For thirty years, the profession was organised around one task: turning a pile of receipts into journal entries. It is that task, and that task alone, that automation has made disappear.
What has really disappeared
Collection, first. Receipts are picked up where they are — inboxes, sales platforms, banks — without anyone having to forward them. Reading, next: amount, VAT, supplier and account are extracted more reliably than a human keying them in at the end of the quarter.
What is left, and is not going away
A model suggests a treatment. It does not decide. The difference seems subtle until the first tax audit, when someone has to explain why a given expense was deducted.
- The positions: depreciation, provisions, how to classify a mixed-use expense.
- The edge cases: what the history of the file cannot settle on its own.
- The responsibility: a tax return is signed by a person, not by software.
What it means for a small business
The price of a set of books goes down, because producing them costs less. But that is not the real difference: it lies in the time your contact can finally spend on your situation rather than on your data entry.
The right question to ask a firm is no longer “how much does bookkeeping cost?” but “how much time will you give me, and to talk about what?”.