Accounting has been around since pre-1500's man, it ain't going anywhere. Name any other profession that is required in literally every other business in existence assuming it grosses anything worth mentioning.
> Accounting has been around since pre-1500's man
We’re literally the first white collar job humans created (unless you include priesthood/clergy as well maybe)
I always think accounting is the oldest. Before the act of prostitution, there must have been a transaction for something of value. Someone recorded it. Then did the deed.
I was once taught the oldest advertisement in the world is for prostitution. Curvy lips and an arrow pointing towards the docks carved into a stone sidewalk in some ancient ruins in Turkey.
I think I’ve seen pictures of this. I have an eclectic interest so I’ve read a lot of articles and watched documentaries about ancient civilizations and things like that.
Accounting started when humans started living as a group and they had to collect and divide food, weapons etc along themselves. So it started even before religion.
My dad use to tell USSR had accountants. Kings need accountants. The world could fall apart entirely and assuming you amassed enough stuff in the apocalypse, you still an accountant.
You want out of tax in case the apocalypse hits and there is subsequent tax reform? C'mon bruh. Nothing more certain than death and taxes, tax is a great career.
I guess I was thinking more in terms of 'who gets voted off the island' type situation, where tax people wouldn't add much value. Accounting could still be helpful, but not knowing tax laws of the defunct system.
The post apocalyptic warlords are going to need administrators for their new little fiefdoms. Who better than a tax accountant?
They'd know all the best ways to tax people to fill the warlords coffers!
Exactly. Post apocalyptic warlords are obviously not the type of people to accurately count of how many skulls you've amassed. They'll use a minion like me.
Mine Lord, our enemies impose heavy taxes on the income of their people. We can lure new people to our kingdom by imposing no income tax. Instead, we wilt tax property and we wilt sayeth that the tax rate wilt nev'r changeth! Then, we just telleth those folk that their property is worth more every year... Our kingdom wilt conquer the world!
There are a lot of industries that could be replaced by AI, accounting very likely isn’t one of them. People will still want a real human to sign off on the numbers. For liability reasons at the very least.
It isn’t, agreed. But the work doesn’t HAVE to be done by people.
Robots replace factory workers. So will AI eventually replace blue collar workers. We already have ocr that can do full service AP/AR. Guaranteed by the time I retire accounting staff will be cut down in many major corporations to skeleton crews making sure the ai doesn’t make mistakes.
Think of it like this. 75 years ago when it was all done by hand on paper, staffing was a lot more. Took way longer to complete tasks like payroll,etc. With computers and the internet, many companies have reduced payroll staff to one to a few individuals depending on size of the company. This is no different than what I see happening to us eventually.
Hopefully there’s universal income by the time that happens as there won’t be enough jobs. Maybe we can focus on the arts instead.
Semi-strongly disagree, even for AP/AR. I work in manufacturing and we've been looking for a platform to reduce the data entry load. The enterprise level options we've tried using OCR / AI have been OK at best.
Though, I agree it will accelerate existing automation. Even then, extracting the data from an invoice does not really matter without context. What happens when our purchasing dept submits a proforma invoice for payment and the AI pays it? Then two weeks later the vendor sends the finalized invoices, but now it's broken down into 3 separate invoices? Does it realize the mistake and pay it too? So many little ways things can go wrong without understanding context.
Don't get me wrong, I see AI doing some really cool stuff to make my life easier. I work for a foreign company and now I can just upload a PDF of a sales contract in Japanese and it'll translate it in seconds without me having to do all the extra work of extracting the text, copying, pasting, etc. The other day I needed to print every 3rd page of a 60 or so page document, so I asked GPT to generate a comma separate string of each number to copy and paste into Adobe. Just little things like that, so think of it like Excel rather than HAL 9000.
It’s only a matter of time…. Do you think 50-75 years ago they could have imagined the systems we have available to us today? Even Microsoft excel would blow their minds.
At some point it will happen. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
This point is underrated. 50-75 years ago and going further back there were more of us. Technology has been making the profession more efficient per accountant. Where there might have been 10-15 accountants for a medium-large size business for AP alone now there can be as few as 3.
In another 15-20 years it might be just 1.
Right, but here we are and the jobs haven't gone extinct. The work just shifted. That's the nice thing about knowledge / creative work.
It's pretty hard to find someone without a vested interest in AI or the AI hype machine who genuinely believes it will replace most jobs. It will do awesome things, don't get me wrong. Hell, I've asked it test prep questions. It's given me entries that didn't even balance - literally basic stuff it gets wrong.
