Coding Skills for Accountants

Recent advancements in computer technology have brought both challenges and opportunities to accounting profession. Existing studies show that increased job automation and job polarisation could provide existential threat to many jobs within the accounting domain. Against this challenge, opportunities are also present that allow accountants to work with more efficiency and make better use of data that are being generated at a tremendous pace and volume. To benefit from these opportunities, accountants need to acquire additional skills. The ‘additional skills’ we focus on in this chapter are coding skills that will be more useful and necessary for accountants in the future. First, workflow automation is an area that would be beneficial to enhance efficiency. Second, the ability to analyse and extract meaningful information out of ever-increasing volume of Big Data would also be invaluable. This chapter further focuses on this second issue to provide readers a starting point to handle Big Data with illustrative examples. Though there are many programming languages that could be helpful, we recommend Python programming language as the tool for beginners mainly due to its ease of learning and capability of handling large datasets.