A Technology Curmudgeon’s Perspective On Innovation

From the April/May 2008 Issue

The word innovation is bandied around quite a bit these days. Most often, it seems the word is used with personal entertainment technologies such as the latest music, camera and video functions for mobile phones, or even YouTube political debates. Unfortunately, truly useful innovations for the professional work environment are less common.

Those who know me occaionally accuse me of being a curmudgeon at times when it comes to technological advances, but this isn’t quite true. I embrace some advances wholeheartedly, but I admit that I am often cynical about the promise of some new gadget or program feature when it is touted as revolutionary or ultra-innovative. Frequently, these new features are just the latest in the trend to make everything do everything possible, regardless of whether many professionals will actually need the function. This can result in bloated programs that grow, over time, to be evermore complex because of the need to make these thousands of capabilities accessible via toolbars and various menus.

I like to think that I am cautiously skeptical — I want to see how something will fit into an existing workflow or, if it requires changing the processes, how much pain it will cause during this transition. If the effort required to change is too great or too disruptive, a new technology may not be accepted, regardless of the promise it holds. Whether or not it is fair, I suppose that I am including feasibility and likelihood of adaptation into my assessment of new technologies.

Many new technologies are brought to market each year, even within our specific area (the intersection of technology and public accounting). Unfortunately, some are developed and marketed by technology vendors outside of the profession and with little knowledge of the actual work tax and accounting firms perform, the subtleties of client interaction, and even the legal factors that must be considered.

On the other hand, there are tax and accounting-savvy developers who do know the needs of the profession. Some come from accounting backgrounds themselves, while others have invested significant time and resources into learning and keeping up with changing needs.

An example of the former is CPA Service Group, a company that recently debuted an automated, web-based disclosure compliance system called DRM. The company is run by a CPA who specialized in these processes for the early part of his career and recognized the need for a simple program that automatically generates engagement letters, disclosure checklists, financial statements and other documents based on the AICPA’s requirements. DRM provides small and mid-sized firms a more cost-effective way to produce consistent and accurate disclosure reporting that can be customized to the firm’s internal standards, formats and practices.

A good example of a new technology vendor that has taken the time to learn the needs of the profession is CharacTell, whose FormCliQ program streamlines the entry of data from invoices, sales orders, estimates and other client-generated documents into an accounting system. Once a document type is scanned the first time, the system remembers where the data is supposed to be routed and does it automatically for future documents of the same type, leaving only the need to quickly review the information. It also uses optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically index and archive these documents, which makes it easy to search by any of the data contained within the documents: vendor, part number, invoice number, quantity, etc. With these documents basically one click away, they can also very easily be printed or electronically sent to recipients.