3 HOUR(s)•ECONOMY
Mamun Rashid
Mamun Rashid
Not long ago, the finance team in a company would have spent the week buried in paper, chasing invoices and posting entries by hand. Today the accountant opens one screen, and the numbers are already there, reconciled overnight. Instead of finishing the month-end close, the accountant is with the managing director, explaining what the figures mean.
This is one of the biggest changes in the history of the profession, and it is not only about technology. It is also about new business models, higher expectations, stronger ethics, and new skills, driven by digital systems, automation, artificial intelligence, data, sustainability and ESG reporting, evolving standards, globalisation and tax reform, tools such as blockchain, and, above all, people with the right knowledge. Start with the digital shift. Paper ledgers and manual journals are quietly disappearing. Transactions flow into cloud-based systems where the general ledger updates in real time, and a month-end close that once took two weeks can be done in hours. The role of the accountant shifts from recording to explaining. This makes the profession more valuable to business.
Close behind sits automation. Rule-based software now handles repetitive work that once filled the day: matching invoices to purchase orders, posting journal entries, running bank reconciliations, and processing payables. This frees skilled people from data entry for judgment, analysis, and advice. Artificial intelligence pushes this further, working through huge volumes of data in seconds. It can draft financial statements, forecast cash flow, and support audits by testing the full population of transactions rather than a sample, strengthening assurance. But AI is still a tool, not a replacement. It does not understand the culture of a company and cannot exercise professional judgment. The real story is humans working with machines.
That partnership matters most with data. Every business now produces more information than it can use, and the hard part is no longer gathering it but making sense of it, where management and cost accounting come into their own. Variance analysis and reliable forecasting turn a scorekeeper into a strategist. Investors, regulators, and the public now want to know not just how much a company earns, but how responsibly. Reporting on emissions, energy use, waste, staff wellbeing, diversity, and governance is becoming as important as the income statement. For Bangladesh, where exporters answer to global buyers, this is already a commercial reality.
Globalisation adds another layer. As local firms trade and raise capital across borders, they meet transfer pricing rules, multiple tax regimes, and the global minimum tax on multinationals. Tax administration is going digital too, with e-invoicing and real-time VAT reporting reshaping compliance. Accountants who understand both local rules and international practice will be in high demand. Running through all of it are trust and good governance. As money and records move online, so do the dangers, from cyber-attacks to digital fraud. Strong internal controls and protection of confidential information are now core duties, not afterthoughts. Ethics will stay at the heart of everything: financial information shapes the choices of lenders, employees, and the public. AI can calculate, but it cannot supply honesty or a sense of the public interest. As tools become more powerful, ethical leadership matters more, not less.
The accountant of tomorrow will not simply ask what happened last year. He or she will answer what is happening now and what the business should do next, as adviser, risk manager, and partner. For young people entering the profession, this is a real opportunity: not to race against AI, but to use it wisely while building the human qualities no machine can copy.
The writer is an economic analyst