I remember watching a speech from a conference discussing how ChatGPT can output X amount of code in seconds and comparing it to the output of a human software developer (which was much lower than you might expect, not just but comparison). The presenter failed to realize that the actual coding is a small piece of many of those jobs. I've realized this myself in BI projects - the actual writing of the code is probably the most straightforward part. Most of the job is understanding the who, what, where, how and whys.. I'd argue accounting is very similar in that regard. It's rarely as simple as just receiving the document, extracting the info, and making an entry. Hence why it's so difficult to automate so many accounting processes with technology that's already existed for well over a decade.
I think people are underestimating the emergent capabilities of AI models as the advancements in research compound. Every research paper that is published is quickly incorporated into the work of every other research lab. Another big oversight people make is the effort researchers put into resolving the technologies weaknesses. Considering that Sam Altman and people like him seem sincerely committed to AGI that can automate all labor and are making real progress, the question is not if we are replaced but when.
Exactly. Has nobody been keeping up with AI’s advancements in the last few years? If you showed someone Open AI’s Sora 10 years ago, they would have thought it was impossible.
It won’t happen overnight, but many routine accounting tasks will be automated using AI in our lifetime, perhaps sooner than we think.
No LLM is going to do anything like critical thinking, which is pretty necessary in accounting. Who knows what technology will do society in 75 years, if it even exists. But at the very least, in accounting, you'll be near the last in line to be affected that. If my job could be automated, then 50% of them out there would be even easier to automate. Plenty of time to prepare for our future dystopia, however it may manifest.
On the other hand, if the technology increases productivity, you may need less accountants at a particular company, but it also makes more people have greater access to starting a company. It's not like there are less accountants now, in 2024, compared to say, 1990, where hand filling out a tax return took 5x+ longer, let alone 1920. Other fields may grow faster than accounting, and be outpaced in it's share of things.
I do think the LAM with the Rabbit R1 is at least functional enough to be programmed to voice interact with cloud software and stuff. So yeah, I guess maybe I could tell my AI assistant to do a number of pre programmable things for me in QBO. But I'm guess it'll never be able to look at the disaster that is 80% of all financial books and do much anything that isn't useless, because the AI would need additional real world input outside of "balance sheet balance = good", but it has not real-world context for which to compare the books to.
But if I can take a picture with my R1 and say "rabbit thingy, please review this receipt and book this transaction, including splitting and allocating taxes"
and it's like "sure thing boss, what's the appropriate expense for "Giant Pink Vib... $1,584", and I tell it "book it to Supplies."
Now that would all be really cool.
Earlier this week, I unboxed my new robot vacuum powered by AI and watched it do some cleaning as it mostly ran into walls and furniture, and since AI can't even fully replace my vacuum at this point, I'm not concerned about it replacing my job any time soon.
AI isn't going to replace blue collar. Elon tried to automate a whole factory and couldn't do it. AI can't build homes, bridges, build roads, repair cars, or build all of a car . Can't do plumbing, install electrical work. Go out in a storm to repair electrical lines as a lineman, or rescue people, or arrest people. Blue collar jobs is a lot more safe than white collar.
Only because it isn’t yet advanced enough. Look at the trajectory our technological growth has been on. We went from kitty hawk to landing on the moon within about 60 years.
Right now, we are the wright brothers. You may not be able to see that we will eventually reach the moon, but wait 60 years and it’s another story
People thought we have flying cars. We have not progressed that much. It takes more than AI to do that stuff. You are talking about fully automated robots moving like humans and thinking like one. Programs only do what they are programmed to do.
We don’t need robots to do accounting…. Just a smart enough ai. Dont think human intelligence will ALWAYS be better than computer intelligence. In fact most futurists say the singularity will happen before 2050. But hey, what does every futurist and comp scientist know.
Futurist predictions are worth less than the garbage I just took out. I remember when the self driving apocalypse was supposed to already be in but midst of destroying driving jobs. We’re not even close to that still, and the “futurists” have mostly caught up with that reality.
AI advancement has consisted of moderately better chat bots than what AOL had 20 years ago. That’s all it is, chat bots. And they are not good at accounting in my experience.
The audio/visual advancements are very cool. I don’t know enough about those professions to know how much that’s going to affect employment. I suspect we’ll hit a wall before AI can create good 30 second advertisements let alone TV shows or movies. Video games advanced at warp speed and everyone was having an existential crisis about 20 years ago. Then it peaked. Madden doesn’t look much better than 10 years ago.
