By Christian Furness, published 9 August 2026
There was a glorious period in British accountancy when knowing how to perform a VLOOKUP made you practically indispensable.
You were the keeper of ancient knowledge.
Colleagues approached your desk bearing broken spreadsheets. You pressed several keys, frowned thoughtfully at the screen and occasionally muttered something about an absolute cell reference.
Then you fixed it.
They returned to their desks believing they had witnessed sorcery.
Sadly, progress has intervened.
Artificial intelligence, automation, data analytics and increasingly sophisticated finance systems are changing accounting, audit and tax at considerable speed. Work that once occupied a respectable portion of somebody's Thursday afternoon can increasingly be completed before they've finished making the tea.
Which raises an awkward question for anyone currently working in the UK profession:
Will the skills that make me valuable today still make me valuable in 2030?
Mostly.
But probably not in quite the same way.
Accounting isn't disappearing.
Audit isn't disappearing.
Tax certainly isn't disappearing. Governments have shown remarkably little enthusiasm for simplifying that.
But where the value sits within these professions is changing.
Routine processing is becoming easier to automate. Information is becoming cheaper to obtain. Analysis is becoming faster.
So attempting to compete with a computer on computational speed is probably an unwise career strategy.
The computer doesn't need lunch, doesn't have annual leave and has never announced at 4.47pm on month-end that it needs to leave early because the dog is at the vet.
The better strategy is to become exceptionally good at the things technology struggles to replicate.
Judgement. Commercial understanding. Curiosity. Communication. Relationships. Scepticism. Influence.
And knowing when something is complete cobblers.
Here are ten skills we believe accounting, audit and tax professionals should be developing now.
1. Learn to Use AI Before Someone Half Your Age Does It for You
Let's establish something immediately.
Typing:
"Please make this email sound more professional."
into ChatGPT does not make you an AI strategist.
Useful?
Absolutely.
A digital transformation programme?
Probably not.
Finance professionals should now be actively investigating how artificial intelligence can improve their actual work.
That might include analysing data, investigating variances, researching technical subjects, summarising documents, producing first drafts, scenario modelling, identifying anomalies and automating repetitive processes.
The important word, however, is assist.
Because AI has a fascinating characteristic.
It can occasionally be completely wrong while sounding like the most confident person in the room.
Anyone who has attended enough board meetings will recognise the phenomenon.
The future accountant therefore needs two AI skills.
First:
How do I use it?
Second:
How do I know when it's talking rubbish?
The second may ultimately prove more valuable.
Use AI.
Embrace it.
Experiment with it.
But retain enough professional knowledge to know whether the answer it has produced bears any relationship to reality.
2. Become Properly Good With Data
Excel isn't dead.
There is no need for a funeral service.
But being the person who knows how to create a pivot table may no longer guarantee legendary status within Finance.
Professionals should increasingly understand tools and concepts such as:
Power Query, Power BI, ERP systems, cloud accounting platforms, dashboards, data visualisation and data governance.
Some will go further into SQL, Python and automation.
You don't necessarily need to become a programmer.
But you should understand where your numbers come from.
Because few things puncture the atmosphere of a confident board presentation faster than this exchange:
CEO: "Where does the £14.7 million forecast come from?"
Finance: "The spreadsheet."
CEO: "Yes. Where does the spreadsheet get it?"
Finance: "Steve."
This is not data governance.
Understand the systems.
Understand the data.
Understand how the data entered the systems.
And, ideally, establish who Steve is.
3. Find Out How Your Employer Actually Makes Money
This sounds obvious.
It isn't.
There are finance professionals who can explain every line of the balance sheet but couldn't confidently explain why customers buy the company's products.
That is dangerous.
Imagine two accountants presenting identical management accounts.
Accountant One says:
"Gross margin has fallen from 31.8% to 29.6%."
Correct.
Thank you.
Everyone with functioning eyesight can see that on page seven.
Accountant Two says:
"Margin has fallen because supplier costs increased, our sales mix moved towards lower-margin products and we're discounting too heavily in three categories. If we address those areas, there's a significant opportunity to recover margin."
Now the meeting becomes interesting.
The first accountant has described the accounts.
The second understands the business.
Learn about customers.
Learn about competitors.
Learn about products, pricing, sales, supply chains, operations, working capital and cash conversion.
Spend time with people outside Finance.
Find out what Sales actually does.
It may come as a surprise to both departments.
Ask Operations what frustrates them.
Talk to customers if you get the opportunity.
Understand what keeps the Managing Director awake at 3am.
Don't just understand the accounts. Understand what caused them.
That is commerciality.
4. Stop Being the Official Historian of Bad News
Finance is extraordinarily good at telling businesses what happened last month.
