Staff Acceptance of New Technology Dramatically Reduces Error Rates
The survey of 497 individuals working in the controllership function, conducted in July 2023, revealed that these errors were closely linked to concerns about low capacity.
“While capacity issues aren’t new to accounting, demands on accounting staff capacity continue to rise. In the past three years, 73% of accountants report that their workload has increased because of new regulations, and 82% say economic volatility has increased demands for their work,” said Mallory Barg Bulman, senior director, research in the Gartner Finance practice. “If these financial and regulatory pressures continue to increase, as history suggests it will, the already-limited capacity accountants will be stretched further and increase error rates.”
The survey asked accountants how often they or their peers made common errors such as those due to manual work, automation, those made by other internal business partners, insufficient review, reopening books, misinterpretation, or volume/complexity overload.
“Financial errors can have tangible business consequences. When accountants make errors — and those errors make their way into the monthly or quarterly close — the enterprise may make business decisions based on incorrect data or, worse, issue inaccurate financial statements,” said Bulman.
Acceptance of Technology Drives Down Error Rates
Technology acceptance in this context is defined by four elements, users must find it easy to use, easy to learn, easy to customize for their own needs, and it must have all the information the user needs in one view. Companies that digitize with high technology acceptance for their technology environments see a 75% reduction in financial errors.
“In this survey, 73% of accountants felt that the technology available to them is missing one or more of the four elements of acceptance,” said Bulman. “The accounting functions that are managing to build technology acceptance don’t necessarily have different technology: building acceptance is more to do with putting in place practices that allow staff to perceive technology as easy to use and helpful.”
Gartner experts recommend three best practices to build technology acceptance:
- Incorporate structured staff feedback into vendor testing and prioritizing technology enhancements.
- Replace old behaviors with new ones and lean on tenured staff to guide the way.
- Provide transparency into errors and the resolution of errors.
“Given the potential of technology acceptance to reduce error rates in accounting, controllers should make sure they understand the levels of acceptance in their functions and improve it where necessary,” said Bulman.
