Accountants mess up on the daily, per new Gartner survey

Accountants—they’re just like us. Well, in the sense that they make costly mistakes on the regular.

18% of accountants make financial mistakes at least daily, according to a newly published Gartner study conducted in July 2023.

The survey polled just under 500 respondents working in the controllership function, and screw-ups were the name of the game: A third of accountants made errors a few times weekly, while 59% said they made several errors every month. Hard relate.

But these mistakes aren’t necessarily the result of pure recklessness or oversight, per the survey. A closer look revealed many errors were associated with capacity constraints.

“While capacity issues aren’t new to accounting, demands on accounting staff capacity continue to rise,” Mallory Barg Bulman, senior director of research in the Gartner Finance practice, said in a statement tied to the report. “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.”

Should those economic and regulatory pressures persist, Bulman added that “the already-limited capacity accountants will be stretched further and increase error rates.”

And, unfortunately, some attempts to close the gap are coming up short: The survey noted that “efforts to increase capacity through finance technology have not yielded the expected gains.” Gartner experts prodded into what might actually improve the likelihood of tech tools reducing errors, and they found that user acceptance of the tech was a key ingredient, per Bulman.

Gartner defined technology acceptance by four central pillars: Users need to find it easy to use, learn, and customize. Additionally, all necessary information needs to be viewable in one place.

“It stood out that when users displayed acceptance of the technology they were using in accounting, they used it much more effectively, realized capacity improvements, and made significantly fewer errors,” she added. But 73% of accountants thought their available tech stack was missing “one or more of the four elements of acceptance,” Bulman noted.

And that’s a crucial reminder for finance chiefs considering AI and other tech investments. “It’s better to have less technology with a workforce that accepts it than to have the cutting edge of technology and resistant employees,” Bulman said.