The Human Firm: an ‘important and urgent’ book for accountants

The global accounting software market size is forecasted to grow in size from $14.7bn (£11.8bn) in 2022 to $29.8bn (£24bn) by 2030, showing a compound annual growth rate of 9.2% in less than a decade. Adoption of the latest accounting softwares by old and new firms alike has been a staple of any conversation, as they seek to keep up with new regulations and their own personal workloads. Only recently, Beever and Struthers, a 100-year-old firm of chartered accountants based in Manchester, London, Blackburn and Birmingham, announced a management Knowledge Transfer Partnership (mKTP) with Aston University to help boost its data-driven technologies within audit functions. “Given that the business has been around for up to 125 years, it is quite traditional in its approach, but we are now keen to embrace the opportunity that a truly digital transformation could offer,” Michael Tourville, Beever and Struthers partner says. “Although we are a firm with a long history, we are also an entrepreneurial business and are keen to grasp opportunities when we see them. This mKTP is all about giving our clients more insight and helping us navigate data far better too.” Technology certainly has found its place in financial services, but co-founder of Farnell Clarke and author of The Human Firm, Will Farnell, is here to remind the industry that embracing the digital revolution should be done while “maintaining the human touch”. The Human Firm is Farnell’s second book, which was published with the help of finance software Sage to help other firms build better businesses “by digitising and humanising their practices”. Farnell, whose first book was The Digital Firm – a summary of all that he has learned during his own adoption of the best tech available – was one of the first accountants to fully adopt cloud technology for his firm. Even before that, he has been a driving force in the industry and now boasts more than 15 years in financial services. Where The Digital Firm filters through the growing pains of tech adoption, The Human Firm is delving deeper into the mindset, team, culture and systems needed to be a thriving accountancy practice today. On what the book is looking to achieve, head of accountants at Sage, Karen Ainsley, says: “By leveraging our digital network and encouraging a balance between technology and human connection, and by working with Farnell, we are shaping the future of accountancy practices, fostering stronger relationships, and ultimately enhancing the value provided to clients." Author, motivational business mentor and friend of Farnell’s, James Ashford, wrote the Forward to The Human Firm, a process which he referred to as “straightforward” because he was able to “call upon his experience as a client of accounting services”. Recounting a particular visit to an accountant that stood out, Ashford says: “He wanted to know what my personal goals are, so I said I wanted to take my kids to and from school every day, and to move closer to the children’s school so they could play with their friends. My wife wanted to leave her job, also. “As an accountancy firm, if you’re not having that conversation with your clients, you won’t understand the people behind the business and what they’re actually trying to achieve. There is no way you can possibly serve them properly. And so, we want firms to have this level of conversation with their clients to understand what they want to gain from your financial advice.” Ashford also went on to describe the new book as an “important and urgent” book for accountants to read, saying that “there’s a fear in the industry that accountants are going to be replaced by technology”. “Are accountants going to be replaced by robots?” Ashford asks rhetorically. “Yes, if you act like robots, but if you act like humans and have these human interactions and deep, meaningful conversations, you’ll never be replaced. Technology will facilitate those conversations. That’s the big shift.” Farnell described his second book as “a work in progress”; where The Digital Firm had a clear-cut blueprint of his own experiences of adopting cloud technology pre-2010 to recount, his latest book took note of the landscape now and the sort of technology accountants have to contend with, all the while providing a very human service. He says: “Some of the things that I’ve talked about here are my vision for what an accountancy firm fit for the next decade is likely to look like and what it’s delivering. “I got into a conversation with Ashford and I said I had these ideas for a new book, and that I’d love to work with a vendor [Sage] that really shared my passion for helping accountants and bookkeepers understand what an opportunity technology is. It frees us up to do all the things that technology can’t – forge deeper relationships with our clients, do more for our clients, understand their objectives, and so on.” While the book was still at the conceptual stage, Farnell was aiming for it to be about 40,000 words long. The Human Firm ended up being about 70,000 words long, because while he was writing it, a lot of very topical things began to happen – namely, ChatGPT. “It hit the news slap bang in the middle of my writing the book and it really got us focused on what we were trying to achieve with it,” he explains. “That’s the most dehumanising example of technology; you could just get ChatGPT to write all of your emails and you’ll never have to talk to a client again.” When news of ChatGPT began to circulate, Farnell realised that he had to go “even deeper” into highlighting the importance of human empathy in the business. And while the book was much longer than anticipated, it was all the more richer for the case studies The Human Firm documented. “People think that if you introduce more technology it will dehumanise the process, but it doesn’t,” Ashford concludes. “It frees people’s mental capacity up so they can bring their best human selves to the conversation and operate at a higher level.” Farnell is of the opinion that tech adoption in the industry is still really low compared with where it should be, citing only about a 20% rate of true cloud-based technology adoption across financial services. However, in his opinion, the fact that AI is such a hot topic right now “fundamentally supports” his book, as it provides a real-time case study that ultimately illustrates the urgent need to look at how accountants humanise their firms and build really client-centric relationships, in response to digitalisation without any of the personalisation.

The Human Firm: an ‘important and urgent’ book for accountants

Accountant-turned-author, Will Farnell, has released his second book with the help of Sage, which explores the relationship accountants should have with their tech to make client interactions more productive and help future-proof the craft

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