Accounting
The accounting profession’s complicated relationship with creativity.
You may not associate the accounting profession with creativity, but creative thinking has always been an essential skill for accountants. Navigating ambiguous business transactions, determining accounting treatments for unprecedented situations, and developing operational workflows requires more than subject matter expertise. It requires creative problem-solving abilities.
Routine accounting tasks such as assigning value to various elements of a bundled arrangement, attributing revenue to a free service period, or identifying an anomaly worth investigating, all require a level of creativity to form your professional judgement.
A prime example is the creative thinking involved to determine the accounting treatment for crypto currencies. It was the creative thinkers of the accounting world that proposed new rules to capitalize certain labor costs tied to internally developed technology. This fueled innovation and contributed to the tech boom of the 1980s.
Accounting needs creative professionals now more than ever. With the rise of artificial intelligence and outsourced labor, today’s accountants need to be forward-thinking advisors who drive innovation and add value in ways that can’t easily be outsourced or automated.
The
Ever since Enron’s notorious accounting scandal in 2001, being a “creative accountant” has had a negative connotation. It insinuates cooked books, shady dealings and compromised ethics. It’s such a career-ending quality that the accounting profession seemingly did everything it could to dissociate itself from creativity.
That approach has had unintended consequences. There’s a deeply rooted belief that accountants are boring and lack creativity and social skills. Those stereotypes are repelling college students at a level that threatens the livelihood of the profession. This has been a major contributing factor to the well-documented shortage of accountants in the pipeline.
Righting the ship
It’s time for accountants to reclaim their creative spirit. There’s a long history of accountants flexing their creativity and driving innovation. The founder of Nike and the inventor of bubble gum were accountants. Marvel poached Simu Liu from the Big Four, and Robert Plant and Mick Jagger were the rockstars of their accounting classes.
By embracing creative thinkers, the accounting profession can boost its appeal with students and better meet the evolving needs of its clients. Celebrate those that break the mold, challenge the status quo, and resist the “same as last year” practice. Praise the creative problem-solvers who find and implement process efficiencies, craft alternative procedures and identify automation opportunities. Instead of suppressing creativity, highlight it.
For those accountants who claim they’re not creative, I beg to differ. You’re likely more creative in your accounting work than you realize. It’s also important to recognize that creativity is a muscle that can be developed with practice. Here are a few exercises that accountants can use to sharpen their creative thinking skills.
1. Change your environment. It’s no coincidence that your best ideas come to you while you’re on a walk or taking a shower. A change in environment can stimulate creativity. Next time your team needs to brainstorm, skip the video call and opt for a phone call where everyone takes a walk. Create calendar blocks to dedicate time for thinking away from your desk. Reduce distractions and resist the urge to multi-task. These small changes will help to attract inspiration.
2. Encourage idea generation. Accountants tend to be perfectionists and that can stifle creativity. Oftentimes a perfect solution doesn’t exist, so try to take a “no idea is a bad idea” approach. That first idea is rarely the best one, so use a stream of consciousness to keep the ideas flowing. Your brain has limited working memory as well, so get those ideas down on paper to help free up your headspace. By breaking big problems into small ones, you’ll find that narrowing your focus helps to clear those mental roadblocks.
3. Utilize visual thinking and perspective-shifting. Using metaphors can be a great way to make sense of complexity. This could mean picturing the problem as an iceberg to surface hidden complications, a tree to help identify root causes or a staircase of individual steps that leads to a desired outcome. By analyzing why an idea is bad, you can uncover the changes needed to improve it. If you get stuck in granular details, zoom out and try to see the big picture of what you’re solving for.
Conclusion
Creative thinking has always been an essential skill for accountants, but it’s never been more important than it is today. It’s time to fully embrace creative thinkers and become the innovative and forward-thinking advisors that the business world demands.
By building a culture around innovation, the accounting profession can overcome outdated stereotypes and attract new joiners that are equipped to thrive in this rapidly evolving industry.