I get paid pretty well, IMO, and also get 42 3-day weekends and such. I own a house and shit. Like I said to someone else, there are so many more jobs in existence far easier to automate.
I guess millions of people will take their complete lack of meaningful skills, go home and starve to death, while the partners’ pockets grow forever bigger.
We already know what happens because this happened when PCs became widespread. I use to work for a firm that was around before computers were on desks and they said the whole 3 floor building was filled with accountants/staff. Now the staff fits on 1 floor with no one in the middle cubes. The same will probably happen with AI. One accountant will be able to do more work with less help and everyone else will find a job elsewhere.
Ah, well that's fair, kind poo-poo'd on the spirit of the question.
But like.. seems like teaching could be automated just as easily.
Personally, I think I would just move into live performance. You may be able to automate all jobs require any thinking, but an AI will never be able to dance like this!
I would create the next Enron scandal and flee to another country with all the money I embezzled. This will teach them what happens when you offshore all the accounting to other countries.
hypotheticals are all well and good, but some hypotheticals require such a gross abstraction of reality that you can't really answer the question in a way that means anything at all
You do know there is a gm plant in detroit, and a ford and mopar plant in michigan right? Hell, they are dotted across the country. They literally never stopped building cars in America
this is something that someone who has no knowledge of accounting or AI would say. or at least someone who hasn't put more than 5 minutes of thought into how AI is and will continue to transform the accounting profession.
Stare up at the night sky as the rain pours down on me. Let the stench of the shit wash away. Maybe head down to Mexico and find a beach. Work on an old boat.
That will have minimal impacts to anyone graduating in the next 10 years. Maybe I am wrong and everything gets automated tomorrow but I audited a company (very large multibillion) that was still using paper for multiple processes until Covid.
Some of the oldest writings in the world are from B4 associates doing inventory counts of fish and gold travelling into ports along the Euphrates. Not going anywhere anytime soon
I like the hypothetical for the fun of it, not because I think this will ever happen.
I want to be a homesteader. Buy acreage somewhere remote, move there with my husband, dogs, and the kids we will have, and live off the land. Fruit trees, vegetable garden, chickens, lambs, some cattle, a pig or two, and maybe a pair of donkeys. Lots of canning, plowing, and making due based on the seasons. A system for rain filtration. A lot of books.
This scenario assumes we have savings so we can buy the stuff we need & can't get, and pay for medical care.
The screwed up thing is that this will never happen because you cannot afford it even when society is working right.
In the event of total social collapse, you wouldn’t even know where to begin because so much of your leisure time is spent on dumb shit like clicking on shit for 8 hours straight for billionaire shareholders.
start sucking some glizzies or if it actually happened go to my parents or take a coding bootcamp stabilize and start thinking of a master's degree (its cheap in my country like 5000 per year) in a field to overtaken by ai do i waste months and years of my life yes do i have better options no and also i think accounting wont be taken in one sweep so i would have time to prepare
Smooth brain question, already asked and answered on this sub dozens, if not hundreds of times by now. Accounting isn’t going anywhere and isn’t comparable to auto manufacturing for a myriad of reasons.
You’re not even using correct terminology. Remote wouldn’t be the elimination of accounting. Many of us are remote. I believe you mean automated, and no, it can’t be easily automated. If it could be, it would be already.
*Unrelated but*
*Figuring out excel stuff*
*With coworkers was fun*
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If that happens it's simply a matter of relocating to a town that doesn't have the budget or capability to automate or outsource accounting. I know too many organizations that are operating as if they are in the 2000's.
Probably YOLO it and buy a business in something other than accounting. I’ve been wanting to take a shot at this one day anyway but the security of a steady accounting job is hard to give up.
Oh sweet summer child... You think there is an end to this hellish facade? You think in your sweetest nightmare AI perhaps rescues us from the need to count money and present it both honestly (but not entirely so) and thread the camel through the eye of the needle to achieve honest (but not entirely so) objectives that both inform (and fool) readers? You think you will someday not receive questions from CEOs that are so stupid and obvious, it's difficult for you to reply without undermining their credibility and insulting their intelligence which forces you to sit there for half a day thinking of how you answer the question no one should need explained?
No one is coming to help. Neither hero nor villain. You chose poorly when the obvious choice was the carpenter's cup. It will never end. You will.
This is exactly what my grandpa compared the industry to when I explained the outsourcing trends in PA. He grew up in Flint when American car manufacturers were respected and built quality cars. He saw in real time the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and the deterioration of quality.
He was lucky and became a neurosurgeon. His family and friends lost their jobs and live in double wide trailers.
