Is the world moving too fast for accountants?

Kevin Phillips argues that the profession's commitment to accuracy might be holding businesses back from making the fast decisions they need to survive.

Imagine if we were to rank professions by speed, like we do with animals. Day traders would top the list, executing transactions in milliseconds. Emergency responders would follow close behind, making life-or-death decisions in seconds. Software teams that fix bugs typically react within hours.

And accountants? We'd likely rank towards the other end of the scale, somewhat ahead of geological surveyors and government agencies. We’re traditionally methodical, thorough, and reassuringly slow. This deliberate pace has long been a hallmark of our profession, and a distinct strength.

But what happens when the world changes faster than our methods can keep pace?

When the world moves faster than your forecasts

The reality is that traditional financial planning can’t keep up with the speed and variety of change today. By the time you've crafted that perfectly accurate forecast, the assumptions underpinning it have shifted multiple times over.

Consider what UK businesses have already experienced this year. US trade tariffs on UK goods have changed at least six to seven times in six months, with rates swinging from 0% to 35% depending on the sector. That's a major policy shift affecting planning assumptions roughly once every three weeks.

The impossible pursuit of accuracy

No traditional budgeting process can respond to that pace of change. What’s more, in today's environment, perfect accuracy isn't just difficult to achieve – it's impossible. The world moves so fast that forecasts become outdated before they reach the leadership team.

Yet many of us continue to pursue precision with the same dedication our predecessors applied to double-entry bookkeeping. We agonise over getting every line item exactly right, even when we know that external conditions will make those calculations meaningless within weeks, and probably even days.

But I’m not suggesting we abandon rigour. Instead, we need to recognise that maintaining traditional accuracy standards in a fast-changing world is doing our clients a disservice. The companies that will thrive today are those that trade some precision for the agility to respond quickly to change.

How then do we maintain professional rigour, and move fast enough to make a real business impact?

Embracing tolerance levels

The solution lies in integrated modelling. Instead of tackling hundreds of line items individually every time something changes, you set up a series of key assumptions that cascade through your financial model.

When something changes in the world, the assumption updates and this rolls through the affected line items in the income statement, including updating interdependencies, cash flow projections and scenarios.

Certain critical line items will inevitably require more detailed scrutiny, but even these can sometimes be handled with assumptions – if the speed gained outweighs the impact of the reduced accuracy. This is where your experience and training as an accountant come into play: every company will need a slightly different approach in terms of when to use assumptions, which assumptions are most relevant, and how to balance speed and accuracy.

The strategic opportunity

Get this right and you’ll give your client a significant competitive advantage. While competitors spend weeks updating traditional budgets, companies with assumption-based models can assess new scenarios within days and focus their expertise on strategic decisions rather than manual recalculations.

The organisations implementing these approaches typically see forecast updates taking hours, not days, gain real-time scenario modelling capability, and their finance teams are freed up to focus on opportunity identification.

The evidence for speed

If you're still questioning whether this trade-off between speed and precision is worth it, consider this: research shows that faster decisions tend to be higher, not lower, in quality. A 2019 McKinsey study showed that quicker decision makers are twice as likely to make better quality decisions than their slower counterparts. These companies also achieved better financial results, with the top performers realising returns of at least 20% from their recent decisions. This sentiment was also reflected in research from Orgvue, an organisational design and planning company, a year later.

Surprisingly, speed doesn't undermine good decision-making – it enables it.

Making the shift

We all know that today's pace of change is fast and unpredictable, and this is unlikely to end. But the choice isn't simply between speed and accuracy – it's about finding the right point on the continuum. More speed inevitably means accepting less accuracy, while pursuing greater accuracy requires moving more slowly.

The question becomes: where on that continuum does your organisation feel comfortable sitting? While profit metrics might encourage leaning more heavily towards the speed end, ultimately it comes down to personal choice and the organisational appetite for risk. The key is making that choice consciously rather than defaulting to traditional accuracy standards that may no longer serve your clients' needs.

As accountants, if we continue optimising for an accuracy that's no longer achievable, we risk our clients not surviving. Instead, we can help them build financial architectures that dial up agility and rapid response, without completely abandoning accuracy and rigour.

This starts with having the courage to loosen our grip on precision just enough to embrace the power of speed. And maybe, if anyone does ever publish my theoretical list of the speediest professions, we’ll move way clear of the geologists and governments!

As published AccountingWeb - August 2025