Where is accountancy going? - Richard Murphy

14th March 2025

I've been senior partner of a firm, a director of a number of profoundly entrepreneurial companies, a founder of a number of campaigning organisations related to accounting issues, a professor of accounting, and even spent nearly a decade along the way as a contributing editor to AccountingWEB, although the vast majority of the articles that I wrote did not appear under my name. There is, I can assure you, a long story behind that.

There's another long story about me probably being the only person on the planet right now who can make a reasonable claim to having created a new form of accounting that is now legally required in more than 70 countries - which is the country-by-country reporting system used for large company tax reporting.

The great advantage of this journey through accounting is that it provides me with is an insight into change. Over those 50 years, accounting has changed enormously, and at the same time, in some ways but not a lot.

The tech and software that some of the people around here today can supply was unimaginable when I prepared those first accounts with a manual calculator equipped with a till roll, a pencil, a rubber and sixteen column analysis paper, for those of you old enough to remember the stuff.

Back then, if the accounts did not balance and they frequently did not, it was all down to my inability.

Now, the tech does not let that happen.

However, and let me stress this point incredibly strongly. In 1975 you had to know the techniques of accounting inside out. There was no other way to do it. The double entry was all down to you.

Is that really the case now? I don't know.

If you got this far read the full eye opening article
HERE