Data analytics is the practice of taking a 360-degree view of a problem or situation. One does so by collecting, examining, and organizing all related data to extract meaningful information. Accounting professionals deal with volumes of data every daycash receipts, checks, bank statements, invoices, and moreto produce financial statements. Analytics tools help them dig into financial statements and other nonfinancial data to make predictions and recommend corrective actions. Accountants use data analytics to help businesses uncover valuable insights within their financials, identify process improvements that can increase efficiency, and better manage risk. Entry-level accounting jobs, such as collecting and logging records of business transactions, have already been partially or fully automated. Analytics is now helping accountants perform more complex tasks such as inspecting financial records for fraud and analyzing yearly financial statements. There are different examples, depending on what role you have as an accountant, auditors or tax accountants can benefit from having this skill. Auditors, both those working internally and externally, can shift from a sample-based model to employ continuous monitoring where much larger data sets are analyzed and verified. The result: less margin of error resulting in more precise recommendations. Tax accountants use data science to quickly analyze complex taxation questions related to investment scenarios. In turn, investment decisions can be expedited, which allows companies to respond faster to opportunities to beat their competition and the market to the punch. Accountants who assist, or act as, investment advisors use big data to find behavioral patterns in consumers and the market. These patterns can help businesses build analytic models that, in turn, help them identify investment opportunities and generate higher profit margins.

I have the opportunity to work at a firm where I can use data analytics for both audit and tax. I am mostly working with the tax department, which I am able to use data analytics for a lot of tax planning for our clients, but I have had the privilege to work on some audits and I have been able to use data analytics to evaluate large data sets and invoices to verify accuracy within the firm we are auditing.