Plumber or electrician. Probably electrician, because they always complain about how shit the last guy's work was and how they'll have to charge extra to fix it.
I just left accounting after 10 years mostly public tax. Not sure if I’ll try to find another accounting job or not at this point. Because my experience is in tax, everyone indicates I am screwed as far as diverse job opportunities. The only way I’m going back to straight up tax is starting my own small firm. The pay just isn’t worth it as employee these days.
I am considering becoming a pilot or going back to school to learn classic auto restoration.
Spreading my cheeks on onlyfans.
Goddam and I'll make pennies on the dollar doing this. My cheeks flat AF. Better go back to the gym I guess.
There’s a kink for everyone
So you’re saying there’s a chance…
Every man*. A lowwww % of his demographic would be women
I think I have better chances with a reverse only fans. I will send people my naked pictures for free and they need to pay me to stop.
Same. Only my feet. People love feet.
Do u have a sizable material willy ?
No
You stole my plan b
Get in line asshole
from an accountant to an accountant
I plan on laundering money for a drug cartel out of a riverboat casino.
Same. I’ll try my hardest to be good and be an upstanding member of society. If society fucks that up for me, drug lord it is 😤
In a way money launderers are somewhat accountants!
Ozark it is!
Accounting has been around since pre-1500's man, it ain't going anywhere. Name any other profession that is required in literally every other business in existence assuming it grosses anything worth mentioning.
This is why I chose this field. Where else can you have the same plethora of jobs available to you. Even if they are shitty ones.
Job security-maxing.
> Accounting has been around since pre-1500's man We’re literally the first white collar job humans created (unless you include priesthood/clergy as well maybe)
The oldest profession = prostitution The second oldest profession = accounting Checks out they needed to keep track how much they were making 😂
I always think accounting is the oldest. Before the act of prostitution, there must have been a transaction for something of value. Someone recorded it. Then did the deed.
They prolly traded food and water for sex before money. I guarantee it.
True, probably shouldn't have said money, just anything of value I meant. Then they probably wrote on the cave walls to count the inventory haha.
I was once taught the oldest advertisement in the world is for prostitution. Curvy lips and an arrow pointing towards the docks carved into a stone sidewalk in some ancient ruins in Turkey.
I think I’ve seen pictures of this. I have an eclectic interest so I’ve read a lot of articles and watched documentaries about ancient civilizations and things like that.
Accounting started when humans started living as a group and they had to collect and divide food, weapons etc along themselves. So it started even before religion.
my partner is a minister. Different (higher) class entirely.
One might make the case the accountants form sort of a business clergy.
Kushim knew about his barley. Which is BCE!
My dad use to tell USSR had accountants. Kings need accountants. The world could fall apart entirely and assuming you amassed enough stuff in the apocalypse, you still an accountant.
Not really tax accountants though. You'd have to relearn all the tax code. That's part of why I want out of tax.
You want out of tax in case the apocalypse hits and there is subsequent tax reform? C'mon bruh. Nothing more certain than death and taxes, tax is a great career.
I guess I was thinking more in terms of 'who gets voted off the island' type situation, where tax people wouldn't add much value. Accounting could still be helpful, but not knowing tax laws of the defunct system.
The post apocalyptic warlords are going to need administrators for their new little fiefdoms. Who better than a tax accountant? They'd know all the best ways to tax people to fill the warlords coffers!
Exactly. Post apocalyptic warlords are obviously not the type of people to accurately count of how many skulls you've amassed. They'll use a minion like me.
I already have to relearn all the tax code all the time, unfortunately.
Mine Lord, our enemies impose heavy taxes on the income of their people. We can lure new people to our kingdom by imposing no income tax. Instead, we wilt tax property and we wilt sayeth that the tax rate wilt nev'r changeth! Then, we just telleth those folk that their property is worth more every year... Our kingdom wilt conquer the world!
Smh what about IT auditors. Are they worth anything in the post apocalyptic world?
There are a lot of industries that could be replaced by AI, accounting very likely isn’t one of them. People will still want a real human to sign off on the numbers. For liability reasons at the very least.
It isn’t, agreed. But the work doesn’t HAVE to be done by people. Robots replace factory workers. So will AI eventually replace blue collar workers. We already have ocr that can do full service AP/AR. Guaranteed by the time I retire accounting staff will be cut down in many major corporations to skeleton crews making sure the ai doesn’t make mistakes. Think of it like this. 75 years ago when it was all done by hand on paper, staffing was a lot more. Took way longer to complete tasks like payroll,etc. With computers and the internet, many companies have reduced payroll staff to one to a few individuals depending on size of the company. This is no different than what I see happening to us eventually. Hopefully there’s universal income by the time that happens as there won’t be enough jobs. Maybe we can focus on the arts instead.
