why the accountants are needed?

Question

They could just can be replaced with a computer program?

Answer 1

Not quite. Granted the very first civilian computer application was a spreadsheet program, which vastly simplified the accountants work. But, accounts do more than just push numbers around. After all a computer has to be told which numbers to put into which columns. Sure the accountant tells the programmer this, but they have the information, and they know how to set up the accounts.

Accounts also have the ability to "massage the numbers" to get the data that the bosses need. Otherwise it is just a stack of meaningless numbers. Decisions have to be made on how important a number is and where it should be accounted for. For example do you put the electric bill under your overhead, or somewhere else? What items can you depreciate and over what period of time.

Then there are taxes. The more successful the business, the more complicated the tax law involved. How do you handle the costs of company vehicles, or advertising, or product demos? The account determines the best deductions for these things and where and when to account for them. If they are bought in the first quarter, can the payment be deferred to another quarter; a quarter when the tax load is higher so it can be reduced.

Tax programs and computers make an accountants job simpler, but the account does what the computer cannot do; the why. A computer can do the math better, they can be programmed with the formulas, but they can’t make creative decisions. That requires artificial intelligence and a lot of intelligence.

Accounts do more than the math they determine the how, they decide the where and when and they know the why. The computer has to be told these things before it can start to crunch the numbers. Accounting is so much more than just balancing the accounts.