Remember the old days? Forms shipped off to service bureaus? Is it possible that manual data entry will seem as quaint within a few years?
Manual data entry, of course, won’t completely go away. But the volume of work that must be done that way, in particular in the preparation of tax returns, will diminish substantially and it’s not going to take very long.
The combination of a shortage of CPAs and professional employees and the gains that can be made by reclaiming the time spent punching numbers into tax preparation software will drive this change because the results of automation will be so obvious to firms, whose business depends on the billable hour.
The hints have been there for some time. Intuit, with its consumer TurboTax software, started piloting a program a few years ago in which W-2 information could be automatically pulled from a variety of Web sites.
Thomson Tax and Accounting (the part formerly known as Creative Solutions) came out last fall with technology that lets data from barcoded W-2s and 1099s be put into the tax forms. In November, Intuit moved in the same direction with Source Doc Auto-Entry, which lets accountants scan and import client data from common tax documents and import it directly into both the Lacerte and ProSeries packages.
Change is in the wind and it’s blowing like a hurricane. Unfortunately, it’s likely to hit in a way that, instead of giving any firm an advantage, makes automated data-entry something simply required to play the game.