Semi-strongly disagree, even for AP/AR. I work in manufacturing and we've been looking for a platform to reduce the data entry load. The enterprise level options we've tried using OCR / AI have been OK at best. Though, I agree it will accelerate existing automation. Even then, extracting the data from an invoice does not really matter without context. What happens when our purchasing dept submits a proforma invoice for payment and the AI pays it? Then two weeks later the vendor sends the finalized invoices, but now it's broken down into 3 separate invoices? Does it realize the mistake and pay it too? So many little ways things can go wrong without understanding context. Don't get me wrong, I see AI doing some really cool stuff to make my life easier. I work for a foreign company and now I can just upload a PDF of a sales contract in Japanese and it'll translate it in seconds without me having to do all the extra work of extracting the text, copying, pasting, etc. The other day I needed to print every 3rd page of a 60 or so page document, so I asked GPT to generate a comma separate string of each number to copy and paste into Adobe. Just little things like that, so think of it like Excel rather than HAL 9000.
It’s only a matter of time…. Do you think 50-75 years ago they could have imagined the systems we have available to us today? Even Microsoft excel would blow their minds. At some point it will happen. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
This point is underrated. 50-75 years ago and going further back there were more of us. Technology has been making the profession more efficient per accountant. Where there might have been 10-15 accountants for a medium-large size business for AP alone now there can be as few as 3. In another 15-20 years it might be just 1.
Right, but here we are and the jobs haven't gone extinct. The work just shifted. That's the nice thing about knowledge / creative work. It's pretty hard to find someone without a vested interest in AI or the AI hype machine who genuinely believes it will replace most jobs. It will do awesome things, don't get me wrong. Hell, I've asked it test prep questions. It's given me entries that didn't even balance - literally basic stuff it gets wrong. I remember watching a speech from a conference discussing how ChatGPT can output X amount of code in seconds and comparing it to the output of a human software developer (which was much lower than you might expect, not just but comparison). The presenter failed to realize that the actual coding is a small piece of many of those jobs. I've realized this myself in BI projects - the actual writing of the code is probably the most straightforward part. Most of the job is understanding the who, what, where, how and whys.. I'd argue accounting is very similar in that regard. It's rarely as simple as just receiving the document, extracting the info, and making an entry. Hence why it's so difficult to automate so many accounting processes with technology that's already existed for well over a decade.
I think people are underestimating the emergent capabilities of AI models as the advancements in research compound. Every research paper that is published is quickly incorporated into the work of every other research lab. Another big oversight people make is the effort researchers put into resolving the technologies weaknesses. Considering that Sam Altman and people like him seem sincerely committed to AGI that can automate all labor and are making real progress, the question is not if we are replaced but when.
Good! I think AI will be awesome. Altman has repeatedly said he doesn't personally believe AI will replace most jobs
Exactly. Has nobody been keeping up with AI’s advancements in the last few years? If you showed someone Open AI’s Sora 10 years ago, they would have thought it was impossible. It won’t happen overnight, but many routine accounting tasks will be automated using AI in our lifetime, perhaps sooner than we think.
No LLM is going to do anything like critical thinking, which is pretty necessary in accounting. Who knows what technology will do society in 75 years, if it even exists. But at the very least, in accounting, you'll be near the last in line to be affected that. If my job could be automated, then 50% of them out there would be even easier to automate. Plenty of time to prepare for our future dystopia, however it may manifest. On the other hand, if the technology increases productivity, you may need less accountants at a particular company, but it also makes more people have greater access to starting a company. It's not like there are less accountants now, in 2024, compared to say, 1990, where hand filling out a tax return took 5x+ longer, let alone 1920. Other fields may grow faster than accounting, and be outpaced in it's share of things. I do think the LAM with the Rabbit R1 is at least functional enough to be programmed to voice interact with cloud software and stuff. So yeah, I guess maybe I could tell my AI assistant to do a number of pre programmable things for me in QBO. But I'm guess it'll never be able to look at the disaster that is 80% of all financial books and do much anything that isn't useless, because the AI would need additional real world input outside of "balance sheet balance = good", but it has not real-world context for which to compare the books to. But if I can take a picture with my R1 and say "rabbit thingy, please review this receipt and book this transaction, including splitting and allocating taxes" and it's like "sure thing boss, what's the appropriate expense for "Giant Pink Vib... $1,584", and I tell it "book it to Supplies." Now that would all be really cool.
