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Sometimes, I wonder where I fit on the career spectrum. I am trained as a CPA and 90% of my daily work involves accounting in some form. However, I am also a programmer who geeks out when I find a new way to automate processes or transform data into knowledge.
My boss made a comment a few weeks ago in a meeting, “If you want to get Jared excited, ask him about two things: 1) His family or 2) SAS.” Sometimes, I feel like my two halves are exclusive. I don’t know how they fit together. But, then there are days when someone comes to me looking for information (which they have been told was impossible to get), and I can write some code to pull it together in an hour. Those are good days.
Here’s the thing. I think programming makes me a better accountant. There is something about starting with a blank slate, then outlining, writing, and debugging code that forces you to think logically.
It also helps me to work more efficiently. I had coffee with a former Deloitte colleague over the weekend. We reminisced about 80 hour workweeks and what we learned from those experiences. We concluded that if there is one thing our Big 4 experience taught us to be, it’s efficient. If you were not efficient, you drowned from the sheer volume of work. Efficiency meant I got to have dinner with my wife, instead of staring at workpapers.
There are certain tasks that humans are good at (recognizing patterns), but there are others where computers are far superior. Combing through thousands of records and joining two tables by hand is something I could do. But, I will probably miss something, and it would take days (if not weeks). OR, I could write something that looks like this and let the computer do it in less than a minute with 100% accuracy.
PROC SQL;
CREATE TABLE &Table. AS
SELECT A.*, B.*
FROM &Table1. A INNER JOIN &Table2. B
ON A.&Field1. = B.&Field1.;
QUIT;
Each day, accountants are increasingly asked to take on responsibilities that used to be confined to IT (report writing, data analysis, etc.). However, most of my peers rely on Excel for all but the most complicated analysis. How much time and effort is wasted in performing tasks that a computer should really be doing?
This week is Computer Science Education Week. While I don’t think all accountants need to learn C++, I think it’s time our colleges added basic courses in programming to accounting degrees. Like it or not, our profession is shaped by technology. Simple AIS and MIS courses just aren’t enough to prepare students for what is required of them in the workplace, and it will only get more complex from here.
| This post was kindly contributed by Numbermonger » SAS - go there to comment and to read the full post. |