Workforce Migrates Up the Value Chain

Two finance data points

Eric Glyman's labor thesis rests on two observations. The first: checking LinkedIn, his team found that only roughly 3 to 9 percent of finance roles qualify as "strategic finance," the CFOs-in-training deciding where capital goes. The industry is not explicitly claiming the remaining 91 to 97 percent is non-strategic, "but it kind of feels that way," since most of the work is tedium: logging in, issuing the card, keying the routing number, mailing the check, matching the goods.¹

The second is a labor-composition shift. Reporting on a shortage of bookkeepers, whose population fell by roughly 300,000 to 400,000 over a few years and skews toward workers in their fifties and sixties, initially read as a warning that company financials would degrade. Checking the adjacent roles told a different story: financial analysts and accountants rose by a similar amount over the same period. Glyman's interpretation is that labor migrated up the value chain, from automatable bookkeeping to higher-level analytical work, rather than simply vanishing.¹

A longer historical arc

Glyman retells the bookkeeper data point elsewhere with a longer historical frame and a different specific magnitude: roughly two million bookkeepers a decade ago falling to roughly one million today, a full million fewer, while financial advisers and analysts rose by roughly a million over the same period. He situates this inside a seven-hundred-year history of double-entry accounting, invented in the lead-up to the Renaissance in Italy and scaled roughly a century ago alongside branch and national banks and large industrial firms, Standard Oil and General Motors among them, that needed both scalable systems and large numbers of people to audit and report. His framing treats each step as what happens "in progress": as tools remove tedious work, people move to more strategic, higher-level abstraction. The two tellings differ on the precise magnitude of the bookkeeper decline, roughly 300,000 to 400,000 in one telling versus roughly a million in the other, both relayed secondhand, but agree on the direction.

The creator analogy

The same pattern shows up outside finance. Making content twenty years ago required a film crew, a studio, and high production values; today anyone with a phone can publish. The number of content creators did not fall as a result. "Hell no, there's a lot more," in Glyman's words, to the point that being a YouTuber is now among the most commonly stated career aspirations among children.¹ Lowering the cost and tedium of creation expanded the field rather than contracting it.

The product implication

The underlying automation, an expense report that files itself, automatic vendor-price flagging, and similar tools that save companies roughly five percent of spend annually, is framed as freeing finance professionals to be strategic rather than eliminating their roles: "There's a false sense of honor in being a tedious bean counter... technology is about automating the boring stuff so you can focus on the great stuff."¹ The stated aspiration is to take the roughly 3 to 9 percent of finance work that is already strategic and extend that condition to every finance professional, "self-actualized to the highest level of their craft."

Open questions

The bookkeeper-to-analyst migration is a correlational inference from two trends moving in opposite directions at the same time, relayed secondhand from press reporting rather than measured directly, and it leaves transition friction, individually displaced workers, and timing unaddressed. Whether the number of higher-level roles that open up can actually absorb everyone displaced from automatable work over the relevant timeframe remains the open empirical question underneath the whole thesis.