Long seen as a job with long hours and plenty of manual tasks, accounting has sometimes struggled to appeal to a younger audience. But what can the profession do to appeal to a budding workforce?

Young accountants expect their work to be meaningful and to have access to the latest cloud-based accounting systems, while too many of them complain about spending hours a month inputting data from scratch, found a survey of 500 young accountants by IRIS Software Group.

Worryingly, 40% of those already in training or work said they spend significant time on manual data entry, with a quarter working across more than five disconnected systems day-to-day.