through a dedicated application. In many cases,
