Why every CA should learn coding?

I wrote an article How CCI helped me in my journey. I have received large amount of mails and request to explain how to learn coding and handle practice at same time.

I will be writing on that topic on some other day.

Today I will tell you about why learning to code is must whether you are from computer science background or not.

I learned coding because I wanted to learn it. I like to explore new things. As a Chartered Accountant we are one of the most important person in economic cycle and help our clients in many ways.

May it be IT Filing, GST consultancy or any other area we help our client to comply with law.

However in our profession most of the time what we do is same repeated tasks. For instance I faced lot of issues while filing GSTR-1 for clients, most of the time issue was with wrong GST numbers.

Since I knew coding I developed a product to verify multiple GST numbers.

Now I have a tool using which one can easily verify GST numbers in less than a minute and avoid mistake.

This was an example to show you, how you can develop tools to automate your many tasks. In fact I developed tool using which I could prepared projects reports for bank loan in less than 10 minutes (financial part).

There are multiple things that you can do if you know coding.

Why you should learn coding?

You know finance and tax laws. Your most of the tasks are repetitive and can be automated. If you will not automate them someone else will do and its better you do it.

Being a CA is best feeling and believe me you will increase your productivity by automating most of your tasks.

Here are few tasks that I have automated:

1. GST number verification
2. Project report preparation
3. Tax audit reports with schedule (data is pulled from accounting software and automatically filled in annexure)
4. Financial analysis and management reports

These are few core activities, there are many small stuffs that are taken care without any human intervene.

How to learn coding and which programming language to go with?

There are many programming languages that you can select for making software and web applications.

Following are most famous languages:

1. Java
2. Rubby
3. Python
4. PHP
5. .NET/ASP

However, we are not from science background and our aim is to learn coding as fast as possible.

I wasted 3 months trying to learn JAVA, but failed. PHP is boring and confusing language (my personal opinion).

However PYTHON is what you should learn.

I learned PYTHON and it did not take more than a month to make my first product.

Here are reasons you should select Python for your programming:

1. Its easiest language to learn
2. You will feel writing English paragraphs
3. Most logical language (my opinion)
4. Learning curve is shortest compared to other languages
5. You will find lot of resources on internet
6. After learning it, you will find cheap resources to host your services
7. Development time is shortest among all languages

My decision to select Python has helped me save hosting charges too.

For example, If you host a website made with Python you can easily handle monthly 1 lakh visitors with 5$ server. However with Java programmed website you may be incurring 20$-100$ and with ASP server charges will go further up as you need windows server for that.

Hope this article helps you with starting your coding journey.

Feel free to comment for any further help or guidance.