“You cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking back”, as Steve Jobs famously quoted. A key challenge to the accountancy profession, well any profession for that matter, is how to look forward and be more proactive, not constantly looking back and reacting.

The finance professional needs to provide advice and identify trends that will help the commercial performance of the business, rather than spending days trying to unravel what has happened in the past. Traditionally, if you review accountants’ tasks and responsibilities it has been backwards-looking: tax returns, annual report accounts, month-end variance analysis etc., but now, the CFO, accountant, tax adviser, is being challenged by clients and businesses to be more proactive, to be more business focussed, to provide more insight and to be more forward-looking to pre-empt issues rather than purely resolve them.

Today, computers and software have the ability to complete the majority of the backwards-looking tasks and it won’t be long before they can do it in its entirety, such as month-end variance analysis and tax returns, and therefore clients are expecting advice and insight which will improve performance and let computers to do the reconciliations.  

But how do we make this happen, as the above is very management and consultant talk, and in a practical sense requires a change the mindset of accountants?

This is no easy task and is dependent on many things and some things might be out of control of the individual person, but that does not mean we should not start trying. To take advantage of technology, companies need to invest in new technology and usually, back-office systems are not top priority when it comes to capital expenditure, and if computers are going to complete routine and repetitive tasks, then advanced software will be required.

Moreover, if we have all the digital solutions, how do we change people's mindset about their roles when they have been doing something for years and year.  To me, this is a really interesting and practical debate to be had and one which will evolve over the coming years, especially when predictive analytics and artificial intelligence is scaled across organisations.  

Therefore, what does looking forward mean and how do you find the balance, between looking back and forward? 

• Start with small changes, and stop doing out one or two tasks that no longer adds any value to enable more time to start thinking about what the numbers actually mean – be much braver in your approach i.e. if the work you do does not provide any benefit, stop doing it.  
• Start asking commercially focused questions: what does this information mean and will it help improve the commercial performance? 
• Start publicizing insight and ideas at meetings to spark the debate and get feedback from managers and peers on your ideas 
• Leverage the data you have access to and provide data-driven insights to aid any form of decision making 
• Spend a few days a week sitting with your operational / business colleagues to understand what is on their priority list 
• Automate reporting as much as possible and remove as much manual intervention – this work is time-consuming and offers no value 

Thus, to summarize, it is crucial not to get swamped in the detail which can easily happen and to be constantly thinking “what can I improve next?”