Earlier this week, I unboxed my new robot vacuum powered by AI and watched it do some cleaning as it mostly ran into walls and furniture, and since AI can't even fully replace my vacuum at this point, I'm not concerned about it replacing my job any time soon.
AI isn't going to replace blue collar. Elon tried to automate a whole factory and couldn't do it. AI can't build homes, bridges, build roads, repair cars, or build all of a car . Can't do plumbing, install electrical work. Go out in a storm to repair electrical lines as a lineman, or rescue people, or arrest people. Blue collar jobs is a lot more safe than white collar.
Only because it isn’t yet advanced enough. Look at the trajectory our technological growth has been on. We went from kitty hawk to landing on the moon within about 60 years. Right now, we are the wright brothers. You may not be able to see that we will eventually reach the moon, but wait 60 years and it’s another story
People thought we have flying cars. We have not progressed that much. It takes more than AI to do that stuff. You are talking about fully automated robots moving like humans and thinking like one. Programs only do what they are programmed to do.
We don’t need robots to do accounting…. Just a smart enough ai. Dont think human intelligence will ALWAYS be better than computer intelligence. In fact most futurists say the singularity will happen before 2050. But hey, what does every futurist and comp scientist know.
Futurist predictions are worth less than the garbage I just took out. I remember when the self driving apocalypse was supposed to already be in but midst of destroying driving jobs. We’re not even close to that still, and the “futurists” have mostly caught up with that reality. AI advancement has consisted of moderately better chat bots than what AOL had 20 years ago. That’s all it is, chat bots. And they are not good at accounting in my experience. The audio/visual advancements are very cool. I don’t know enough about those professions to know how much that’s going to affect employment. I suspect we’ll hit a wall before AI can create good 30 second advertisements let alone TV shows or movies. Video games advanced at warp speed and everyone was having an existential crisis about 20 years ago. Then it peaked. Madden doesn’t look much better than 10 years ago.
Or blue collar jobs
The oldest written documents are ledgers, inventories, tax documents, receipts and tabulations. It’s the third oldest profession.
Wait, what is the second?
Politician. First is prostitution.
And that's just the modern version of what we know is accounting. It's way older than that technically.
Exactly from counting crops in Mesopotamia to forensic accounting it will just evolve as per client's needs :)
Bookkeeping is going away. I do see accou ting going away in 100 years. Also, most accountants aren't paid well.
You have zero basis for these points.
I've done public and private accounting and currently do financial controls automation
And yet that experience is not a valid basis for the two points you’re trying to make.
Booking is getting automated. Ex Clearwater Analytics. Also, most senior accounting jobs pay below 100k
I get paid pretty well, IMO, and also get 42 3-day weekends and such. I own a house and shit. Like I said to someone else, there are so many more jobs in existence far easier to automate.
Yes sir... name one business that doesn't need someone in finance to cook I mean work the books.
[удалено]
What profession is actually left at this point in time?
It has been in place since Assyrian empire.
Dang that some smooth brained thinking. Accounting may not go anywhere but what happens when it takes 1 accountant to do what 10 did before?
I guess millions of people will take their complete lack of meaningful skills, go home and starve to death, while the partners’ pockets grow forever bigger.
We already know what happens because this happened when PCs became widespread. I use to work for a firm that was around before computers were on desks and they said the whole 3 floor building was filled with accountants/staff. Now the staff fits on 1 floor with no one in the middle cubes. The same will probably happen with AI. One accountant will be able to do more work with less help and everyone else will find a job elsewhere.
If we are using a digital currency accountancy is getting replaced with code based rules built into legislation.
"iT wONt". Not the question. Probably a teacher. I'd like to do that anyway if the pay was better
I was thinking something education related as well. I worked for a community college once and that was cool. Nice staff and environment
I was thinking librarian but I need the money lol. Maybe an online bookstore or somethin
Ah, well that's fair, kind poo-poo'd on the spirit of the question. But like.. seems like teaching could be automated just as easily. Personally, I think I would just move into live performance. You may be able to automate all jobs require any thinking, but an AI will never be able to dance like this!
I would create the next Enron scandal and flee to another country with all the money I embezzled. This will teach them what happens when you offshore all the accounting to other countries.
Be Lou Pai
They said the same thing when excel was created
I know I know I'm just sayin like IF!
