By Blake Doerr, Partner, Strategy & Technology at CCT
I have spent most of my career turning business problems into software, and that work has taught me that accountants deserve far more credit for how they think. I have had a close view of that way of thinking both professionally and personally: my wife is a CPA.
Before CCT, I worked in energy trading software. Many of the executives we worked with were CPAs or had accounting backgrounds. They understood the numbers, but they also understood how the entire business worked. That combination frequently put them in leadership positions.
Over the years, I started noticing the same qualities in the best accountants I worked with.
When they brought me a problem, they rarely stopped at telling me a number was wrong. They could usually identify the exact line where something changed, explain what the result should have been and offer a theory about what was happening behind the screen.
They had followed the problem almost all the way to the code.
The only thing they could not see was the technical logic underneath it.
Accountants and developers may appear to work very differently, but I have always thought they have more in common than most people realize. Both are problem-solvers. Both work within systems made up of rules and dependencies. Both know that one small error can create consequences somewhere else.
They simply use different tools to find the answer.
That relationship has shaped CCT’s software from its earliest days. CCT’s founders brought deep accounting and finance knowledge to the challenges casinos were trying to solve. I worked especially closely with Kurt Williams, a CPA, to translate the accounting logic behind those challenges into software.
Some of the earliest decisions behind Casino Insight came directly from the way an accountant thinks about the movement of money. If you transfer money from checking to savings, it cannot leave one account without arriving in the other. Both sides of the transaction have to succeed together.
The same principle applies inside a casino.
When value moves from a cashier to a patron, or from a cashier to the vault, the system has to account for both sides. If one side of the transaction fails, the entire transaction should fail.
That debit-and-credit structure became part of the foundation of the software. It did more than organize the accounting. It created a form of quality control inside the way the system worked.
A developer can make a transaction function technically. An accountant understands what must remain true financially when it does.
You need both perspectives to build reliable financial software.
Today, I see the same relationship in the way our Accounting Consultants and Technical Consultants work together.
Our Accounting Consultants understand casino finance, operational workflows and the expected result. When something is wrong, a strong Accounting Consultant can investigate until they reach the edge of what they can see. Historically, they would document what they found and hand the problem to a Technical Consultant.
The Technical Consultant would learn the accounting context, translate it into a technical question, investigate the software and then translate the answer back.
Sometimes that handoff is necessary. Our software connects with a large number of systems, and casinos have unique technical environments that require deep expertise.
But many problems reached the technical team when the Accounting Consultant had already completed most of the work. They knew what the software was doing. They knew what it should be doing. They simply lacked a way to examine the final technical layer themselves.
That is beginning to change.
New development tools are making technical capabilities available to people who may not have spent their careers writing code. Instead of learning every element of a programming language before they can begin, people can describe what they need in plain English.
I often say that English is becoming the new coding language. For accountants, that’s significant because they already know how to describe the problem with precision. They understand the business rules, the expected outcome and the conditions that cannot be violated. The technology gives them a way to carry that knowledge further into the solution.
We have been exploring this with our own Accounting Consultants. In some cases, they can now investigate the underlying logic, identify an issue and solve a problem that would have previously required a complete handoff to a Technical Consultant.
The Accounting Consultant becomes capable of solving more of the problem. The Technical Consultant gains more time for integrations, architecture and the unusual technical challenges where their expertise has the greatest impact.
While the capability was already present in both groups, the missing piece was a better bridge between them.
As technical skills become more accessible, the qualities that distinguish a strong builder are changing. Judgment matters more. Communication matters more. Understanding the person who will use the software matters more.
For financial software, accounting knowledge matters more.
An accountant understands that a technically successful result can still be financially wrong. They know which controls have to remain intact. They understand how information moves into financial reporting and how leaders will use it to make decisions.
That perspective should not enter the development process only after the software has been built. It should help shape what gets built in the first place.
CCT has always treated accounting knowledge as a technical discipline. Two of our four partners are CPAs, and we encourage employees with accounting backgrounds to continue developing that expertise. It strengthens the work because we are responsible for systems that help casinos account for an enormous amount of value every day.
Casino finance leaders should expect the people behind their technology to understand more than how the software runs. They should understand what the numbers represent, how those numbers move through the operation and why the balance has to hold.
The tools we use to build software will continue to change.
The need for accounting judgment will not.
Financial software has always needed accountants. Now accountants can take a more direct role in building it.