Revenue was down.
Costs were up.
Margin deteriorated.
Debtor days increased.
Excellent.
Unfortunately, last month is proving stubbornly resistant to management intervention.
The greater opportunity is to help the organisation understand what happens next.
Businesses increasingly need finance professionals who can answer:
Why did it happen?
Is it going to continue?
What happens if our assumptions are wrong?
What can we change?
What should we do now?
This means developing forecasting, scenario planning, modelling and decision-support skills.
It also requires curiosity.
Your management accounts shouldn't simply inform the business that it has driven into a tree.
Finance should ideally have spotted the tree some distance down the road and said:
"You might want to turn left."
5. Perfect the Professional Art of Saying: "Hang On..."
As technology becomes more capable, professional judgement becomes more important.
Not less.
Imagine your shiny new AI forecasting system announces that EBITDA will increase by 63% next year.
There are two possible responses.
Response A:
"Fantastic. Put it on slide four."
Response B:
"Hang on. Why?"
Be Response B.
Computers can produce answers remarkably quickly.
Humans still have to determine whether those answers make sense.
Ask:
What assumptions are being made?
What's missing?
Where did the information come from?
What happens if we're wrong?
Does this conclusion make commercial sense?
And occasionally:
"Has somebody accidentally included France twice?"
Professional scepticism has always been fundamental to audit.
Versions of it will become increasingly valuable everywhere.
The ability to recognise that something doesn't smell right is extraordinarily difficult to automate.
Particularly when everybody else desperately wants the answer to be right.
6. Learn to Speak Human
The accounting profession has created a magnificent language.
EBITDA.
WACC.
ROCE.
DSO.
Accruals.
Deferred tax.
Impairment.
Working-capital normalisation.
Perfectly understandable to finance professionals.
To everybody else, it can sound like somebody reading aloud from an IKEA instruction manual in Swedish.
Consider:
"The adverse working-capital movement principally reflects deterioration in debtor days."
Perfectly accurate.
Alternatively:
"Customers are paying us more slowly and it's tying up our cash."
Same problem.
Far greater likelihood that somebody does something about it.
The strongest finance professionals will increasingly be translators.
They will turn financial complexity into commercial simplicity.
Learn to present.
Learn to write.
Learn to negotiate.
Learn to tell stories with numbers.
Learn to influence people who don't report to you.
And learn to explain complicated things without producing a 47-slide PowerPoint presentation entitled:
FINAL Board Presentation v9 FINAL FINAL2.pptx
If you can't explain the central point simply, there's a reasonable possibility you don't understand it yet.
7. Tax Professionals: Become the Person They Ring Before They've Done It
There are two types of telephone call a tax adviser can receive.
The first begins:
"We're thinking about doing something..."
The second begins:
"We've done something..."
You want the first one.
Tax compliance will continue to become increasingly technology-enabled.
But tax itself remains gloriously complicated.
Which means the opportunity increasingly lies in interpretation, judgement and advice.
There is a substantial difference between saying:
"Your tax liability is £84,700."
and:
"You're considering three ways of structuring this transaction. Let me explain the tax implications, risks and opportunities associated with each."
The first calculates the consequences of somebody else's decision.
The second helps shape the decision.
Develop technical expertise.
Develop commercial understanding.
Understand tax technology.
Learn to communicate complicated legislation in language that doesn't cause the client to stare silently out of the window.
Become the adviser clients telephone before signing the contract.
Not six months afterwards with the immortal opening:
"We've done something and our accountant thinks there might be a tax issue."
There usually is.
8. Auditors: Find Out What Produced the Number
Audit is changing too.
Technology can increasingly analyse much larger populations of transactions and identify anomalies that previously required substantial manual work.
This doesn't make auditors redundant.
It changes what good auditing looks like.
Tomorrow's strongest auditors will increasingly understand:
systems, controls, data analytics, IT controls, AI governance, fraud risk, cyber risk, valuations, business models and going concern.
The question isn't merely:
"Is this number correct?"
It is increasingly:
"What produced this number, what controls surround the process and why should I trust it?"
This is particularly important when the evidence supporting the number is contained in a spreadsheet called:
FINAL_v3_USE_THIS_FINAL_v2_UPDATED.xlsx
Nobody knows who created it.
Nobody wants to delete it.
And somewhere within it is a formula linked to a laptop belonging to somebody called Graham who left the business in 2019.
Welcome to systems auditing.
9. Become the Accountant People Actually Want in the Meeting
This one contains almost no technology whatsoever.
Which is precisely why it matters.
Build relationships.
Information is becoming cheaper.
Trust isn't.
