Why Are CPAs Tired of "Innovation"?

Despite its positive connotations, the word "innovation" can bring a sense of fatigue and frustration to those in the accounting field. While innovation undoubtedly drives progress and success, it brings with it constant change and challenges. As accountants are responsible for the accuracy and reliability of their work, introducing new processes or tools bring with it risk. If a new tool requires multiple iterations or work-arounds to meet an accountant's needs, the effort becomes a barrier to adoption.

The core cause of this frustration is simple. If CPAs are tired of innovation because they don’t play enough of a role in leading it.

In order for software development to be effective, it needs to be led by someone who fully understands the needs of the users and its use cases. Without this direction, it is far too easy for development projects to drift off focus and completely miss the core objectives needed by the users. This is why software projects are constantly over budget, late and frustrating to initial users.

In order for CPAs to be the drivers of their own innovation and future, we need to span the gap between software development and accounting. We can’t expect a team of software developers to all have accounting experience and knowledge so we need to be the ones that understand the development process. Introducing a CPA that can actually contribute to the development process allows for the core architecture and design of software to consider the current and future needs of the end users. Imagine how much better the software you use on a daily basis could be if you could go back in time and put a CPA on the development team.