If prospects go first to Intuit for the bookkeeping, there’s a good chance they’ll never walk in the door of that accounting firm.įinally, while Intuit hasn’t settled on a final scope of services or price point for QuickBooks Live, we can safely assume that it will be under $500 per month (like Bench) and include categorization of transactions, bank reconciliations, financial statement preparation, and a meeting to review the reports. These firms then upsell their bookkeeping clients on a variety of other services. Just having Intuit in the marketplace for bookkeeping services could drive prices downward.Īdditionally, bookkeeping is a basic service that brings clients in the door for many accounting firms. It may prove difficult for accountants and CPAs to differentiate their services and convince clients to pay more for bookkeeping. My biggest concern with Intuit’s move is that by setting the price of QuickBooks Live at $200 per month, they have effectively anchored the price of monthly basic bookkeeping services at a very low price point. But what about owners of accounting firms or bookkeeping services? Challenges for accounting firms offering bookkeeping services That’s good news for accountants working in corporate accounting departments. These tools will allow them to reduce the time they spend on reconciliations so they can focus on higher value activities, such as internal controls, risk management, and strategic projections. Rather than taking away their jobs, automation will make the jobs of highly skilled workers more interesting and flexible.Īt my company, FloQast, we’re working on embedding automation tools into our close management software for financial controllers. That’s good news for accountants, especially since there’s already a shortage of accounting and finance talent. Some of this work can be automated, but not all of it. While traditional bookkeeping is all about recording financial transactions, accounting is about interpreting, classifying, analyzing, reporting, and summarizing financial data. If bookkeepers are going down, should accountants be worried? By mastering cloud accounting technology and getting my CPA, I turned myself from a bookkeeper into what I like to call an “accounting technologist.” It’s a rare set of skills that allows me to write my own ticket. That’s why bookkeepers had better retrain and learn to manage the machines. That’s less than the mean hourly wage of tax preparers nationwide, so it’s not a good barometer of how compensation will shape up for Intuit’s future force of QuickBooks Live bookkeepers. And will the wages be equivalent? It appears that TurboTax Live experts make somewhere between $17 to $22 per hour. Services such as QuickBooks Live will drastically reduce demand for bookkeepers.Įven if Intuit hires thousands or tens of thousands of bookkeepers, it will be only a fraction of the current jobs. I suspect they are vastly underestimating the impact of automation. The BLS only projects a one percent decline in employment for these jobs from 2016 to 2026. That dwarfs the number of QuickBooks ProAdvisors, which is around 50,000. The impact on bookkeepersĪccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 1.7 million “bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks” in the United States in 2016. With its assisted bookkeeping service, Intuit is just filling the gap until the technology can catch up. It’s only a matter of time until artificial intelligence becomes sophisticated enough to do it all. Merriam-Webster defines a bookkeeper as “A person who records the accounts or transactions of a business.” If you aren’t recording those transactions, are you really a bookkeeper? Hence the need for in-house bookkeepers to help them figure out across tens of thousands of small businesses which part of the bookkeeping process to automate next. Their job is to ensure that transactions are posted properly by automated systems.Ĭompanies such as Intuit that have learned to automate many parts of the bookkeeping process know there is still much to be automated, but don’t necessarily know what that is. Now, tech savvy bookkeepers who understand how to integrate applications hardly ever do data entry. Over the past ten years, the development of online accounting software, APIs, bank feeds, and machine learning has gradually reduced the need to “key in” transactions. They still entered transactions one by one, but categorized them in digital ledgers instead of paper. There was still a need to employ bookkeepers - just fewer of them. Quicken and later QuickBooks digitized those books. Thus the term “bookkeeper.” A person who literally “keeps the books.” Prior to accounting software, businesses hired bookkeepers to record all their transactions in paper ledgers.
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