The Finance Director who can persuade Operations to change behaviour is valuable.
The auditor who can challenge a CFO without triggering a diplomatic incident is valuable.
The tax adviser whom the CEO rings before signing something is valuable.
The management accountant whom Sales voluntarily invites into a meeting is bordering on miraculous.
These people have something technology struggles to reproduce.
Credibility.
They listen.
They ask intelligent questions.
They understand what other people are trying to achieve.
They can disagree without becoming disagreeable.
They know when to challenge and when to listen.
And they don't regard every conversation with another department as an opportunity to remind them that they're £6,421 over budget.
Become interested in people.
They are inconvenient, irrational and occasionally baffling.
They also run every business you've ever worked for.
10. Stop Thinking Your Job Description Is Your Career
This might be the most important point.
Your current responsibilities aren't your career.
They're simply the things somebody currently pays you to do.
Technology changes.
Businesses change.
Markets change.
Job descriptions change.
So instead of asking:
"What am I responsible for?"
ask:
"What problems am I capable of solving?"
The traditional accounting career might be represented as:
Transactions → Accounts → Compliance → Reporting
The developing finance career increasingly looks like:
Data → Analysis → Insight → Explanation
The highest-value finance professionals are moving towards:
Technology → Insight → Judgement → Influence → Decision → Value
Notice something?
"Completing the monthly reconciliation 14% faster than Kevin" doesn't appear near the end.
Kevin should probably also read this article.
The Sheridan Maine 2030 Career MOT
It is therefore time for a completely unofficial, unregulated and almost certainly statistically indefensible career assessment.
Score yourself from one to ten in each area.
Technical expertise
Do you genuinely know your stuff, or are you extremely good at finding last year's working paper?
AI literacy
Can you use AI productively and safely — and recognise when it's making things up?
Data
Can you interrogate information rather than merely move it between spreadsheets?
Systems
Do you know where the numbers actually come from?
Commerciality
Do you understand how your employer or client makes money?
Analysis
Can you explain why something happened?
Judgement
Will you challenge an answer that doesn't make sense?
Communication
Can a reasonably intelligent non-accountant understand you?
Relationships
Do people seek your advice before making decisions?
Curiosity
Are you learning anything that your current job doesn't actually require?
Now add up the scores.
80–100: The Finance Professional of Tomorrow
Excellent.
Your only immediate career-development requirement may be learning how not to mention your score to everybody.
60–79: In Decent Shape
The foundations are there.
Identify the weakest two areas and work deliberately on them.
40–59: Warning Light Showing
Nothing catastrophic.
But it might be time to stop attending webinars entitled The Future of Finance while simultaneously doing exactly the same job in exactly the same way.
Under 40: Please Report to the Finance Museum
Do not panic.
But somebody may shortly place a small card next to your desk saying:
"Traditional Management Accountant, circa 2014. Note the dual monitors and extensive use of Excel."
Development is recommended.
So, Will AI Replace Accountants?
It is the question everyone asks.
We think it's the wrong question.
The better question is:
Which parts of my current job will technology eventually perform better than I can?
And then:
What can I become exceptionally good at that becomes more valuable because that technology exists?
Accounting isn't disappearing.
Audit isn't disappearing.
Tax isn't disappearing.
But value within those professions is moving.
Routine processing becomes easier.
Information becomes cheaper.
Analysis becomes faster.
Which pushes human value towards:
judgement, curiosity, commercial understanding, communication, relationships and decision-making.
The accountant of the future will not necessarily be the person who calculates the answer fastest.
That competition is over.
The calculator won years ago.
The spreadsheet subsequently humiliated us.
AI is merely continuing the tradition.
The valuable professional will be the person who looks at the answer and asks:
"Why?"
Then:
"Does it make sense?"
Then:
"What does it mean for the business?"
And finally:
"What are we going to do about it?"
That is considerably harder to automate.
And considerably more valuable.
One Final Question Before You Accept Your Next Job
Salary matters.
Title matters.
Location matters.
Hybrid working matters.
Career progression matters.
Whether the office coffee tastes vaguely like coffee rather than something extracted from a radiator also matters.
But there's another question worth asking before accepting your next accounting, audit or tax position:
"What will this job teach me that will make me more valuable five years from now?"
Because the safest career strategy isn't trying to preserve your current job indefinitely.
It's continually developing into the person required for the next one.
At Sheridan Maine, we work with accounting, audit and tax professionals across the UK, helping people find opportunities that don't simply represent their next job, but the next stage of their career.
Because the objective isn't merely to survive the changes coming to the profession.
It's to arrive in 2030 considerably more valuable than you are today.
Preferably without being displayed in the Finance Museum.