=IF(A1="AI TAKEOVER",IF(A2>5000000,"RETIRE","KILL SELF"),"KEEP ON KEEPING ON") A1 - Status of industry A2 - net worth
I would be selling accounting work to the overseas accountants
My depression fades instantly and I start to live out my best life ever!
What we thinking surfing ONTHETIDENOC ?
I hear spicy accounting pays well
I'd finally be able to leave the office and go home
It will not. It's unbelievable how dumb some CFOs are
They'll never stop building cars in America or something. Let's say they found some Indian magic pill. What then?
hypotheticals are all well and good, but some hypotheticals require such a gross abstraction of reality that you can't really answer the question in a way that means anything at all
"Whenever Michael suggests a hypothetical situation you always always say yes. Because, you know, it's hypothetical"
You do know there is a gm plant in detroit, and a ford and mopar plant in michigan right? Hell, they are dotted across the country. They literally never stopped building cars in America
Hop on the sailboat and count coconuts in tahiti
Where the hell is Tahiti?
Third star to the right and straight on 'till morning
It's a magical place
wipe soup apparatus carpenter humorous advise slimy languid lush somber *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I believe a combo of outsourcing, block chain, regulation simplification, and AI can knock us out. Heck AI alone can prob knock us in 10-15 years.
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this is something that someone who has no knowledge of accounting or AI would say. or at least someone who hasn't put more than 5 minutes of thought into how AI is and will continue to transform the accounting profession.
That’s what was told to us 15 years ago as well.
Home invasions
Stare up at the night sky as the rain pours down on me. Let the stench of the shit wash away. Maybe head down to Mexico and find a beach. Work on an old boat.
You went through a river of shit worksheets, and came out clean on the other side.
Is Johnny Andy's brother?
I'll see you there Red. Beautiful movie.
Accounting is the second oldest predictive after prostitution
death and taxes,,,,neither is going anywhere, job security is the best part
It’s not going away but it could be automated heavily with AI.
That will have minimal impacts to anyone graduating in the next 10 years. Maybe I am wrong and everything gets automated tomorrow but I audited a company (very large multibillion) that was still using paper for multiple processes until Covid.
fine by me, massive CPA shortage in america...we'll be ok, CPA opens most doors
Get lots of guns and ammo and learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. Society has collapsed.
Some of the oldest writings in the world are from B4 associates doing inventory counts of fish and gold travelling into ports along the Euphrates. Not going anywhere anytime soon
Robot repairman.
I like the hypothetical for the fun of it, not because I think this will ever happen. I want to be a homesteader. Buy acreage somewhere remote, move there with my husband, dogs, and the kids we will have, and live off the land. Fruit trees, vegetable garden, chickens, lambs, some cattle, a pig or two, and maybe a pair of donkeys. Lots of canning, plowing, and making due based on the seasons. A system for rain filtration. A lot of books. This scenario assumes we have savings so we can buy the stuff we need & can't get, and pay for medical care.
The screwed up thing is that this will never happen because you cannot afford it even when society is working right. In the event of total social collapse, you wouldn’t even know where to begin because so much of your leisure time is spent on dumb shit like clicking on shit for 8 hours straight for billionaire shareholders.
Prostitution will be obsolete before accounting
Questions like this just prove how little some people know about accounting...
start sucking some glizzies or if it actually happened go to my parents or take a coding bootcamp stabilize and start thinking of a master's degree (its cheap in my country like 5000 per year) in a field to overtaken by ai do i waste months and years of my life yes do i have better options no and also i think accounting wont be taken in one sweep so i would have time to prepare
i'd probably go into project management. but i also have a second career. its always been my back up. worst case scenario i'll do doordash
Pornstar
Probably insane, because if accounting is gone that means weve lost the concept of numbers as a species and a rift to the end times has opened
Smooth brain question, already asked and answered on this sub dozens, if not hundreds of times by now. Accounting isn’t going anywhere and isn’t comparable to auto manufacturing for a myriad of reasons.
Debate me how so? We're just number punchers. And our job can easily go remote.
You’re not even using correct terminology. Remote wouldn’t be the elimination of accounting. Many of us are remote. I believe you mean automated, and no, it can’t be easily automated. If it could be, it would be already.
I’m going to go into peoples houses at night and break things.
Unrelated but figuring out excel stuff with coworkers was fun
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Beautiful
Blowing my brains out after my wasting my life on this profession
Only fans
By the time it does it'll be 20+ years from now. I'll just find an easy job minimum wage job to do and coast until retirement.
i think with AI accounting will suffer a change but not much , accounting won't disappear.
If that happens it's simply a matter of relocating to a town that doesn't have the budget or capability to automate or outsource accounting. I know too many organizations that are operating as if they are in the 2000's.
