Semi or Full Retirement for Bookkeepers (Part 2)

More thoughts on my eventual retirement

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

For those who have read the last piece about my eventual semi-retirement, A Big Thank you. I’ve been trying to come up with different ideas to write about here to add to the podcast, but this one, based on comments and emails, was important to alot of people. So, I will continue on the same idea, but in a different way.

I recently read an article about a company called Fondo. This is a company that started about 4 years ago, during the worst of the pandemic, and now they have about 1200 customers on a subscription basis. They are an accounting firm that uses A.I. to do bookkeeping and accounting.

The idea came from David Phillips, who has obviously followed the accounting field and have run the numbers. 75% of CPA’s are expected to retire in the next decade (or less) and far fewer college graduates want to go into the accounting field. Technology has a potential of making more money, for one reason. Fondo , with its 1200 customers makes an annual revenue of around $6 million dollars and is profitable.

The general idea of automation being used in bookkeeping, I first heard about in 2012 or 2013, when I attended a once a month QuickBooks Pro Advisor meeting in person, before virtual became common. Everyone thought it was 25 years in the future, but the speaker was serious about the idea that it would come much sooner than that. He was right.

There are other companies in the A.I. automated bookkeeping and accounting field such as Pilot, Digits, Finally, and Bench.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

In the 30 years that I have been teaching QuickBooks Online and Desktop and doing bookkeeping, I have always had a relationship-based business. Not just entering numbers and running reports, but just by instict, I knew that I wanted to do more than that for my clients. Personal attention, caring about the books, working with their accountant or tax preparer whenever possible for a fair price (and most of the time I even have undercharged my clients).

Now that A.I. bookkeeping and accounting is a reality, albeit, in the very beginning stages, which is making me see that maybe in my lifetime, the job that I’ve loved for the past few deacdes is going to all but disappear. I am not feeling that yet, as even during Thanksgiving weekend, a client of mine recommended me to someone who needed bookkeeping done. But I know that eventually, people will gravitate to the new-fangled way to do bookkeeping and accounting. The job of a bookkeeper may just change to more relationship based consulting to explain reports and teach people better ways of running their businesess, which is what I have been doing for a long time by instict along with the bookkeeping services. So, if I wasn’t at my advanced age, maybe there would be space for me in the field still.

Now, I have regrets. Regrets that weren’t my fault, but regrets all the same. I was in the retail business managing a Radio Shack for 2 years, among lots of sales jobs that I loved, and my favorite part was ringing up a sale and giving change to someone who paid cash. I loved, as a manager of a Radio Shack, filling out the form with the daily sales, returns, sales tax collected, etc. and forwarding that to the Radio Shack Brass. But I never put it together that I loved the accounting and bookkeeping part of retail, as well as talking to clients and educating them on the differences between VHS and BETA and LASER DISKS (you might not remember those - they were short lived). Education and accounting. My talents went right over my head.

When I discovered bookkeeping, it was 1993. I stumbled into it. (the whole story is in my backstory episode on the podcast). The Link is below:

A Bookkeepers Adventure (My back story)

I loved it, and knew that I had a natural apptitude for it. By 1995, I had taken an NYU course in bookkeeping and was able to apply the knowledge that I learned on a Tuesday night to work on Wednesday morning.

One of my regrets in life is that I didn’t discover it earlier, or realize that back in the 1970’s and early ‘80’s, it was staring me in the face, and I didn’t pick up on it. Not my fault, but it’s still a life’s regret. If I had discovered bookkeeping earlier, I would be able to do something that I love for more years.

I played classical violin from 2nd grade through 2 years of college, and really thought that was going to be my career, but gave it up because I didn’t want to practice 6 or 7 hours every day for the rest of my life. I also hated college learning things that I didn’t care about, even though I was in music school. I stumbled into the retail field in the 1970’s, loved it for a while, but something was missing. I was in and out of work, wasting a lot of time in life (again, not my fault, but it's still a regret) —- Until I discovered bookkeeping. It ended up being my final career, along with teaching bookkeeping, accounting and software—Peachtree (in the 90’s,) which lead to QuickBooks in the middle 1990’s to the present.

And now, rather than doing bookkeeping until I couldn’t physically sit at a desk and do it anymore, I am faced with the idea that the thing I love doing will be taken over by a computer. Yes, quite possible that the computer will save people on taxes, but it will also take away the personality, and intuititon that the bookkeeper and the tax preparer have based on their bookkeeping and tax knowledge, which I consider an art form.

My father, after being a film editor for 40 years, and inventing editing techniques that changed the stories of movies without shooting one frame or one scene more, decided to walk away from it, when the movieola was being replaced by the flatbed editor. It would help change the editing techniques forever, and now with the video and computer generated graphics being used, movie-making just isn’t the same as it used to be. And that’s the course that accounting and bookkeeping is heading to.

It makes one feel like our careers and our lives are meaningless in the big scheme of things, because of technology moving foward taking over everything.

I like technology in so many ways (if there were computers and I-Pads and tablets when I was growing up, I would have been a decent student), but without those tools, I only got through grade school because I played violin and had talent and impressed everyone so much that they just couldn’t leave me behind.

I love my computer, my tablet, my digital clocks, my streaming TV’s, my watch that tells me my heartbeat and my blood pressure. But when technology starts to hit my career love — the love that I have spent 50 hours a week doing for the past 20 years, that’s a body blow.

Maybe that’s why we all age. Eventually, I just won’t be able to sit at a desk and do bookkeeping anymore. I hope that doesn’t happen until I’m 90. For someone who checks all of the boxes in an Asberger Syndrome evaluation, routine is very important for me. Even if I take a day or two off from bookkeeping and the office, I feel lost. Vacations are fun, but also difficult for me at times. Even though some days are stressful at the office, and I get upset with clients, I dread the day that I will be forced to give it up because of age, or because my remaining clients will be having their bookkeeping done by A.I. I don’t think the latter will happen, I think that what will happen is that my clients will eventually grow older, sell or give up their businessess, and not need my, or anyone’s services. I have had 2 companies very recently go bankrupt and just like that, I lost them. But as of now, I have two new clients in the last couple of weeks, so its not slowing down yet, except for the clients who I voluntarily am walking away from.

But the idea that my career is finite, and my life is finite, and I have to figure out the first day of the rest of my life, even before bookkeeping and teaching end, is scary. I am, however, lucky, that I tried to plan that I don’t just do bookkeeping, and teaching bookkeeping, but also have a small business podcast which I can talk about things much more than bookkeeping (which I do - even an episode on the McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case of 1994). So, I hope that one day when I do go into ‘semi-retirement’, I will be filling up my days, part time, and enjoying better what life has to offer.