As a CPA, you are used to working long hours, churning out work papers, and simply getting the job done. However, in an age of fewer qualified staff, work/life balance, and new entrants to the profession looking for cutting-edge ways to work, firms are having a difficult time retaining staff if they are not automating their procedures. Further, firms will look to team members who can help integrate this competency (automation) to sharpen their saws going forward. Aside from the straight efficiency gains, automated tools can reduce errors and help CPAs to transform client databases into improved management letters. All of this results in helping the firm get beyond the commoditization of their services.
 
CPAs who work in industry also need to maintain strong internal control, which simply can't effectively be maintained with a pen, paper and manual review. Not to mention anti-fraud programs that practically require using data analysis to detect the needle of fraud in the haystack of company transactional processing.
 
"The issue this year is that by the time they catch their breath from all of last year's work, they are off the races again for the following year's compliance," notes John Morrow, Vice President of the AICPA's New Finance program in an a recent interview from the CPA2Biz Audit & Control Technology Store. Since it is difficult for CPAs to nail down a sustainable process, according to Morrow, they are finding it difficult to match an appropriate technology to the process. This is not to say that companies should not be taking steps, Sarbanes-Oxley or not, to better manage their internal controls using the automation benefits of software and database technology.
 
Technology used to be expensive but is now affordable to a point where CPAs looking to learn the new competency may want to consider it a personal investment. In essence, the market is getting larger so developers can drop prices and still make a comfortable profit margin. For example, data analysis tools for sampling records or scanning databases for anomalies used to be costly and take days to learn but now present themselves as add-ins to Microsoft Excel.

"Every CPA is comfortable with Excel so instead of trying to fight that, which so many vendors do on a daily basis, we should revel in it and add new functionality to help an auditor do a better job in the field," says Mike Pluscauskas of InformationActive, which provides software for transforming Excel into an audit software.
 
The best place to start is to identify the top manual procedures and see what of these tasks can be automated. In an audit, it could be sampling records for confirmation letters or manually scanning general ledgers. In a company, it could be testing internal controls or doing account reconciliations.

"We identified reconciliations as a top time waster in companies who tend to support a myriad of schedules that invariably go out of balance. By consolidating this effort into a central tool and automating as much of it as possible, it is not only faster, but the quality is built in from the start," says Jeff Adler from RecWizard. Once the top areas are automated, they serve as case studies for applying the approach into every facet of the company. CPAs, more so than any other professional, live by the "trust but verify" principle which makes it ever more important to first automate low-hanging manual procedures.
 
Top Three Things You Must Do To Increase Your Audit & Control Technology Competency
 
Identify your top manual procedures either in an audit (i.e., sampling and scanning ledgers) or in practice (i.e., completing manual reconciliations) and try to automate at least 25 percent of these procedures in the coming three months.
 
Familiarize yourself with the functionality in Excel (or through an add-in product) to you to better scan, summarize, or find a trend in a data file.
 
Gain an appreciation of the audit and control technology available by reviewing vendor Web sites, doing a search on Google or reviewing the CPA2Biz Audit & Control Technology Store.