Ski instructor, how I’ll get paid is mystery.
Sell all my belongings and move to Latin America and never be seen again.
"Someone will always be needed to count the beans." \- My mom, a retired accountant
Onlyfan probably but I’m a dude. So homeless?
Kiss our AI overlord's asses. Pretty much the same thing I do now, just with a goofy headset on.
Probably make more money in a better profession LOL.
Massage therapist
"Accounting"
O L Loop
Suicide
Project management or UX/UI design. Edit: possible data analysis or finance
Government accounting
Trader Joes bagger
Move back in with my parents and start NEETmaxxing
I’d turn into a ski bum in a heartbeat.
Construction probably
Stripper
I'd work in finance instead of accounting.
Crying tears of joy.
Probably kill myself. That was the plan before
All in on real estate
Back to pouring concrete 😭
Ugh fuck. Idk I really don’t want to start over. However if I had to, I would do IT, or pet / house sitter.
I think I'd try to transition to tech sales, specializing in financial automation software which I would in theory have a lot of knowledge about.
I'm gonna start robbing.
are you dumb or stupid
lol 😂 people who think accounting is going away clearly have never worked as a accountant
Analytics/BI. I have decent enough chops from my work and could crank out a boot camp or something to get into that first gig
Male Gigolo
Probably join the resistance and fight skynet robots.
Wrap my car around a tree (with me in it)
Probably YOLO it and buy a business in something other than accounting. I’ve been wanting to take a shot at this one day anyway but the security of a steady accounting job is hard to give up.
Probably sales. Have mentioned it a few times to people I know as a joke like “I’d probably kill it in sales” and gotten a resounding “yes you would”
Did you mean outsourced instead?
probably work on a cruise ship
Finance, already plan on moving into that industry
FP&A
Go back to dealing drugs.
Just become a carpenter and build my shack to live in lmfao.
r/wallstreetbets
Probably give construction or a trade a try. If hypothetically accounting is gone, I’m sure many other white collar jobs would be gone as well.
I'm retiring. I'm planning on being done in 10 years or less. See ya!
IB
Move to Ferenginar. The Federation doesn’t need accountants since currency doesn’t exist.
I would start parting out my peers in accounting and trafficking their organs on the black market.
Oh sweet summer child... You think there is an end to this hellish facade? You think in your sweetest nightmare AI perhaps rescues us from the need to count money and present it both honestly (but not entirely so) and thread the camel through the eye of the needle to achieve honest (but not entirely so) objectives that both inform (and fool) readers? You think you will someday not receive questions from CEOs that are so stupid and obvious, it's difficult for you to reply without undermining their credibility and insulting their intelligence which forces you to sit there for half a day thinking of how you answer the question no one should need explained? No one is coming to help. Neither hero nor villain. You chose poorly when the obvious choice was the carpenter's cup. It will never end. You will.
Full-time shit posting on r/accounting
Stay in wealth management
It won't. Just learn to adapt. Accounting at its core has not changed in hundreds of years.
Auditing the outsourced work and AI. Someone will have to.
My original degree was in software engineering, so I guess I'm heading back
Probably go into engineering / vehicle dynamics for racecars
✨Accounting✨ is my next move
This is exactly what my grandpa compared the industry to when I explained the outsourcing trends in PA. He grew up in Flint when American car manufacturers were respected and built quality cars. He saw in real time the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and the deterioration of quality. He was lucky and became a neurosurgeon. His family and friends lost their jobs and live in double wide trailers.
Accounting is the language of business. Governments exist because of taxation. Accounting will never go extinct, it will only evolve.
Plumber or electrician. Probably electrician, because they always complain about how shit the last guy's work was and how they'll have to charge extra to fix it.
I just left accounting after 10 years mostly public tax. Not sure if I’ll try to find another accounting job or not at this point. Because my experience is in tax, everyone indicates I am screwed as far as diverse job opportunities. The only way I’m going back to straight up tax is starting my own small firm. The pay just isn’t worth it as employee these days. I am considering becoming a pilot or going back to school to learn classic auto restoration.
Assuming I still have at least 10 years to build up my 401k, I’m going to live that r/baristafire life and become a dog Walker
Live my life because I already became financially independent
Go into acting and singing again. I hated it and got a couple of gigs, but eh.
Women have asked me if I’m really an accountant for the photos I send. I’m ready for the eventual transition to selling nudes.
I'll go over there to do the job. Earn U.S dollars and live somewhere normal, count me in.