How to partner with AI as an accountant

John Toon explains how his interest in technology led from studying AAT to his Strategist role.

Among the many sessions at this year’s Festival of Accounting and Bookkeeping, two stood out as especially interesting. “The Future is Now: Embracing Game-Changing Technologies,” made the challenge clear, while “Is AI Really Going to Change Everything?” posed an intriguing question.

Both panels featured John Toon MAAT, Technology Strategy Lead at Beever and Struthers. In that role, Toon has built on the foundations of his AAT qualification to become one of the UK’s leading accounting technology strategists. And his career arc points to an interesting development, as more accountants focus on how they can use technology to assist in their work.

Taking the lead

“The core part of what I do is to lead on our technology strategies,” he says. “So that means everything from the client-facing stuff that we do to the operational side of the business and the advisory part of our business to clients. I’m in charge of setting the strategy for that. And that’s a strategy that gets written and reviewed every couple of years because technology changes so quickly in our space.”

Headquartered in Manchester, Beever Struthers employs over 100 staff, with offices in Birmingham and London. In the past five years it’s become a model of a tech-savvy accounting firm, developing in-house systems and processes. Employing experts in data science, data analytics, data engineering, software development and engineering, it also has client-side advisory teams to consult on systems and software solutions.

“Those services tend to focus on technology solutions, mainly finance-based because we’re accountants, but we do also do CRM and HR systems and other operational systems,” says Toon. “And again, it’s a mixture of selling and implementing new technologies, but also helping with review of process and systems.”

The way ahead

Looking at his current role, Toon has carved out a niche that may offer a roadmap for those accountants aiming to work more closely with technology. “What larger firms like ours are actually doing more around data and analytics is an opportunity,” he says. As technology advances, having established a data analytics team within the firm specifically for audit, Toon’s horizons have been broadened as the firm grows.

“It’s not just audit where we need to consider data, it’s actually the whole process,” he says. “So what I think was new for the industry and for the firm, and probably still is to a degree, is that you’ll find cloud accounting specialists and data teams in lots of firms, which are typically aligned around audit. You will also sometimes find software engineering skills in firms, but they tend to be isolated, and don’t work together collectively.

Toon has tackled that, bringing teams together to offer a more coherent technology offering to client.  “As a consequence I think we deliver more quickly in terms of opportunity development and project management.”

It also helped secure funding from ICAS to run a 12-month program looking at the use of large language models (LLMs) and how they affect professional judgment. The was based on B&S’s knowledge transfer partnership that specifically focuses on technology in its broader sense in the audit practice.

What people get wrong with AI

Since then, stints at various firms and a spell as a portfolio FD have helped Toon acquire a broad understanding of the kinds of disruption, challenge and opportunity accountants and their clients are likely to face as technology seeps into more aspects of business. And AI, the biggest one of the lot, is giving many pause for thought.

“I do think that we hear a lot about AI, but actually with not a lot of substance attached, which is frustrating,” he says. “the reality is AI as an umbrella term, and accounting firms have been using that for probably quite a long time.”

“The AI conversation is now all about large language models (LLMs) and fun stuff like ChatGPT and Gemini. But the reality is that accounting practices and businesses in general struggle to find use cases. And that’s down to a number of reasons, but mainly it’s because a lot of firms have thought, ‘I’m not really sure what it does, so I’m going to experiment with it and just spread it around everywhere and let 50 people go away and play with this with no real structure around what they’re trying to achieve.’”

How to use AI effectively

Instead, Toon says businesses that focus on problem-solving have much more success in utilising LLMs. Identifying a use case or problem with internal experience and research conducted through the HRB network and then experimenting with solutions is the way to go.

For instance, he cites the team’s creation of a proof of concept of effectively an LLM-powered chatbot to do personal tax returns. “We’ll continue to experiment and refine it, so that we can put it in the hands of some of our clients and develop it as more of a commercial product for us – and potentially free up some of our internal team.”

Progressing from AAT

As he looks back, Toon says his path to tech strategist began with a year out after A-levels, followed by the decision to try out AAT Level 2.

“What it gave me was an incredible grounding in accounting, from the very basics up. And when I started to fast-track into ACA, I was streets ahead of all these other students who had been off to university and studied for an accounting degree or whatever in terms of work experience, but also practical and exam experience. And so I was running audits before I finished my AAT qualification, which I did over about two and a half years.”

A good decision? “I absolutely loved it.”

Christian Doherty is a business journalist and freelance writer for AAT.