Matthias Balk/Photographer: Matthias Balk/pict
Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund has temporarily banned Big Four firm PwC from advisory and consulting services contracts, people familiar with matter said, halting the firm’s progress in one of the world’s most lucrative markets.
Executives at the $925 billion Public Investment Fund and its more than 100 subsidiaries have been told to stop handing out consulting projects to PwC until February 2026, the people said, declining to be identified as the information is confidential. The firm’s auditing projects will not be affected, they said.
The PIF did not explain reasons behind the move in messages sent to its portfolio companies. Representatives for the fund declined to comment, while a spokesperson for PwC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The PIF’s decision comes two years after PwC received a license to open its regional headquarters in the kingdom, where it employs more than 2,000 people across Riyadh, Jeddah, AlUla, Al Khobar and Dhahran. In the Middle East, the company operates from more than 20 locations.
PwC’s non-audit services span areas like mergers & acquisitions and tax advisory, alongside its strategy and consulting work. For its most recent fiscal year, the Middle East was the
The Middle East generated £1.97 billion ($2.5 billion) in revenue for the company in the twelve months to June 30, up 26% from the same period a year earlier. The firm said its accounting models assumed revenue growth would remain robust in the region in 2025 and 2026, though it conceded that it might not reach last year’s levels.
The region also ranks among the strongest globally based on revenue and profitability for the likes of McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group Inc. Business from the Saudi wealth fund has been a key driver of that growth.
The PIF is anchoring the kingdom’s economic transformation plan, Vision 2030, and has set up about 100 portfolio companies. That includes Neom, a $1.5 trillion new city on the west coast, as well as other multibillion-dollar projects aimed at building out historic areas like Diriyah and AlUla into tourist destinations.
That’s
Farmers and fishers who chose to forgo making estimated tax payments by January must generally file their 2024 federal income tax return and pay all taxes by March 3.
The usual March 1 deadline, which is a Saturday this year, is pushed back two days.
The March 3 deadline applies to anyone who qualifies as a farmer or fisher and did not make a 2024 estimated tax payment by last Jan. 15. Those who made a qualifying payment by that date can wait until the regular April 15, 2025, deadline to file and pay and still avoid estimated tax penalties.
A farmer or fisher is anyone who received at least two-thirds of their gross income from farming or fishing during either 2023 or 2024.
Taxpayers, including farmers and fishers, in disaster areas have more time to file and pay with an automatic extension. Taxpayers in the entire states of
KPMG today launched KPMG Law US, making it the first law firm owned by a Big Four firm in the U.S.
KPMG Law US will collaborate with KPMG’s global network of law firms, operating in more than 80 jurisdictions, to provide clients with legal managed services, legal operations consulting and legal technology innovation. It will provide legal services powered by artificial intelligence and KPMG Digital Gateway, a cloud-based and generative AI-enabled platform that serves as a “control tower” for a company’s tax and legal data and provides advanced analytics and reporting capabilities.
The law firm will operate as an independently managed subsidiary of KPMG LLP and maintain strategic alignment with the KPMG LLP Tax practice. It will build on the established presence of KPMG in Arizona, which currently serves over 100 clients.
“KPMG Law US is uniquely positioned to transform the delivery of legal services,” Rema Serafi, Vice Chair of tax at KPMG, said in a
KPMG
“We have been studying Arizona’s structure for years, and we’re excited by the possibility that it presents to us,” KPMG Tax principal Tom Greenaway, the designated principal on the application, said during a Jan. 14 court hearing. “We think the time is right now for us, given the advances that we have made in technology and the maturity of this market. We really think that we can bring innovation and a complete set of integrated legal solutions to our clients and to other clients here in Arizona.”
Aprio, a private equity-backed Top 25 Firm based in Atlanta, is taking advantage of the same law by joining with Radix Law in Arizona to form
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