Facing an Automated Future: How small U.S. bookkeepers are adapting to changing accounting technology

Automation through the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to accounting technology is profoundly transforming the ways small bookkeepers accomplish their work. Many small bookkeepers express fear around their increasing economic precarity, especially regarding future sustainability of their jobs and businesses. Bookkeepers’ believe these changes will actually lead to the loss of their jobs, rather than the transformed roles promised by technology companies and thought leaders. In this paper, I examine how small, U.S. bookkeepers are coping with and adapting to changing accounting technology, and how those reactions are constructed and informed by larger social and economic processes.

Research Strategy

• Literature Review

• Participant recruitment

  • Completed through in person networking and recruitment and virtual networking through online bookkeeping communities

• Semi-structured interviews

  • Mostly completed remotely via video conferencing software

  • Through my interviews, I collected data on:

    • Business and work history, including how they started their business

    • Impact of technology on their bookkeeping work and on how they run their businesses, both positively and negatively

    • Bookkeepers’ business community - who they go to for different kinds of support and how technology has impacted they ways they connect with their community

    • Thoughts on the future, including optimistic, pessimistic, and realistic ideas of what the future of the bookkeeping industry might look like.

• Ethnographic observations & Informal interviews

  • Attended two major accounting and technology conferences, where I attended main stage presentations, breakout sessions, networking events, and spoke to accounting technology vendors.

• Qualitative pattern analysis (MAXQDA)

  • Began with manually identifying large themes I saw emerging as I completed interviews and observations in a large list.

  • Used my initial list as a starting point to create a comprehensive codebook.

  • Read through my interviews and observation fieldnotes and used MAXQDA to qualitatively group and code my data.

  • Used post-it notes to pull themes from my analysis and used those to play with ways the story of bookkeepers, technology, and their community could be told.

This project is in progress! Please check back in May 2021 for the final report.

Until then, you may enjoy this blog post I wrote part way through my research, ‘Opening Up an Inflection Point: Bookkeepers’ Narratives and Communities Facing New Robot Overlords’